Review: 'Together' delivers a pre-marital commitment conundrum in the clever disguise of a creepy body-horror thriller

If you like your weird body horror wrapped in a metaphor, writer-director Michael Shanks’ “Together” is your jam — a smart, occasionally funny and deliciously grotesque story about the secrets of commitment.

Meet Tim and Millie, played by real-life married actors Dave Franco and Alison Brie. They are in the process of moving from the big city to the country, where Millie has lined up a job as an elementary school teacher. It’s a rough transition for Tim, a rock musician who, at 35, is still chasing the dream of a major record deal.

Shanks’ sharp script presents us with Tim and Millie’s relationship problems — including Tim’s fear of getting married, Millie’s worry that Tim is a man-child, and mutual concerns about how infrequently they have sex recently. But, because Brie and Franco are such charming people, the audience suspects that Tim and Millie will be fine if they just stick together.

And, after getting lost in the woods and drinking from a watering hole, sticking together — literally — is what Tim and Millie start to do. Suddenly, their attraction becomes quite literal, which brings problems ranging from the gross-out comedy to revulsion to, by the end, an odd sort of acceptance. The fact that those steps also apply to Tim and Millie’s rocky relationship is the point.

The joy of “Together” is watching Franco and Brie descend into seven levels of freaking out about Tim and Millie’s situation. They are natural scene partners, and bring out the terror and sometimes the humor in each other’s work — and their apparent security as a married couple seems to be infused n their performances.

When Millie’s schoolteacher pal Jamie (Damon Herriman) makes a reference to Plato’s “Symposium” and its theory of the soulmate (for details, listen to “Origin of Love” from “Hedwig & the Angry Inch”), you may know where the movie is going. But with Brie and Franco steering this outlandish movie, it’s still fun going on the ride.

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‘Together’

★★★1/2

Opens Wednesday, July 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for violent/disturbing content, sexual content, graphic nudity, language and brief drug content. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'The Fantastic 4: First Steps' gives the MCU a fresh start, with frenzied action lightened by the clever creation of a retro-future world

There are two movies battling for our attention during the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe entry, “The Fantastic 4: First Steps” — and one works so well it makes up for the deficiencies in the other.

This installment, No. 37 in the sprawling franchise, introduces a set of characters new to the MCU: The Fantastic 4, a group of astronauts and scientists sometimes called “Marvel’s First Family.” As the quick retro-TV documentary at the movie’s beginning explains, the brainy Dr. Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) led a space mission with his best friend, Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), his wife, Sue Storm Richards (Vanessa Kirby), and Sue’s brother, Johnny Storm (Joseph Quinn). 

That mission hit a cosmic storm, and the radiation gave all four of them incredible powers. Reed can stretch and contort his body like rubber. Ben has turned into a super-strong rock creature. Sue can turn invisible at will and manipulate powerful force fields. And Johnny ignites into a fire being who can fly. 

On this parallel universe of Earth, called Earth-828 (the MCU mostly has resided in Earth-616), the quartet aren’t just superheroes but super-celebrities. One of the best throwaway gags comes when Johnny opens a box of Lucky Charms and finds his own miniature action figure inside. It’s a retro-future kind of world, where women dress like Jackie Kennedy in the ‘60s, Johnny records space transmissions on gold-colored vinyl LPs, and the “Fantastic Car” looks like a Hot Wheels car from the days of tail fins. 

Director Matt Shakman is clearly at home building this Earth 828, which isn’t surprising for the guy who helmed the era-hopping “WandaVision.” Production designer Kasra Farahani and crew create a “Jetsons”-style futuristic style that permeates everything from the New York skyline to the Fantastic 4’s living room. The look is reminiscent of Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” and a group of movie geeks could stay up all night debating who influenced who. (One supervillain, a subterranean kingpin called Mole Man and played by Paul Walter Hauser, is reminiscent of The Underminer from “The Incredibles.”) 

Shakman makes us and his cast so at home in this world that we don’t mind so much that the story is a patchwork affair. The script is credited to four writers — Josh Friedman (“Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes”), Eric Pearson (who worked on this year’s “Thunderbolts*”) and the lesser-known team of Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer, with Pearson, Kaplan and Springer sharing story credit with Kat Wood — and the seams sometimes show. 

Early in the story, Sue reveals to Reed that she’s pregnant, after years of trying. Any family celebration of this blessed event is cut short when an alien visitor arrives, a silver figure on a celestial surfboard. The Silver Surfer, played in motion capture by Julia Garner, tells the people that Earth has been chosen to be devoured by a planet-chomping being known as Galactus (voiced by Ralph Ineson). The Fantastic 4 vow that they will do something, though the super-smart Reed isn’t sure what, to stop Galactus.

Shakman stages some action scenes of varying quality — a mid-movie outer-space chase as Sue goes into zero-gravity labor is the most frenetic — and more use of the word “family” than any script this side of a “Fast and the Furious” movie. Through it all, Shakman clearly is having more fun building this cool world than capturing the emotional lives of the superpowered humans who are trying to keep it from being destroyed. 

While this is the first time the Fantastic 4 has been in the MCU, it’s not the first time they’ve been in the movies. There was an atrocious Roger Corman-produced adaptation in the ‘90s (the stars of which make cameos in the early moments here). There were two not-horrible movies, in 2005 and 2007, with Ioan Gruffudd, Jessica Alba, Chris Evans and Michael Chiklis in the lead roles. (That one was referenced in “Deadpool and Wolverine.”) And there was the train wreck that was the 2015 version, with Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell. This one, unlike those others, manages to gauge accurately how seriously we’re supposed to take all this, which is maybe 40 percent.

The results are a lot more entertaining and eye-catching than some recent Marvel movies. Maybe because Marvel is starting fresh with these superheroes, and giving them a self-contained story that doesn’t rely on knowledge of 14 other characters presented in nine previous movies and TV shows. (Of course, there’s a mid-credits scene that teases an upcoming supervillain, but that’s almost required in Marvel movies these days.) “The Fantastic 4: First Steps” is charming on its own, and a sign that Marvel is bouncing back after the doldrums caused by the inevitable decline after “Avengers: Endgame.”

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‘The Fantastic 4: First Steps’

★★★

Opens Friday, July 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action/violence and some language. Running time: 115 minutes.

Review: 'Sorry, Baby' is a biting and empathetic tale of a woman trying to get her life unstuck, and a glorious debut for writer-director-star Eva Victor

Alternately sad, scary and awkwardly funny, writer-director-star Eva Victor’s debut feature, “Sorry, Baby,” is a sneakily moving story of a woman stuck in place and trying to move — move on, move forward, move somewhere — after a bad thing happens to her.

Victor is very clear what the bad thing is, though she does not dramatize the bad thing. Victor tells her story in chapters, and the second chapter is called “The Year with the Bad Thing,” and she doesn’t leave any doubt what the bad thing is.

In the first chapter, called “The Year with the Baby,” we meet Victor’s character, Agnes, a literature professor at a small New England college. Her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), has driven up from New York for a visit — staying at Agnes’ house, which is the same house they shared when they both were grad students here. Agnes is the youngest full-time professor the college’s English department has ever had, a fact often cited by Natasha (Kelly McCormack, wickedly funny), an adjunct professor and former classmate who jealously comments that everything has come easy to Agnes.

Lydie also meets Agnes’ neighbor, Gavin (Lucas Hedges), a handsome and slightly perplexed man — and, Lydie suspects, someone with whom Agnes has had sex. Since Lydie knows about the bad thing that happened to Agnes four years earlier, the possibility that Agnes has an occasional friend with benefits down the road is a positive.

Then comes that second chapter, “The Year with the Bad Thing,” set when Agnes and Lydie are grad students, finishing their respective literary theses to turn in to their professor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi). Natasha’s in the class, too, and annoys Agnes by suggesting that Agnes is the professor’s favorite. 

Then there’s the Bad Thing. 

The rest of Victor’s sharply observant and warmly empathetic movie focuses on the ways Agnes is trying to exist in the wake of the Bad Thing. She tries to write. She carries on at school. She considers doing some damage, either to herself or to something else. She finds a stray kitten in the street and tells Lydie that they’re keeping it.

Every second Victor lets us spend with Agnes is perfect. Victor finds quiet, precise moments that show us Agnes’ bruised psyche, with hints of humor that show us her resilience to avoid falling into an abyss of her darker thoughts. Victor doesn’t underline her points, and doesn’t have to — she understands Agnes intuitively, and projects that feeling to the audience so we understand her without having to have her emotions broadcast to us.

As an actor, Victor balances Agnes’ hesitant humor with a deep reservoir of pain, finding a middle space where she’s working through her life to find a way to get out of her rut. When “Sorry, Baby” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, I compared Victor’s writing skills and deep empathy to another Sundance phenom, Miranda July. Victor shows in “Sorry, Baby” that she, like July before her, has got a lot to show the world. 

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‘Sorry, Baby’

★★★★

Opens Friday, July 25, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content and language. Running time: 103 minutes.

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This review originally appeared on this site on January 30, 2025, during the film’s premiere run at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Oh, Hi!,' the most nerve-wracking date night movie ever, is a showcase for the crazy-good comic talents of Molly Gordon

From the premise — a couple dating for four months takes their first weekend road trip together — a viewer might think they know where writer-director Sophie Brooks’ romantic comedy “Oh, Hi!” Is going to go.

They would be disastrously, hilariously wrong, because Brooks and star Molly Gordon (who shares story credit with Brooks) go into some strange and dark places in this examination of miscommunication and mixed expectations.

When we first see Gordon’s Iris, she’s greeting her best friend, Max (Geraldine Viswanathan), who has arrived in a panic and very concerned for her friend. She should be, because Iris opens with “I did something bad.” Then Brooks cuts to 33 hours earlier in the narrative, as Iris and Isaac (Logan Lerman) are driving in the countryside in upstate New York, heading to a farmhouse they’ve rented for the weekend.

Iris and Isaac seem like a very typically gaga-for-each-other couple. They have sex on the couch when they first arrive. They make out in the creek behind the house, drawing the wrath of a creepy neighbor (David Cross). Isaac cooks her scallops. And, later, Isaac suggests they uses some of the leather and chain goods they found in their landlord’s closet for some light S&M.

What happens next — and how Iris draws Max and Max’s boyfriend, Kenny (John Reynolds), into her “something bad” — make up the last hour of this funny and off-kilter comedy. And I am loathe to give away anything more.

Iris’ behavior will, I’m sure, divide audiences, in part along gender lines. Women will likely empathize with Iris’ heartache, and may even consider her drastic actions justified. Men could go either way here, either dismissing Iris as a nut case, or reluctantly conceding that Iris has a point — even if she has gone to extremes to make that point.

What’s not up for argument is that Gordon is one of the funniest people working in movies, woman or man. Gordon has shined in supporting turns in “Shiva Baby,” “Booksmart” and “Theater Camp.” Here, she invests Iris with a boatload of modern anxieties, and adds a bracing dose of righteous anger when her perfect weekend goes off the rails. Scoring her first significant leading role, Gordon makes “Oh, Hi!” a wonderfully off-the-wall declaration of empowerment — one that will make people laugh and then reconsider how they’ve been treating their significant other.

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‘Oh, Hi!’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 25, in theaters. Rated R for sexual content/some nudity, and language. Running time: 95 minutes.

Review: 'Eddington,' depicting the self-inflicted madness of the COVID-19 pandemic, is a horror show dressed as a satire

For much of its running time, writer-director Ari Aster’s darkly comical drama “Eddington” captures with brutal accuracy a part of the recent past — the panic and animosity that poured out when our brains broke during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

And if you thought Aster’s earlier movies — “Hereditary,” “Midsommar” and “Beau Is Afraid” — were horror movies edging into surrealism, you haven’t seen anything yet.

It’s May 2020 in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, and nerves are frayed by the fears of the pandemic and the resentment of those told they have to wear masks or socially distance themselves. The main source of that resentment in Eddington is the sheriff of Sevilla County, Joe Cross (played by Joaquin Phoenix). Joe gets belligerent when he’s told he has to wear his face mask in public places, like the town grocery store. And a lot of his anger is directed at the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).

Ted is running for re-election, on a platform of economic growth — mostly by touting the big data center that a tech conglomerate wants to build on the outskirts of town. The data center isn’t universally loved, as some in the city council are suspicious of Ted’s enthusiasm for the tech company’s plans, as well as the enormous water usage such a center requires.

Joe bundles up his grievances, and his personal beef with Ted (which is explained later), into a campaign to run against Ted for mayor. Joe turns the sheriff’s office into his campaign headquarters and orders his two deputies, Michael (Micheal Ward) and Guy (Luke Grimes), to become his staff. He even covers his official sheriff’s SUV with campaign slogans that are notable for their conspiratorial messages and random punctuation.

Joe’s problems aren’t limited to his issues with Ted. At home, his mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), is sleeping on their couch and pumping out conspiracy theories she finds online. These theories find a receptive audience in Dawn’s daughter, Ted’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who becomes fascinated by a New Age preacher, Vernon (played by Austin Butler). 

And to raise the tension level, some of the high school kids are starting street protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. One of the kids leading the movement is Sarah (Amèlie Hoeferle), who recently broke up with Michael, Joe’s deputy, who’s Black. Ted’s son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), and Eric’s best friend Brian (Cameron Mann), both have crushes on Sarah, and decide joining the protest movement is a good way to impress her.

Aster evokes the anxiety of those first COVID months, where people grasped onto whatever information they could find — and frequently found disinformation and took it for the truth. The town is a powder keg, and the leader who should be defusing the situation, Sheriff Joe, is lighting matches.

Phoenix gives a riveting performance, portraying Joe as the original emasculated incel, transmuting his home frustrations into a political statement. Phoenix leads a powerful ensemble that delivers strong performances, with O’Connell’s web-addicted conspiracy-monger topping the list.

The tension Aster builds up in the first 90 minutes — in a two-and-a-half hour movie — is so nerve-wracking that a viewer wonders how he will sustain it. The annoying thing is that he can’t, and Aster overcompensates with a hard swerve, from mocking conspiracy theories to leading us into one. The most terrifying thing about “Eddington” is Aster’s mind game, in which his depictions of right-wingers’ fever dream of a left-wing cabal lead us to the same messed-up government and public square that the non-fiction world got to through haphazard stupidity.

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‘Eddington’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violence, some grisly images, language, and graphic nudity. Running time: 148 minutes.

Review: 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' gets the legacy reboot/sequel it didn't deserve or need, but it could be a lot worse

The new legacy-sequel “I Know What You Did Last Summer” frequently falters, when director Jennifer Kaitlyn Robinson can’t seem to decide whether she’s rebooting the 1997 slasher movie or creating a continuation of it. 

But when it settles into the business at hand, of creatively slaughtering 20-somethings who may or may not have deserve it, it’s not half bad.

Robinson, who co-wrote with Sam Lansky and devised the story with Leah McKendrick, takes us back to Southport, the North Carolina seaside town where a killer in a fisherman’s raincoat killed several people with a giant hook. Some of those people are among the five young folks who tried to cover up a hit-and-run fatality in which they were involved. The new movie reminds everyone that two of those five survived the brutality: Julie James (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Ray Bronson (Freddie Prinze Jr.). 

Before we get to them this time, we start with five new friends: Best pals Danica (Madilyn Cline) and Ava (Chase Sui Wonders), Danica’s fiancé Teddy (Tyriq Withers), Ava’s high-school boyfriend Milo (Jonah Hauer-King) and Stevie (Sarah Pidgeon), their old high school friend from whom the others had grown distant. On the night of Danica and Teddy’s engagement party, the five go driving on a dangerous curve, where through a moment of immaturity, they accidentally cause a pickup truck and his driver to careen off the road and into the rocks below. 

Ava and Stevie want to call 911, or at least go down and try to save the driver. But Teddy — whose rich dad (Billy Williams) runs the town and apparently grew up thinking the mayor in “Jaws” was the hero — urges the others to keep quiet, so their lives don’t get ruined.

Flash-forward a year, and those five aren’t doing so hot. Danica is preparing for a wedding, but not to Teddy, who’s a despondent drunk living on his dad’s houseboat. Stevie’s managing a bar owned by Ray from the first movie, and has grown close to Danica. And Ava is punishing herself through sexual encounters with random strangers — like Tyler (Gabbriette Bechtel), whom Ava meets on the plane to Southport, which Tyler is visiting because she hosts a true-crime podcast and is fascinated by the 1997 killings.

At her bridal shower, Danica opens a card in which someone has written the fateful words: “I know what you did last summer.” And we’re off and running, with cast members being dispatched with a harpoon gun and the infamous giant hook.

Director Robinson has some fun staging the murders with a mix of ‘90s nostalgia and new-school creepiness, occasionally but not consistently landing some genuine scares. It’s fun to watch Wonders and Cline, running neck-and-neck for the title of the movie’s final girl, jump wholeheartedly into the franchise’s bloodshed. But Hewitt and Prinze, though they provide some of the movie’s strongest moments, also remind us that this franchise was never that good and we don’t need to take it that seriously, then or now.

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‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody horror violence, language throughout, some sexual content and brief drug use. Running time: 111 minutes.

Review: 'Smurfs' is a chaotic attempt to wring any humor, whimsy or anything genuine out of a classic cartoon franchise

Thankfully, I was seated away from small children when I attended a recent preview screening of “Smurfs,” the latest attempt to turn Peyo’s classic blue cartoon characters into a movie franchise — because I blurted out a word not appropriate for little ears.

It was in the first five minutes, when a character called No Name Smurf — lamenting that he doesn’t have a name that describes his occupation or other character trait, like the others — started singing, in the voice of James Corden, the movie’s “I want” song. What I muttered under my breath was, “Oh, Smurf me.” Except I didn’t say “Smurf.”

That turned out to be the high point of “Smurfs,” a chaotic mishmash of kid-movie plotting and amuse-the-grownups one-liners that tries to establish a heroic mythology for the Smurfs while also mocking the idea that such grandiosity should even exist. It’s a movie that might have looked good on paper at some point, in terms of pushing a brand toward a new audience, but makes no sense narratively, comedically or emotionally.

The Smurfs are happily partying when No Name gets hold of some magic book, called Jaunty (voiced by Amy Sedaris), and starts playing around with the magic powers the book bestows on him. That draws the attention of an evil wizard, Razamel (voiced by JP Karliak), who comes through a portal and kidnaps Papa Smurf (voiced by John Goodman).

After a few moments of panic in Smurf Village, it’s up to Smurfette — the only female Smurf, voiced by Rihanna (in fact, the movie’s tagline is “Rihanna is Smurfette”) — to lead a rescue party. The Smurfs venture through the portal, and end up in a live-action Paris, where they find some ninja Smurfs and Papa Smurf’s old friend Ken (voiced by Nick Offerman), who imparts the heroic backstory of how the Smurfs fought a group of evil wizards to protect all that’s good in the world. And now, the wizards are amassing again and must be taken down.

Arriving in Paris, director Chris Miller (A DreamWorks alum who directed the first “Puss in Boots”) and writer Pam Brady (“Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken”) open up more questions than answers. Among them: Why do the motivations of Razamel’s brother, the Smurfs’ longtime nemesis Gargamel (also voiced by Karliak), shift every 15 seconds? Or why is Paris depicted in live-action footage, but the human characters we meet there — like Razamel’s assistant, Joel (voiced by Dan Levy) — animated? And who in their right minds thought any of this was funny?

The songs are forgettable, even with Rihanna singing them. (Rihanna joins a list of pop singers who made some of their worst music while voicing Smurfette, a list that includes Katy Perry and Demi Lovato.) The animation style is a hybrid of Pixar-style computer animation and old-school line drawing, which produces the cheapest versions of both.

There’s a line toward the end, where Papa Smurf warns away the evil wizards by saying, “Don’t mistake our kindness for weakness.” That was the only moment of “Smurfs” that brought me joy, only because I started to imagine a certain segment of the Internet gearing up to declare “the Smurfs have gone woke” — and the thought that such people would waste their time getting mad about a movie so inconsequential made me smile.

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‘Smurfs’

★

Opens Friday, July 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for action, language and some rude humor. Running time:  92 minutes; accompanied by a 3-minute “SpongeBob SquarePants” short, “Order Up.”

Review: 'Abraham's Boys' delivers a dark drama under the cloak of a vampire thriller, with a striking performance by Titus Welliver

Like Dracula’s cape, writer-director Natasha Kermani’s brooding thriller “Abraham’s Boys” comes cloaked in the trappings of the vampire myth — but the monster beneath is something else, creating a dark drama about loyalty and madness.

Taking a short story by horror writer Joe Hill, Kermani sets her drama in California’s Central Valley in 1915. It’s here, we’re told, that Abraham Van Helsing, the famed vampire hunter who drove a stake in Dracula’s heart 18 years earlier, has settled after fleeing the specter of vampires in Europe. Van Helsing (Titus Welliver, familiar to fans of “Bosch”) teaches his two sons — teen Max (Brady Hepner) and 12-year-old Rudy (Judah Mackey) — algebra and reading, while he also tends to his ailing wife, Mina (Jocelin Donahue).

Yes, Mina — known in Bram Stoker’s story as the wife of Jonathan Harker, and the object of Dracula’s eternal desire. Kermani’s script suggests an unfortunate fate for Jonathan, and that Van Helsing and Mina have created a life together, now threatened by the seeming return of the demons they fought in London and Amsterdam.

At least that’s the story Van Helsing has told Max, and the dark history he has kept from Rudy until now. As Mina’s condition worsens, and Van Helsing grows more secretive, Max starts to wonder how much of his father’s Dracula story is true.

The storytelling is spartan, with only a few side characters — such as Elsie (Aurora Perrineau), a mapmaker for the railroad that’s coming to end the Van Helsing family’s rural solitude. The focus is on the Van Helsings as they prepare to confront the evil that’s coming, as Max wrestles with Rudy’s question: What if something is already inside?

The highlight of “Abraham’s Boys” is seeing Welliver, a character actor who usually plays gruff cops or shady criminals, dig into a hard-edged, enigmatic character like this. Van Helsing, as a figure of literature and film, is more familiar with death than most, and Welliver helps us feel his acceptance of that painful fate.

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‘Abraham’s Boys’

★★★

Opening Friday, July 11, in theaters. Rated R for bloody violence and grisly images. Running time: 89 minutes.