January 2026 [19-25]
Stranger Things: S5, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5, Blue Moon, Elio, The Alabama Solution, Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, Song of the Sea, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
- Stranger Things: S5 [2025] - 50
On the air and in my head “rent free” [as they say] since 2016, I’m pretty sure that Stranger Things is the origin of calling something a “roller-coaster” because each season rides its highs and lows so rapidly that [depending on how far below sea level you happen to be at time of watching] you may have to contact your doctor for signs and symptoms of decompression sickness. I tend to stick pretty close to my guns when I say that I don’t engage with shows that go beyond three seasons… And this kind of nonsense is exactly why. In his astoundingly beautiful series “The Border Trilogy”, my main man, Cormac McCarthy, said “Long voyages often lose themselves,” and that couldn’t possibly be truer for any one thing than it is for this set of Stranger Things. I wrote a full review on this season that you can check out but, the long-short of it is that this is just more of the same bullshit the show has always been: soaring moments that get so heavily muddied and idiofied by all the scum surrounding them that you have nothing left to hold by the end, except your own disappointment at what could have been. Nearly 10-years in the making, Stranger Things is only going to be remembered for two things: Will Byers openly admitting to being a misogynist in front of all his friends, and… No, it’s just that one thing actually.
- One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 [2025] - 70
Still holding some hope in my heart for a series that embodies almost everything I hold dear in so many ways, One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5 is a documentary surrounding the production of the show’s final season… And it’s at once enlightening and validating given my huge list of criticisms. Regardless of how you felt about S5, I think this is a worthy companion piece, because it gives a lot of insight into both the genuinely very cool things they did to make it all happen… As well as the very stupid things that caused the landslide of accidental comedy that the season actually turned into. While this didn’t ultimately change my opinion of the show in any meaningful way, it did give me some context for assumptions I’d made while watching it… Assumptions that [after hearing one or both of the Duffer Bros. effectively say “we don’t know what we’re doing” over and over during writer’s meetings] were, unfortunately, mostly correct.
- Blue Moon [2025] - 58
Nominated for his role as famous lyricist, Lorenz Hart, Ethan Hawke truly does shine in this otherwise entirely-forgettable-and-dreadfully-long talking picture. We follow Hawke as he recounts his life and career to the employees-made-prisoners of a hotel bar while a party ensues for his former companion, Richard Rodgers, over the release of his new play, “Oklahoma!”. Hawke’s performance is truly great, but the whole thing feels like a stage-play… And not in a good way. The story is jilted and largely without context, characters are just kind of around so that one conversation can careen into the next, and the entire thing feels less like a dramatized vision of someone’s life, and more like a recreation of working in retail hell as Hart [Hawke] relentlessly corners the various patrons and employees of this small establishment with his woes before moving in and amongst the party, doing exactly the same thing to people over there. It’s an interesting character study in a person living on the edge of their last thread maybe… But man it just makes for a miserable and unengaging watch.
- Elio [2025] - 55
Speaking of miserable and unengaging… Disney-Pixar’s entry for Best Animated Film at the 2026 Oscars is… Really impressively lame. Elio tells the story of… Well… Elio as he struggles with finding his place in the universe after the death of his parents and injection into his aunt’s busy military career. He’s a nerd obsessed with aliens, and he’s desperately seeking any sort of way to both contact and get them to take him away from this world in which he doesn’t belong. That’s uh… Hey Disney… That’s a GREAT storyline… So how in the world did you make a movie that’s so stupid? The movie is just so entirely bereft of context for almost anything it tries to convey that none of its plot points are even vaguely interesting or impactful, and it whips up a nice little cherry for the whole adventure by making all of the most potentially interesting characters incredibly stupid and flattening the film’s most important plots to the point that nothing-means-anything-and-now-the-credits-are-rolling-so-everyone-just-go-home-happy-I-guess. Enough grousing though, let’s talk about a couple of movies that are actually worth your time.
- The Alabama Solution [2025] - 88
Another Oscar nom [this time for documentary], The Alabama Solution showcases the horrors of Alabama’s prisons [and, thus, the United States’ as a whole] through the lenses of various social leaders incarcerated within. Filmed almost entirely through contraband cellphones, The Alabama Solution raises the ever-important questions of: “Who watches the watchers?” and “What happens behind closed doors?”. To use tired documentary adjectives like “powerful” and “moving” kind of cuts this experience off at the knees, but it’s difficult to find other words to describe it. The nightmares that these inmates suffer at the hands of power-hungry guards, the slave-labor that they are put through as punishment for their various crimes, and the overall living conditions of these human beings is something no creature should ever have to endure. Our “justice” system is anything but, and this is an excellent look into some of the many ways that it fails the very people it vows to both protect and rehabilitate.
- Little Amélie or the Character of Rain [2025] - 92
Man… I really didn’t want KPop Demon Hunters to have any actual competition this year… Ugh, and it sure absolutely does. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain is a movie in which I have to search for things to criticize, because they simply don’t present themselves openly. And, though I can find a few, they’re more things that I’d change for my own masochistic tastes in film than things I’d actually call “flaws”. This is one of those rare experiences I’d call “important”, and it speaks in such a language that everyone can both relate and be mystified by, with one scene being so moving that I don’t know if I’ll ever forget it 🫙✨. In an interview post release, the source material’s author, Amélie Nothomb, told the film’s directors that “she felt like we brought her dad back to life”, and I don’t know what else I could possibly say that would matter more than that.
- Song of the Sea [2014] - 87
Following up one excellent animated film with another, I’d first watched Song of the Sea in March of 2023. I didn’t write a review for it then for some reason, but I really quite enjoyed it, giving the experience a very high rating of 91. My partner wasn’t around at the time, however, and had never seen it on her own… Being a fan of both anything ocean-flavored and whimsical “nugget movies”, I figured this was a shoe in, so we tossed it on to find out [I was right]. Song of the Sea is part of Tom Moore's "Irish Folklore Trilogy" — following 2009’s The Secret of Kells, preceding Wolfwalkers in 2020 — and is the strongest of the 3 by a large margin… Though that doesn’t mean that either of the others are slouches by any sort of measure. Featuring what I’d consider some of the best animation in the business, each of these films is such an artistic triumph as to be compared to anything Studio Ghibli, or the Spiderverse films, and they deserve visionary recognition as such. Similar to Little Amélie above, Song of the Sea really only loses points for me because it has moments where the storytelling could be much heavier and more painful, but it chooses a lighter, simpler path instead… Not necessarily “wrong”, I just want to be hurt as much as possible by these beautiful pieces of storytelling.
- 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple [2026] - 37
Not to let my week end on too high a note, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is such an atrociously mediocre movie that it almost deserves accolades simply for being bland. While its predecessor film, 28 Years Later was also a masterpiece of wasting my time, that one had some seriously impressive moments of artistic vision, and characters that you could at least pretend to mythologize should you find yourself held at gunpoint about it. Bone Temple eschews some of the more extreme lows of the previous film [I guess] but, in doing so, has also thrown all of its meaningful fence-swings out as well. Gone is anything interesting done with cameras, gone is any bizarre editing and loud radio-style audio screaming at you about boots and troops and guns, and gone is anything even vaguely resembling storytelling. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple feels like the project you hand your kid when you want them to have an in to the industry, but you know that they don’t have any sort of talent of their own. Maybe your name and work will carry them forward… Maybe it won’t. Spoilers, the only part of this movie worth watching is Ralph Fiennes being an absolute maniac to Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast”.
What a pile of absolute garbage.
