A lot of stuff this week.

Smile 2

2024 has been a disheartening year for horror films. Only a few have been good, and only one has been great. That’s why I had absolutely zero expectations when I went into Smile 2. I was very lukewarm on the first one, finding it too campy to be scary and too serious to be funny. It also didn’t help that Zac Cregger’s Barbarian was released a few weeks prior. That was a great and hilarious horror movie that still managed to scare you in parts. Smile, on the other hand, was a fun premise executed blandly. I hoped its sequel would amp up the ridiculousness in a way that would at least make me have fun, and it did. Smile 2 is a better film than the original, but still not without flaws.

First, this is a very predictable movie, at least for me. I called every twist well in advance, but at the same time, I still had fun watching it play out. There’s some pretty inventive scares that mainly stem from the best twist in the overall plot – this is happening to not just a regular person but a very famous pop star trying to kick a pill addiction. This makes the smile curse’s MO – humiliate you in public/break you down as a person – way more interesting, cringe, and downright entertaining. The lead actress in this one is also a significant improvement. Naomi Scott is great, perhaps even a bit too good, as her anguished cries feel so real and desperate that they sort of get in the way of the campier elements.

On the other hand, the writing, dialogue, and character development in this kind of movie remain lacking. It could be scarier and so much funnier. We get a less bland compromise of the two than in the first film, but again, I feel writer/director Parker Finn is sitting on a mountain of potential that hasn’t been realized. Perhaps each entry will get a bit better as they go, though it’s hard to imagine them being able to top the outrageous ending of Smile 2. Who knows, though, Smile 3 might be an Oscar contender. Maybe. Probably not. Grade: B- (In Theaters)

Megalopolis

Megalopolis is hilarious—perhaps the funniest movie of the year, though that’s not the intention. I hate saying that because it makes me sound like a prick, but I have no better way to describe my experience of watching this nearly two-and-a-half-hour fever dream from the mind that brought us both The Godfather and Jack, starring Robin Williams. It’s an expensive, glossy, fake-looking piece of nonsense about the bad boy of architects (Adam Driver) with the gift of pausing time to see the “perfect shot” (obviously, this guy is a stand-in for Francis Ford Coppola) who must save New York now called Rome so the people can live in dignity and their daughters will respect them.

There’s a problem though, the mayor (Giancarlo Esposito) is talking mad trash about the architect. He doesn’t trust him. But the mayor’s daughter (Game of Thrones‘ Nathalie Emmanuel) falls in love with the architect and wants to bear his children. On top of that, King Caesar (a curiously horny Jon Voight) is having problems with his two ungrateful kids – an incestuous pair of twins played by Aubrey Plaza and Shia LeBeouf. Plaza is a news reporter named Wow Platinum, and she’s working for the “Dingbat News” to bring down the architect. That’s about all I remember other than a scene where Jon Voight says, “Hey kids, check out my boner!” and undoes his pants to reveal not a penis but a crossbow, and then starts killing people.

Megalopolis is bad. It’s a fascinating piece of filmmaking that’s never boring to watch, but it’s a bad one nonetheless. Its themes are incoherent and hint at Coppola‘s really out-of-touch and disjointed psyche. What’s he trying to say here? It feels like someone gave $20 Million to a third-grade class and allowed them to put on their own play with zero notes. Perhaps it’s a future midnight movie. Grade: D+ (Pollack Cinemas)

Industry Season 3

Young hot people screaming at each other about money. What’s not to like? Max’s premium post-Succession methadone continues to get better year after year with this season, the third, bringing it to heights it’s never seen before. It’s about a bunch of intelligent, ambitious, and foul-mouthed Gen Z investment banker people at London’s top financial firm, Pierpoint. They’re horny for money, power, and each other, and while the first season played almost like a casting call for a variety of uncut dicks, the more salacious and, to be honest, less compelling elements of the show have definitely died down in favor for deeper dives into the complex lives of the characters and their hilarious and often tragic dynamics with each other.

This season follows movie-star-gorgeous trust fund baby/ publishing heiress Yasmin (Marisa Abela), who is having difficulty showing her face at her Pierpoint job because she’s being slammed in the tabloids, primarily for reasons involving her criminal, embezzler father. We also follow Robert (Harry Lawtey), a young, handsome, and always short-changed as a dumb guy on the rise at Pierpoint. He’s in love with Yasmin, but she toys with him non-stop. There’s also Harper (Myha’la), one of the only Americans on the show, who is reeling from recently being fired from Pierpoint because of all her backstabbery, currently working at a non-profit and corrupting an organization designed to help people be sustainable. Harper isn’t the biggest sociopath on the show but she’s the most obvious one. Finally, out of the main characters we have left, there’s Eric (Ken Leung – absolutely fantastic), the consensus pick for the most compelling character on the show. He’s a middle-aged Managing Director at the firm who recently became a partner. He’s the one who fired Harper after forming an alliance/mentorship with her and he’s obsessed with appearing young. One of the saddest/best scenes of the series is him desperately asking a sex worker the morning after, “Do I fuck like a young guy?”

This season is great but not perfect, with two or three episodes standing as some of the best the show has ever produced – a tremendous standalone one diving into a fascinating supporting character named Rishi (Sagar Radia) and his gambling addiction, the penultimate episode surrounding Eric that mostly takes place in a boardroom in the twilight hours of the evening, and a mid-season episode involving Yasmin and her dad on a boat that blew my jaw wide open. I love that this show doesn’t focus too much on the math of what these people do because I’ve watched 24 episodes of this show and still have no goddamn clue what they do. There’s a line on a computer screen, and numbers must be above it? Or below it? Math fucking sucks, and money frustrates the dog piss out of me. While some of the show’s plotting feels forced, it’s easy to forgive because of the acting and dialogue caliber. However, one major out-of-left-field choice the finale makes immediately felt cheap and unearned despite only lasting less than a minute. It’s the first time something that felt 100% like a stupid little studio note happened on Industry. Bad move.

Industry is often compared to Succession or labeled Gen Z Succession , but that’s inaccurate. While this show is great, it’s nowhere near the level of phenomenon that show was. The characters aren’t nearly as interesting, the writing not nearly as sharp, and while there are surprises along the way, it never feels earned quite the way it did on that show. The fact people are adopting a similar show like Industry at such an alarming rate, a much pricklier and hard-to-love show than that already prickly and hard-to-love show, is proof of just how much people miss Succession. Industry might not live up to those heights, but in the meantime, before we find another “the show”, it will do. It’s one of the best TV offerings in 2024, though, without question. Grade: A- (Max)

Rumours

I really wanted to like this movie as Guy Maddin is an extremely talented visual artist who has given us some fantastic cinema. Rumours looks terrific and is shot and edited very unlike most political satires. It might be the prettiest-looking political satire since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove in 1963. Anyway, for how good it looks and how good the performances are, the humor really is lacking. Sure, there are jokes, but all are pretty obvious, and what the movie is doing from a parody standpoint is even verbalized by one of the characters. I didn’t find it particularly clever, and the third act mumbles into this incoherent fever dream that lacked staying power. Basically, it’s about world leaders meeting at their annual G7 summit in Germany, but they get lost on the enormous property and discover aliens or monsters or ghosts or something that stirs them into a panic, resulting in them being the most useless versions of themselves. Each character is essentially the personification of the country they represent.

Cate Blanchett is great as the German Chancellor, as is Denis Ménochet as the President of France, probably the film’s strongest performance. On the other hand, Charles Dance is miscast as the President of the United States, and Roy Dupois is very ehhh as the hunky Prime Minister of Canada. The rest of the cast isn’t given much to do. Overall, this was maybe the most forgettable movie I saw all month, but definitely not the worst. Grade: C+ (In Theaters)

A Different Man

One of the more frustrating viewing experiences I’ve had in the last year; I wanted so desperately to love Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man based on its fascinating premise alone, which involves Edward, a struggling New York actor with neurofibromatosis (The Winter Soldier himself, Sebastian Stan) who can only book minor, insignificant roles in things like “Don’t make fun of people with disabilities at work” corporate training videos. His neighbor and romantic interest, Ingrid (The Worst Person in the World’s Renate Reinsve), is an aspiring playwright who promises to write a great role for him. Time passes, and Edward decides to get a risky, life-altering procedure that would shrink his face tumors and transform him into Bucky Barnes. Unfortunately, this doesn’t make him a better actor (he’s awful, btw the character, not the actor), and it just so happens that Ingrid has since written her play about Edward, but he can no longer play that part. Then along comes Oswald (Under the Skin’s Adam Pearson), another actor with neurofibromatosis who is ten times more talented and a hundred times more outgoing than Edward, even looking like Sebastian Stan.

My biggest complaint with A Different Man is the awkward pacing in its way overlong, 112-minute runtime. There’s a great short film in here that filmmaker Aaron Schimberg drags out to feature length for some reason. There’s actually a spot right near the one-hour mark of the movie where the picture dragged to the point of disengaging me completely. For five whole minutes I was just thinking about my grocery list. I thought it was just me and my dumb brain, but the good friend and fellow artist I saw it with had the same exact feeling. My second biggest complaint with A Different Man is its general lack of cohesiveness. There are four or five absolutely fantastic scenes in this movie, but besides that it just kind of rolls around on the floor like a lost marble. An actual story structure really would have helped this out. It’s also not clear what the message of this movie is supposed to be. Maybe that women are awful? You might gather that based on how one-dimensional the Ingrid character is written, despite the great Renate Reinsve’s best efforts. Every character in this movie is pretty shitty, but at least for Edward and Oswald you get to learn and understand where they’re coming from. There’s even a scene in this that lampoons how cisgender white males just assume a piece of art was created by a man (when, in fact, it was created by a woman, Ingrid.) This would play better if the only female character in this had any real depth to her; as it stands, the joke’s on Schimberg.

Besides the four or five banger scenes, the main reason to see A Different Man is for the exceptional performances of Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson. This is Stan’s best, most complex screen role to date and Adam Pearson, a British actor who actually has neurofibromatosis, completely steals the third act of the film. This is a fascinating movie, which is usually code for “it sucks,” but in the case of A Different Man, it just means a lot of impressive elements fail to come together in a way that’s rewarding or cathartic. In other words, it only sucked a little bit. Grade: B- (In Theaters)

Mr. McMahon

I don’t know much about professional wrestling other than what my WWF-obsessed roommate tells me and what I’ve seen in The Iron Claw or Vice’s The Dark Side of the Ring. What all three of those sources communicated loud and clear is that there is a shit ton of drama in the history of professional wrestling. Some are trashy, some tragic, some both, and almost every bit of it, in one way or another, involves WWE co-founder Vince McMahon. He’s like both the God and Satan of professional wrestling, but fans hate him with the fervor of Star Wars fans hating George Lucas. In this riveting six-part docuseries by American Movie filmmaker Chris Smith, we explore the life and environment of Vince McMahon, along with his triumphs and mistakes. If you know next to nothing about wrestling, you’ll probably find this documentary series fascinating if you can get past some gradually paced table setting in the first two episodes. If you’re a huge wrestling fan, I have no idea what you’ll think of this. You tell me. Grade: B+ (Netflix)

V/H/S Beyond

Why do I keep watching this shit? Every year, Shudder releases a new entry in the found footage anthology series that feels dated to the time it debuted all the way back in 2012. The first sequel in this franchise, V/H/S/2, was the closest any installment ever got to being a “good movie,” while the rest have ranged from “all right, I liked that one segment” to “complete fucking garbage.” Twelve years later, we have the horror franchise’s seventh installment, V/H/S/Beyond, which is supposedly extraterrestrial themed? Let’s break it down:

STORY #1: STORK: Written and directed by the guy who made Thankskilling in college, yes, that Thankskilling, Stork is a mildly aggravating but fast-paced tale about a group of cops raiding the house of a baby snatcher. However, when the cops get there, all they find are zombies in construction people’s outfits that they must kill to death with their automatic weapons. The action plays out on body cam footage, and the experience of watching it is like watching someone else play a video game. There’s a really dumb twist I ended up predicting because, apparently, I’m as dumb as the guy who made this movie. The ending “monster reveal” is pretty fun, though. (2 out of 5 screams)

STORY #2: DREAM GIRL: This basically asks the question, “What if Brian DePalma‘s Carrie‘s third act was shot terribly, and there were absolutely zero stakes?” The worst installment by quite a bit; at least it takes place in Mumbai, which is mildly interesting. (1 out of 5 screams)

STORY #3: LIVE AND LET DIVE: Starts poorly with annoying characters yelling dumb shit on a skydiving plane, but soon gets on track when a lanky alien being crashes into the carrier, causing it to crash and the skydivers on board to skydive immediately, with little notice. A bunch get injured or killed, but the survivors land in an orange grove surrounded by a bunch of scorpion-bodied aliens who are trying to kill them. This is another entry seen through a go-pro/body cam of sorts. It’s dumb, the characters are shallowly written, the acting not great, but the pace is super fast and some of the kills are on point. It’s better than the first two entries combined. (3 out of 5 screams)

STORY #4: FUR BABIES: Actor Justin Long writes and directs this segment with his brother and it’s a total mess. First of all, it has nothing to do with aliens or space. Second of all, it features the dumbest, least credible characters of any segment that don’t act the way any human being has ever acted. It centers around a woman with a YouTube show about her pets. She seems very nice. However, a group of leftist college protesters, or how Justin Long sees them, take offense that the lady has taxidermied her dead pets. I guess that’s animal cruelty or whatever? The goddamn dog is dead already, right? Wait, is Justin Long saying leftist college protesters are so stupid they would think taxidermy on a dead animal would be animal abuse? Ok…so the leftist scumbags go over to the house of the YouTube demon lady and try to abduct her and free her animals, but little do they know the taxidermied animals are the walking dead. So the lady gets the upper hand and starts turning the protesters into giant dogs. As fun as this premise sounds, Long and his broseph never find a way to make it entertaining. It’s a total dud. (1.5 out of 5 screams)

STORY #5: STOWAWAY: The only truly good and inventive segment of the whole bunch. This at times feels way too cerebral and leisurely paced for a V/H/S installment – similar to how Ti West‘s Second Honeymoon felt in the first film. It’s about a woman hunting extraterrestrials who finds a spacecraft that accidentally alters her DNA. It’s a very strange but visually gorgeous piece, directed by actress Kate Siegel (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass) and written by her husband, Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass). It’s a beef tenderloin in a sea of chicken nuggets. (4 out of 5 screams)

Overall, this is one of the weaker installments of the anthology. Perhaps not as putrid as V/H/S Viral or last year’s V/H/S/85, but pretty bad. Grade: C- (Shudder)