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.
Samara Weaving seems to be typecast as an onscreen punching bag. In the “Ready or Not” films and now this dour rom com/thriller, she plays a fetching can-do femme transformed by the masochistic madness of the plot into a purple bloody mess. Directed by Jorma Taccone, “Over Your Dead Body” is a remake of 2021’s grim Norwegian film “I Onde Danger” (lamely rebranded as “The Trip” in the United States).
The story begins with Weaving’s Lisa and her husband Dan (Jason Segal) having marital problems, not least of which are a two-year drought in the conjugal bliss department. He’s an indie film director who scored critical success early but now is relegated to making “pop-up ads.” Lisa is a struggling stage actress cheating on Dan with a fellow thespian. Money is another sizable problem. A getaway to Dan’s dad’s cabin on a lake in Upstate New York during a stunning fall season (the landscapes are shot in Finland but look legit) becomes an opportunity for Dan to off Lisa and cash in an insurance policy. But when he hesitates to apply Chloroform, she tases him and ties him to a kitchen chair to put her own permanent separation plan in play. But then, murder interruptus — a trio of escaped convicts (Timothy Olyphant, Keith Jardine and Juliette Lewis) drop through the ceiling. The couple have to team up or die.
The main problem with “Over Your Dead Body” is that neither Lisa nor Dan is all that interesting or likable. It’s the trio of malevolent misfits that hold our attention, especially Olyphant’s smooth but demonic mastermind and Lewis’s edgy Allegra, who is sexually aroused by the clamor of violent confrontation. The movie may be even more gruesome than its Norwegian inspiration, though “Dead Body” somehow manages to make whimsy from the severing of fingers, ears and noses. Turns out romantic separation is always messier than it has to be.
Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!”
Right now cinemagoers can double their Frankenstein pleasure with “The Bride!” and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” up for the Best Picture Oscar this Sunday. Sure, “Frankenstein” is streaming on Netflix – it’s practically left theaters – but it is one of those films best seen on the big screen, as is Maggie Gyllenhaal’s newly opened grand spectacle. They play like bookends to the original story by Mary Shelley, just 18 at the time she wrote her 1818 novel subtitled “The Modern Prometheus.”
In the book, The Bride was promised but never made. It’s in the 1935 James Whale-directed sequel to “Frankenstein” (1931) and Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” that we get the realization of the corpse bride via very different narratives. Wedding crashers in the genre are “Frankenstein: The True Story” (1973), starring Jane Seymour and David McCallum of the “Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” and an emotionally inert 1985 version of “The Bride” pairing Jennifer Beals (“Flashdance”) with Sting, in which the rendering of The Bride was defined by the performer’s comely, magazine-cover self.
The narrative flip from the book’s Gothic Europe to post-Prohibition Chicago is a kitschy and vibrant reimagining.
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” is a hot mess — both the title character and the film. It’s a wildly ambitious project with a distinctive female lens, and while it’s rife with social commentary, those themes often feel stitched on — and at times, carelessly so. The film flounders despite a killer cast, including Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard, and her brother, Jake, who appear in supporting roles. But the main reason to see the film is the bravura headline by Jessie Buckley, who’s been nominated for a best actress Oscar for her deeply emotional portrait of grief in “Hamnet” (2025).
Buckley can do no wrong in “The Bride!” She previously partnered with Gyllenhaal for her critically acclaimed directorial debut “The Lost Daughter” (2021), for which Buckley received a best supporting actress nod. Here she carries the film’s heaviest load, both as the shadowy visage of “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley hurling barbs of foreboding from a dark dreamscape, and as Ida, a brash flapper-era Chicagoan party girl whose demise leads to her reincarnation — or “reinvigoration” in the film — as the bride.
Fred Wiseman (left) and Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi at the Coolidge Corner Theater (Claire Vail).
Frederick Wiseman, the critically revered documentarian whose films mapped the moral frame of American life, died Monday at 96 at his home near Porter Square, in the city he in many ways, spent a career studying.
Born in Boston in 1930 and trained as a lawyer (Yale Law and a stint in the army) before turning to filmmaking, Wiseman carried a jurist’s sensibility into cinema — gathering evidence, observing behavior, withholding judgment. His camera did not accuse; it revealed. His body of work may be one of the most sustained portraits of modern democratic society ever assembled on film.
Written and directed by Brent Dawes and Phil Cunningham, “David”’s animation is on par with Pixar. It sticks to the part of the Biblical story that chronicles the rise of the young shepherd and poet who would become the unifying King of Israel. Of course, David slays Goliath, repels the Philistines, deals with King Saul’s January 6th cling to power and ultimately makes Jerusalem the capital of Israel — all this around 1,000 BC. David (well voiced by Brandon Engman) is an earnest, reluctant leader full of brio, no matter the tall odds.
Scenes of battle and violent conflict are tres G-rated—think fights in “The Lion King.” As David matures as a military leader, he is not the conflicted warrior king depicted in the streaming series “House of David” and the Bible itself, the one who commits adultery with Bathsheba and subsequently hatches a plot to kill her husband. No, this David often breaks into song and follows prophecy to the letter. It’s crisp animation and tight story-telling.
Eyeballs are gouged, testicles put to a blade, and blood spurts in this Sam Rami film. It’s not quite as gory as Rami’s “Evil Dead” films, but it is not exactly shy. Rachel McAdams, dorked out with greasy hair and frumpy clothes, plays an office drone at some cutting-edge tech company. Linda Little is a numbers geek, apt to rise from her cubicle and chat up her bosses with tuna fish smeared to her upper lip. Bradley Preston (played by Dylan O’Brien of “Maze Runner”), becomes Linda’s new boss after his father dies (“Evil Dead”’s Bruce Campbell). Bradley, the jerk, welches on a promised promotion and relocates her to a new Bangkok office. Linda learns of the betrayal en route to Thailand with Bradley and his biz-school bros. The plane goes down, and Linda—a “Survivor” aficionado who has dreamed of a role on the show—suddenly becomes indispensable in hunting, kindling and scavenging. The sex-and-power reversal evokes Ruben Östlund’s darker “Triangle of Sadness” (2022). But “Send Help,” driven by flimsy pretexts for improbable hidden agendas, takes a softer bite of social commentary. The film has Linda and Bradley transitioning from uneasy codependency to something resembling “Lord of the Rings” without earning it. What begins as an empowerment fantasy grows banal. “Send Help” is whimsically entertaining. McAdams’s bravado carries the paunchy plot.
Faster, angrier and meaner—that’s how folks have come to like their zombies since director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland flipped the genre on its head in 2002’s “28 Days Later.” They introduced a “rage virus” that transformed infected humans into berserk, flesh-rending decathletes on crack. George Romero’s shamblers could barely hold the beer of these boss-level zombies and a series was hatched. The latest entry, “28 Years Later: The Bone Temple,” is chomping its way through theaters. Boyle and Garland have dropped in and out of the series. Neither were onboard for the 2007 follow up, “28 Weeks Later” (perhaps its best chapter), but reunited last year for “28 Years Later”—the ostensible cornerstone of a trilogy, now a tetralogy probably still not complete. Garland wrote the script for “Bone Temple” but Boyle hands directorial duties to Nia DaCosta, who caught our eye with their 2021 “Candyman” remake, lost us with their insipid “Marvels” meander in 2023, but regained our interest with last year’s opulent and bawdy “Hedda.” DaCosta may not be a top orchestrator of character and the human element, but they do have a formidable visual sense, and “Bone Temple” is strikingly framed — be it scenes of bloody butchery or serene countryside meadows. Its rampant gore is hard to look away from.
At the end of last year’s first act, our pre-teen protagonist Spike (Alfie Williams) had left his family’s island enclave to seek answers on the mainland. There he teamed up with Sir Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his band of lost boys, known as the Jimmys. A cartoonish ending (golf clubs and parkour to take out the “infected”) offered a wisp of hope. But “Bone Temple” finds them in a place that is dark, sinister and grim.
The sequel opens with Spike in a death match to earn his into Jimmy’s gang. O’Connell’s Jimmy presides over the fray, a cartoonish Nero savoring the slow demise of another. The film’s other thread reunites us with Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), curator of the Bone Temple ossuary — pillars of bleached ulnas and tibias surrounding a tower of skulls — and observer of the infected. Kelson, slathered in iodine (which staves off the virus), has developed the neat trick of using morphine darts to tranquilize zombie Alphas, infected that can rip the spine from a human like blowing their nose. This allows him to bond with one regular visitor that he names Samson (six-foot-eight former MMA fighter Chi Lewis-Parry, who looks like Jason Momoa’s maxi-me). It’s an intriguing relationship, with Kelson something of a fatherly Frankenstein seeking to strike connection and balance.
Jimmy has a different relationship with the “infected.” He was the young boy watching the “Teletubbies” in act one’s preamble when his da, a priest, embraced the horde descending on his house and church as a divine intervention (Jimmy is the only one who escapes). Jimmy’s character is inspired by flamboyant, blonde-wig wearing 1960s–’80s British TV host Jimmy Savile, who was revealed after his death in 2011 to have been a prolific pedophile and sexual predator. But Jimmy and his wig-wearing minions put another evil layer on things — they roam the countryside pillaging and torturing other quarantined survivors in the name of Old Nick (another name for Satan). It’s a bit of a leap, but one that DaCosta, O’Connell, and Garland mostly make stick.
O’Connell was also a villain in “Sinners,” playing the opportunistic vampire Remmick in Ryan Coogler’s imaginative, genre-blending period piece and current awards contender. At least Remmick had a code. Jimmy is an amoral sadist with a deity complex and an intense amount of charm, which makes him twice as lethal.
The Kelson and Jimmy threads eventually converge, not because of Spike’s prior connection to Kelson, but through Jimmy’s manipulation when he deems Kelson Old Nick himself due to his Satan-red application of iodine — a claim Jimmy weaponizes to cement his authority over his restless charges.
“Bone Temple” moves in strange and unexpected ways that mostly work. When it falters, Sean Bobbitt’s rich visuals and a knockout performance by Fiennes easily carry it past the rough patches. Williams, too, is strong as the torn and vulnerable youth roped into an unenviable and horrific existence, Lewis-Parry gives anuanced turn as the massive, naked Alpha. O’Connell is just as (for better or worse) pop-off-the-screen audacious here as he was in the waning moments of last year’s film.
Those expecting waves of zombie carnage may be surprised by “Bone Temple.” Its ugliest horrors come from human cruelty dressed up as moral purpose, acts Jimmy chillingly tags as “charity.” These are often peek-through-your-fingers grim. As with previous entries in the series, “Bone Temple” closes on a note of wary hope, punctuated by a big reveal that promises that the “28 Years” saga will shamble on.
There’s little surprising or new in “The Long Walk” despite its pedigree, passion and professionalism. It’s still a compelling and emotionally charged tale primarily because of those three Ps – and the grim prospect of how much further we as a society can fall. It’s based on Stephen King’s first novel, written as a student while at the University of Maine but not published until 1979; even then it went under King’s pen name of Richard Bachman, like “The Running Man.”
In “Walk,” we get dropped into a dystopian America in the late 1960s or ’70s. It takes a while to register, but the unhappy alter reality has the distinct tang of “The Mist” or “The Stand”: The United States has just emerged from a war, but the country is not the portrait of Ozzie and Harriet productivity we’ve all been sold on. Much of what we see in our limited lens is the depressed and the needy. Most of the people we see along the long stroll could use a hot shower, a bowl of hot soup and some new threads.
Zach Cregger’s follow-up to his 2022 surprise art house horror hit “Barbarian” builds just as confidently with mood, moxie and acrid, enigmatic tugs. “Weapons” has you from the get-go as a young child from the fictional town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, informs in a soft, reflective voice-over how one night 17 children exited their suburban homes at the exact moment of 2:17 a.m. and, holding their arms out like birds about to take flight, ran into the night and vanished. There’s a liberating joyousness to the otherwise ominous exodus. The next day at school, we learn that all were students of a new teacher, Justine Grundy (Julia Garner, “The Assistant,” “Ozark”), so when Justine walks in, the classroom is empty except for one: Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), a small, quiet boy and the subject of regular bullying.
Parents are understandably upset and want answers. During a town meeting, Justine is blamed and castigated for her inability to provide answers. Later, her car is vandalized with the ominous tag of “witch” in bold red letters.
For What it's Worth 