Everything I watched from February 1, 2026 – February 28, 2026
NEW SHIT
Scream 7
Wow, it’s almost impossible to imagine a shittier direction to send this franchise into. The Carpenter sisters are gone and we instead get Sidney Prescott, Super Mom, and her 16-year-old daughter being stalked by Ghostface. It plays like a really dumbed down version of the Laurie Strode/granddaughter dynamic in David Gordon Green’s Halloween 2018. Instead of your signature Scream campiness and self-aware humor we get a double dose of self-seriousness over-coming-trauma-porn. Full of one-dimensional teen characters you never get to know, with the killer reveal to be the absolute stupidest reveal in the entire franchise. For fans, it’s worse than Scream 3. I think we’re truly at the bottom of this franchise. Grade: D (Theaters)
Industry (Season 4)
I’m going to get a lot of shit for this but I think this show is just shy of greatness. Season 4 isn’t as good or as frequently poignant as Season 3 was, but it has some of the series’ best individual scenes. Marisa Abela continues to be absolutely incredible as Yasmin, with Kit Harrington and Charlie Heaton delivering their best work. Ken Leung doesn’t get as much to do but he absolutely steals an episode from all of his fellow actors. This show kinda went from this darkly satirical drama about financiers to a very over-the-top and intense horny soap opera. Grade: B+ (HBOMax)
Pillion
Let’s start off this review by confirming I am not a part of the BDSM community. I do however understand the concept of roleplaying through my work as a local improviser. This movie is a tragedy about two people who obviously love each other, but the Dom (Alexander Skarsgård) is so deep into his kink that they can’t seem to make it work. This was sold to me in the trailers as “romantic” but I disagree. This is most certainly a tragedy about two people seeking love and not quite finding it but with little jokes/gags here and there to take the edge off. This is a really good debut film, very well made with some outstanding performances, but it wasn’t really my thing. Doubt I’ll revisit it anytime soon. Grade: B (Theaters)
The Pitt (Season 2)
I’m really starting to come around on this show but I’m still sick of people telling me how medically accurate it is. I don’t give a shit, I’m here to watch a human drama. A lot of the human drama is very “ripped from the headlines” forced and several supporting characters feel like two-dimensional caricatures, however, once you get into the rhythm of Season 2, it’s really hard to miss an episode. My recommendation is to wait till Season 2 finishes and just binge the whole thing. The Pitt is bingeable television if I’ve ever seen it, it’s light, tasty, but doesn’t have too much substance. Grade: B (HBOMax)
Dead of Winter
Wow, what a turd of an action thriller. I love me some Emma Thompson, too. Dead of Winter is about a recent widow (the great Emma Thompson) who accidentally stumbles upon a kidnapping in the middle of the snowy woods and then is forced into becoming an action hero. Emma is great in this, she really does her best, but the material is seriously underwhelming and has an affordable healthcare message that is sloppily weaved into the plot. The biggest sin Dead of Winter commits is not being dumb, but being boring. If it would have leaned harder into the improbability of its plot it may have been a good trashy little thriller like the best Liam Neeson action thrillers, but it settles on being like the worst Liam Neeson action thrillers in that it’s completely forgettable. Grade: C- (HBOMax)
OLD SHIT
Cabaret (1972)
I was expecting this to be less about a bisexual polyamorous relationship and more about a nightclub that offended Nazis. However, Liza is fantastic here as is Michael York and the other guy. The scene where that little inbred Nazi fuck starts singing about the homeland is chilling, what a gross moment to experience at a restaurant. Joel Grey, on the other hand, runs away with the movie. It makes you wish Cabaret was about him. Grade: B+ (digital rental)
Sweet Sweetback’s Bad Ass Song (1971)
This movie begins with the writer/director/lead actor, Melvin van Peebles‘ teenage son, Mario van Peebles, naked and having simulated sex with a neighborhood prostitute. Mario was 14 when they filmed this which is more than a little creepy. But then the movie launches into this really interesting, not particularly well made from a technical perspective but certainly interesting satire of black exploitation movies. It’s pretty spot-on and clever at times and viewing it more as a political statement of the time (that’s still relevant today) than a film is probably the way to look at this. It’s unfortunately the only movie directed by a black filmmaker I watched during Black History Month. Shame on me, I promise to watch at least 3 next month. Grade: B (digital rental)
Tommy (1975)
I’m a much bigger fan of the actual album than I am of this ultra cheesy but visually interesting Ken Russell film adaptation. Grade: B– (digital rental)
Sleeping with the Enemy (1991)
Wow. Among the worst 90s thrillers I’ve ever seen, Sleeping with the Enemy owes every ounce of its success to lead actress Julia Roberts, who serves as the only non-abysmal thing in this catastrophic, bus pile-up of a movie. She plays a lady who meets a rich guy (a truly awful Patrick Bergen) and they fall in love, only he’s super controlling and abusive. She pretends to drown to escape him but he finds her, and she must kill him so her life can be happy. One of the red flags about this guy is that he likes to bang to the score of Stanley Kubrick‘s The Shining. Anyway, this unfolds in an outrageous, sloppy fashion that never pays off. What a dud. Grade: D (Hulu)
Rap World
Maybe the funniest human being doing comedy today, Connor O’Malley, released this 50-minute mockumentary to YouTube a few years back, about a group of bored losers in 2009 Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania who decide to record a rap album that will forever change their lives. O’Malley and his collaborators’ sense of humor is certainly an acquired taste, but if it’s your thing, I can’t think of a better way to spend an hour. Grade: A- (YouTube)
REWATCHED SHIT
Flying through my Sopranos-(A+)-rewatch this month. I just finished the epic fifth season and have just started the flawed but underrated Season 6A. It’s the show I watch on weeknights after work, usually 1-2 episodes a night, and then dream about getting into screaming matches with fat Italian guys over trucking contracts. I’m still not convinced “Christopher” is the worst episode of the show, for me it’s “Everybody Hurts” a painfully lifeless episode that does one interesting thing (Gloria Trillo fall-out) and then pads it with AJ and his boring friends, Artie getting a Davey Scatino-light storyline, and a whole subplot devoted to financial planning. At least “Christopher” has a great Janice subplot and some very funny moments.
For the Super Bowl I watched two movies – Terminator 2: Judgement Day (A-) and Kramer vs. Kramer (B+), because why wouldn’t you watch a double feature about A.I. and divorce? Terminator 2 remains one of the best action movies ever made and this is realistically probably the 20th or 30th time I watched it in my life. Is it James Cameron‘s best movie? I don’t know, I go back and forth between T2 and Aliens, but it’s certainly better than any of the Avatar movies. Kramer vs. Kramer I hadn’t seen probably since my own parents’ divorce back in 1999, and I have to say, it’s a lot better and less boring watching it as an adult. Still, Dustin Hoffman terrorizing Meryl Streep about her dead husband (John Cazale) on the set of the movie is such a despicable way for an actor to get a reaction out of another actor. Seriously, Dustin, it’s Meryl fucking Streep, you’re the junior in this pairing.
In terms of horror, I revisited a cult classic favorite of mine, Ice Cream Man (B) starring Clint Howard as a disgusting ice cream man who gets his kicks feeding kids eye balls and cockroaches in their ice cream. I had originally seen this in theaters at a birthday event for myself with fifteen or sixteen of my close friends. Everyone hated it and by hated it, I mean loved it. It’s one of the few so-bad-it’s-good movies that is actually paced properly. Seriously, check it out. I also rewatched Ready or Not (B-) because the sequel is coming out and while I’m still not entirely sold on this (the film’s humor needs work), it gets better each time I watch it.
On Friday the 13th, I got off of work early (by coincidence) and decided to watch two Friday the 13th movies before performing a lukewarm improv show. Each are usually less than 90 minutes, and I had four hours to kill. I picked two I revisit the least, Friday the 13th Part II (B-), and Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (D). An argument can made that Part II is the best film in the franchise, I have it at #3, but it does function as almost like the perfect, prototype thriller. It has the most likable and dynamic cast, the smartest protagonist (Amy Steele), some of the franchise’s best and most brutal kills, but it doesn’t have that fucking hockey mask. Jason wears a sack over his head in this one. Is it even Friday without the hockey mask? This is also one of the only entries (if only) that has full-frontal nudity. Not that you’d care, but you know, it does. 1981, movies could have casual full-frontal nudity in them. Moving on…
…Jason Takes Manhattan on the other hand you can make an argument for being the absolute worst in the franchise. I still loathe every agonizing second of Jason Goes to Hell, but Manhattan is really fucking bad. First of all, Jason isn’t even in Manhattan till the third act, and when he is, he’s mostly in Vancouver. Only the famous Times Square scene was shot in New York. Anyway, it still wouldn’t distract from the fact this one has flimsy characters, flimsy logic (it tries carry over the telekinetic Tina shit over from the 7th entry), and really toned down kills. Worst of all it’s barely any fun to watch, which is awesome considering it’s the single longest entry at 100 butt-numbing minutes.
After performing a lukewarm show, I decided to cap off the night with the most controversial entry in the series – Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning (D+), the one with the most sex and nudity, mean-spirited kills, the foulest language, and absolutely no Jason. Part 5 is an trashy who-dun-it, but one that is super clumsy and just doesn’t work. Almost everything to enjoy is just marveling at how bad the directing is and how tonally bizarre and dumb the script is. It’s like a train wreck, you can’t look away.
I watched three adult dramas from the early 2000s era, starting with Todd Field’s emotional powerhouse In the Bedroom (A), an thoroughly tragic film about how a married couple (Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek) respond in the face of a personal tragedy. Wilkinson and Spacek do some of the best acting I’ve ever seen and the film itself is a true marvel. It’s a slow burn but it wraps you up so tight in its story about parents and their children. It’s perhaps the best since Ordinary People (1980).
I decided to tee up Todd Field‘s follow-up movie, Little Children (B+), another movie more about adults and their fellow adults. This one is not nearly as good as In the Bedroom, but it certainly tries. It feels like slightly deeper observations about upper-middle-class Americans than most comedies, but it never is not engaging or entertaining. Kate Winslet gives one of her better performances and the rest of the cast is excellent from Jackie Earle Haley to The American’s Noah Emmerich.
Speaking of heartbreaking tragedy, I decided to rewatch Brokeback Mountain (A) since I hadn’t seen it since college. Speaking of emotionally devastating movies, WOW. This is one painful, open wound of a motion picture. Heath Ledger delivers his very best screen performance as Ennis Del Mar, a quiet cowboy so deep in the closet he can barely function. Jake Gyllenhaal is fantastic as Jack Twist, failed rodeo star turned secret lover to Ennis. And for something that has been labeled “the gay cowboy movie”, there’s five excellent female performances in this: Anna Faris, Linda Cardinelli, Kate Mara, Anne Hathaway, and the especially superb Michelle Williams as Alma, Ennis’ miserable wife. It’s funny this was deemed so controversial in 2005 because the sex scenes, especially the gay sex scenes, are so fucking tame they might as well be PG-13. This is a seriously intelligent and nuanced drama for adults only, not because of obscene content, but because kids would probably be bored by it. Deserved to win Best Picture back in 2006.
Then I dove into a foursome of movies from the early 2000s. First up was The Recruit (C-) which is the most of-it’s-time, post-9/11 government tech thriller you’ll ever see. God, what a time to be alive! Anyway, Colin Farrell plays a hot orphan who is really good at tech. His absentee father was a CIA agent killed in the line of duty, so naturally, CIA recruiter Agent Al Pacino, takes a vested interest in Hot Orphan, wanting him to be a CIA agent. Then, shit goes haywire during a training exercise and nothing appears to be as it seems and a couple of action sequences.
After that, I revisited the mystery thriller, Identity (B-), which is a really cool, low-stakes, fun watch for most of its runtime but introduces a twist ending so dumb your face literally crawls off your head.
I also rewatched The Rules of Attraction (B-) which I always really despised from the first time I saw it at a seventh grade sleepover in 2003. It’s a really cynical, dark comedy about a four lonely college students (James Van Der Beek, Jessica Biel, Shannyn Sossamon, Ian Somerhalder) with mental health problems embarrassing themselves with poor choices. The way I view it now is as a period piece about 2002 (from 2002), and how it perfectly captures the time period. The performances are all great and the film has some genuinely clever dark humor, even if it is so self-satisfied it practically comes with the director’s jizz all over it.
After that I watched Mystic River (A), it’s Clint Eastwood‘s masterpiece, a powerful old-fashioned no frills drama built around to brilliant performances by Sean Penn and Tim Robbins.
I also rewatched three movies from last year: Predator: Badlands (B-), Marty Supreme (A-), No Other Choice (A-). Predator Badlands is not as fun on rewatch while both Marty Supreme and No Other Choice improved on rewatch, especially Marty Supreme which feels like such a future classic.
NEXT MONTH
Margetis Movie Reviews 