Based on the bestselling 2022 novel by Shelby Van Pelt and directed by Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing”), “Remarkably Bright Creatures” channels Nicholas Sparks by way of centenarian wildlife expert David Attenborough. If that sounds like a lot of tentacles, it should, as the film is narrated by an aging giant octopi named Marcellus. Marcellus lives in an aquarium on the Puget Sound and likes to get out and scamper about at night, which brings him into contact with Tova (Sally Field), a retiree who works the late-night janitorial shift, both to keep busy and to help settle past traumas. One affectionate tentacle touch and Marcellus can tell that there is a “hole” in Tova’s heart. Things get more complicated when Lewis Pullman’s Cameron, a broke struggling musician, takes over Tova’s shift after she twists an ankle. The Sparks-ian angle — human trauma distilled into an airy lite confection — has all three finding closure on that past and healing in the now, through interaction with each other. For the audience, there’s an unsolved mystery to add intrigue.
Marcellus, voiced by Alfred Molina, gives us all the Attenborough octopi factoids we need, and while the film is best when Marcellus is at the center (the FX and such are excellent), Field and her gaggle of aging gal pals — the “knit-wits,” a sewing club with Joan Chen, Beth Grant and Kathy Baker — charm in devilishly understated ways. It’s heartwarming for sure, but never maudlin. Field, a veteran presence, carries the film and knows when to cede the stage to her eight-armed co-star.
Watching “Creatures” sparked the desire in me to go back and watch the Academy Award-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher” (2020), which plays like “Creatures” IRL. It also has me wanting to reread Sy Montgomery’s excellent and emotionally insightful “The Soul of an Octopus,” which, like Tova, is about the author’s interaction with a polypous named Athena at our beloved New England Aquarium.
Rows of bikes at Casa Bikes @ AMPED!, with a community space in the background.
When you walk into the 10,000 sq. ft. home of Casa Bikes @ AMPED!, you’re overtaken by its size — it’s probably the largest bike store in the area — and its paradoxical homeyness. Row after row of e-bikes and cargo bikes are sprinkled with oases of couches and chairs set around tables. There are rotating art displays on the walls and on the floor, some of which light up when you walk by.
The dual-concept space blends Casa Bikes, an e-bike rental and retail store, and AMPED!, which gives cyclists and community members —especially underrepresented voices — a place to interact. It’s the brainchild of co-owners Charles James and Daisy Chiu, who formerly ran Crimson Bikes, and Elder Gonzalez, and situated right at the end of the Community Bike Path that runs from the Alewife Linear Park path (currently closed for renovation) through Davis Square to the Lechmere T stop, then into Cambridge Crossing, the substantial development in East Cambridge just north of the Museum of Science.
“We didn’t just want to build a shop — we wanted to create a place where people can come, connect and actually experience something together,” said James during a tour of the space, which had its grand opening in September 2025, mere months after REI’s first small-format retail store closed. “We wanted to inspire childlike wonder,” he added.
Reviews of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and “Is God Is”
“The Devil Wears Prada 2”
It’s been 20 years since the original “Devil Wears Prada” made office politics and the pandemonium of high fashion intoxicating. While the main cast — Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Stanley Tucci and Emily Blunt — barely look a decade older, times have definitely changed. Social media, micro-aggressions and HR rules have changed life for Streep’s Miranda Priestly (fashioned after famed “Vogue” editor Anna Wintour, whose former junior assistant penned the book the first movie was based on). She has to have her latest assistant (Simone Ashley) police her language in board meetings.
At the end of the last Manhattan fairytale, Hathaway’s Andy Sachs left “Runway” magazine for the world of hard-hitting journalism—an endeavor that pays considerably less. When we catch up with Andy, she’s collecting a coveted award for her integrity-driven stories, only to learn that she and everyone at the paper have been sacked by the paper’s new parent company (a scenario all too familiar and real these days). Simultaneously, “Runway” gets egg on its face for a feature it ran on a fashion line that it didn’t know uses sweatshops for its threads. Nothing like an out-of-work scribe and a company in a PR tailspin to get the team back together again. Natch, Miranda barely remembers Andy (or feigns such) and per usual sets her up to fail. Still at Miranda’s side is Nigel (a well-postured Tucci bringing back his blasé-faire élan), loyal vanguard of haute fashion and barbed witticisms, with Emily (Blunt) now over at Dior and a chief buyer of ad-space from “Runway” (the real-life model for the Emily character recently fessed up and the parallels are to-the-curb tight).
In the first “Prada” we had Paris, here we get Milan and a meandering side thread about a takeover of Elias-Clarke, the parent company of “Runway.” What that does besides putting too much yarn in the air is to weave Lucy Liu, Kenneth Branagh with an enviably rich mane, Justin Theroux (unrecognizable as a goofball tech-bro) and B.J. Novak as the mealy-mouthed scion of Elias-Clarke’s CEO, into the fold. The sharp script, again written by Aline Brosh McKenna, and tight direction by David Frankel — also returning — go far, but nearly falters along the final walk as the overly complicated corporate mega blah ties up. The cast, though, is all in, lovingly bringing back the personas so many identified with and rooted for. Miranda may not be the firebrand she was back in 2006, as time and mega-mergers have tamped her down. She’s less a pop-off-the-screen paw scratch, but also more vulnerable and human. “Prada 2” is a comfortable nostalgic fit, with clean lines and even seams.
“Is God Is”
Adapted from her own stage play, Aleshea Harris’s “Is God Is” is a slow burn of a revenge tale that twists in strange, stylized ways as it follows the travails of twin sisters Anaia (Mallori Johnson) and Racine (Kara Young, the upcoming “I Love Boosters”). The twins, after receiving a letter from their disfigured mother (an unrecognizable Vivica A. Fox), set off on a quest to avenge her by killing their father (Sterling K. Brown, “Moonlight,” “Paradise”). What ensues is something of a lo-fi spaghetti western filtered through the lens of a Greek tragedy with bubbles of Afrofuturist hip — in a loose stylistic sense, think “Sinners” and, to a lesser degree, “Him.”
Of the twins, Racine is as — if not more — scarred than her mother from the fiery act of cruelty inflicted by Brown’s father—the flashback of which is dark, eerie and hard to watch. The credits list him only as “Man.” Mom is referred to as Ruby God, which, I guess, is what gives her agency to command the act of vengeance from her long-simmering death bed somewhere in the dusty fields of Virginia.
The command that Ruby has over the girls is curious as she has been long absent from their lives — since the incident. They grew up in foster care hell. The two also have a form of ESP, where they can look at each other and communicate in full sentences — for the rest of us it helps that we see them on screen in closed-captioned psychic subtitles.
The violence that comes — and there’s lots of it — is fast, bloody and brutal. It’s also at times comedic, with a touch of mean poetry to it — something Quentin Tarantino elevated to an art form and Harris is not too bad at. The girls’ tools of choice? A rock in a bloody white sock — looking like David’s sling — and a pair of pruning loppers.
As the twins, Johnson and Young are asked much of, and shoulder it well, but the film feels too long for what it is as the quiet moments of talky contemplation before the next, far-too-intimate beat down, often feel flat and don’t add anything new. Brown and Fox smolder in their brief parental parts, and the ever-elegant Janelle Monáe is a portrait of troubled grace as Man’s current wife. “Is God Is” comes out swinging and fierce, but there’s a hollowness to it that resonates more than the searing anger it postures.
Renny Harlin heads back to the deep blue — but this time the sharks aren’t the problem so much as the movie around them.
This return to shark-infested waters is a rote exercise compared to Harlin’s quirkier, “Deep Blue Sea” (1999), since “Deep Water” unspools as a by-the-numbers disaster flick. We’re introduced to a cast of personalities in Los Angeles, boarding a jumbo jet bound for Singapore. On the flight deck, Ben Kingsley is our captain, with a dutiful Aaron Eckhart as the first officer — one’s a karaoke-crooning charmer chasing a golden girl in every port; the other’s a straightlaced, former Air Force pilot with a few trauma skeletons in the closet. The X-factor in the misadventure is a bellicose, self-entitled slob (Angus Sampson) — basically everything that’s wrong with America — who chain-smokes wherever he pleases and leaves an e-device plugged into a charger in his checked luggage. Not good; you know it’s only a matter of time (though, given the film’s long developing arc, about halfway through the movie) before a fire breaks out in the hold and the plane goes down in the middle of the oceanic nowhere. A coral reef holds a few severed sections tenuously above water.
The crash also serves as a dinner bell for a shiver of ravenous sharks that take opportunistic pounds of flesh — limbs make for tasty hors d’oeuvres. The pat survivor-hell bears all the trappings of the cheesy, B-level disaster thrillers of the 1970s (“The Towering Inferno” and “The Poseidon Adventure”), but none of their lean-in bravado (and the special effects are lame, especially by today’s standards — “Sharknado” included).
Harlin cut his teeth on sequels in the “Die Hard” and “Nightmare on Elm Street” franchises. He never really found a directorial footing to call his own, and most recently helmed the god-awful chapters of “The Strangers.” He again reverts to a banal retread that no one will remember.
For What it's Worth 