reviews – 2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! (2025)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Ryan Coogler
CAST: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O’Connell
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners pulls one of the best head-fakes I’ve seen in a long time. The initial trailers would have had you believe the film was basically a character study (albeit an intense one) of identical twin brothers trying to run an illegal business in 1932 Mississippi. Since both brothers are being played by the excellent Michael B. Jordan, aided by a stellar supporting cast, I got the impression it would be a hybrid of Heat, The Cotton Club, and Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.

Sinners does cover much of that fertile ground…for its first half. Read no further if you’ve been lucky enough not to have seen what the main attraction is, plot-wise, for the film.

We first get a prologue depicting a bloodied young black man bursting into a Sunday church service while holding the top half of a broken guitar neck. This is Sammie Moore, played by Miles Caton in his film debut. The rest of the film is a flashback to the previous day.

The Smokestack brothers have returned home. Smoke and Stack are identical twins, although one of them (Smoke, I think?) has some visible gold in his smile, so that helps distinguish them from each other. They are both sharply dressed, having returned from Chicago after working for Al Capone for a spell. They plan to open a juke joint in a building they purchased from a smarmy character named Hogwood, a white man who grins and assures them they won’t have any trouble from the Klan ‘round here.

This whole first half of the movie is masterfully told. We are presented with fully drawn characters, not generic placeholders to be shuffled randomly later on. We find out that Sammie is cousin to Smoke and Stack. We meet Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a mixed-race woman who was left high and dry romantically when Smoke left for Chicago. There’s Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a nearly-ancient man who plays a mean blues harmonica, whom the brothers want to hire to play in their new joint. There are the Asian owners of a grocery store, hired to cater their grand opening.

And then there’s actress Wunmi Mosaku, who gives a luminous, heartbreaking performance as Annie, a woman who bore Smoke a child that died as an infant. One of the highlights of the film shows Smoke reconnecting with Annie in a scene that at first invites some crude jokes, but which later provides a deep emotional resonance in the movie’s closing passages. I only remember Mosaku as a sizable presence in the one-and-done HBO series Lovecraft Country (2020), but she was also apparently in Deadpool and Wolverine (2024), so now I gotta go back and watch THAT again. Twist my arm.

The movie plays more like a really good Stephen King novel than any other movie I can think of since Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The film’s canvas is painted beautifully and crisply, moving smartly without rushing. I would hope Sinners gets nominated for its film editing (provided by Michael P. Shawver), not because of the thrilling later sections, but because of how economically the first half of the film provides us with the perfect amount of information to understand everyone’s motivations when the second half arrives, when all hell breaks loose.

I must also mention the film’s, I guess, “mystical” content when it comes to African American history. Early on, Annie, who is a “hoodoo” practitioner (I don’t think “witch” is the right word here), tells a lovely story about how, every once in a while, a musician comes along who can play so beautifully that their music “pierces the veil” between past, present, and future, inviting the spirits of all three to come together and enjoy the music as one. There is a magnificent sequence where we get a visual representation of exactly that when Sammie starts to play the blues in the juke joint. Trying to describe it in print is a fool’s errand, but it is one of the film’s many visual highlights. Trust me. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s as elegant a representation of Black history as I’ve ever seen, and I don’t know how anyone will be able to top it in the future.

All of that, though, is just prologue for the main event: the vampires. If you’ve read this long and didn’t know that was coming, I’m sorry I spoiled that for you, but you were warned.

The whole second half of Sinners flirts with becoming a straight-up genre picture, which is not a bad thing in itself, but which would have been almost disappointing when stacked against what came before. However, because we have been given such a thorough grounding in all the characters beforehand, there are real stakes involved in trying to predict who will live and who will die. Some deaths are almost foregone conclusions, but even those are more affecting than they would have been in other similar films.

Traditional vampire lore is very much at play, especially the bit about having to be invited into a house. But the filmmakers did add one new bit, which I thought was EXTREMELY effective. As a vampire is about to feed (or thinks it’s about to), it begins to drool…a thick, gooey saliva that drips from its mouth like ectoplasm. This is a cool touch, and it makes perfect sense, a Pavlovian response to an imminent meal. Don’t be surprised if another vampire film in the future steals that from Sinners. I’d steal it. Wouldn’t think twice about it.

Sinners undoubtedly has some deeper meanings that I am not qualified to unpack, and I leave it to you to find them. This is one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and it is deservedly making bank at the box office. (Over $200 million globally as of May 3^rd, 2025.) It is surprising, it is dramatic, it is thrilling, and it is worth seeing on the big screen. Trust me.

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Mike Nichols
CAST: Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, Cher, Craig T. Nelson, Fred Ward, Ron Silver, Bruce McGill, David Strathairn, M. Emmet Walsh, James Rebhorn
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 77% Fresh

In any event, Mike Nichols’ film isn’t a nuclear-based thriller, like The Day After (1983) or WarGames (1984), that depends on an unexpected resolution. Silkwood isn’t about theatrical heroics or bombastic personalities. It’s a quietly intense character study of an everywoman with an untidy personal life who experiences a seismic shift in her perception and decides she simply can’t stand by and do nothing. This isn’t a crowd-pleaser like Erin Brockovich (2000), but this film’s story and central character are no less important.

The film goes to great pains to show us how ordinary and messy Karen Silkwood is. The incidents at the Oklahoma nuclear facility where she works (along with her live-in boyfriend, Drew, and her roommate, Dolly) are almost secondary to the plot, at least for the first half of the film. Karen has kids that live with her ex-husband and his girlfriend in Texas. Her relationship with Drew isn’t stormy, but it’s not perfect. Dolly seems tolerable as a roommate, but is not shy about speaking her mind. Dolly brings a girlfriend home one night, and there is a slyly amusing conversation between Karen and Drew about Dolly’s sexual preferences. (“I can handle it.” “Me, too.” “…so why are we talking about it?”)

I don’t want to go into too many details about the true-life incidents that occurred at the facility where Karen worked because, if you’re not intimately familiar with the facts of the story, they should be as surprising to you as they were to me. Plutonium is involved, but probably not in the way you’re thinking. Karen learns enough to know she should be more involved in the factory’s union…a LOT more. One plot thread almost feels like it’s ripped off from The China Syndrome (1979), until you realize Syndrome was released four years after the events of Silkwood, so if anything, Syndrome was probably inspired by Karen’s discoveries.

I also have to mention Cher as the roommate, Dolly. Of course, Meryl Streep is amazing and convincing as an everyday, average divorced mom, but Cher more than holds her own in every scene. There is absolutely no hint of the pop music megastar of the ‘70s in this film. Director Mike Nichols insisted she wear little or no makeup in her scenes, which went against every fiber of her instinct as a performer. She understood the assignment: she never upstages anyone. This is not a grandstanding kind of supporting role, like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive (1993) or Cate Blanchett in The Aviator (2004). It required subtlety and understatement, and Cher delivered. I tried to spot her “acting,” and I never could. She was unbelievably natural and, at times, heartbreaking. The movie is almost worth searching out just to see her performance. It’s a clinic in how to own a small role and make it stand out by doing less than you might expect.

Silkwood may not feel as thrilling as some of the other thrillers I’ve already mentioned, but it is just as compelling, specifically because we’re watching an ordinary person under extraordinary circumstances. We’re not watching a hero triumphantly rise to the occasion. We’re watching a struggling divorcee who’s trying to do the right thing after years of inaction, even if it means losing the trust of her co-workers or sacrificing her other personal relationships. I identified more with Karen Silkwood and her situation than I did with Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome or Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich.

The ambiguous nature of the film’s ending mirrors what happened in real life, and when the credits rolled, I felt a surge of empathy for the people left behind and the unanswered questions they live with to this day. That doesn’t happen to me very often.

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: William Wyler
CAST: Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, Ralph Richardson, Miriam Hopkins
MY RATING: 10/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

The AFI’s list of the 50 Greatest Villains in American film does not include Dr. Austin Sloper, played with indifferent cruelty by the great Ralph Richardson in William Wyler’s The Heiress. This is a miscarriage of justice, as Dr. Sloper is one of the most ruthlessly harsh characters I’ve seen in a movie in many years. The fact that he is successfully upstaged by Olivia de Havilland as his daughter, Catherine, is a triumph of screenwriting, directing, and pitch-perfect acting from both performers. The fact that both performances nearly overshadow a charismatic young Montgomery Clift is something that must be seen to be believed.

The film starts in the mid-1800s in the Washington Square area of New York City. It’s a time of horse-drawn carriages, corsets, and garden parties. Catherine Sloper is a very plain, very shy, single woman who lives in a three-story brownstone with her widowed aunt, Lavinia (Miriam Hopkins), and her father, a financially successful doctor who will bequeath a $30,000-a-year inheritance to Catherine upon his death. In addition to the $10,000-a-year she already receives from her mother’s inheritance, Catherine will be financially comfortable for the rest of her life. Alas, her social graces are virtually nonexistent, and she is quite plain when compared to her late mother…as Dr. Sloper casually mentions from time to time, utterly oblivious to the effect this has on Catherine.

At a garden party, during which Catherine is socially humiliated by a thoughtless gentleman, she meets the well-dressed, well-behaved, and nearly penniless Morris Townsend (Clift), who makes it clear that he is utterly taken with her and would like nothing more than to spend the rest of the evening talking or dancing with her and no one else. Her aunt Lavinia is ecstatic the next day, but Dr. Sloper is skeptical. In his mind, no gentleman in his right mind would express romantic intentions towards his socially unsuitable daughter unless he simply wanted the money that comes with her, and he says as much to Mr. Townsend AND to Catherine. The callousness of Dr. Sloper’s behavior is abhorrent, and I found myself thinking, “If this guy were drawn and quartered by the end of the movie, that would still be too good for him.”

The brilliance of the screenplay becomes apparent when Morris boldly announces his love for Catherine, to her complete stupefaction. And when he actually proposes, that pushes her over the edge, and she falls head over heels in love with him, because he’s the first man who has ever shown anything more than polite tolerance towards her…including her father. Dr. Sloper lays out his case for what he believes Townsend’s true intentions are: to take control of or squander her inheritance after they marry.

Dr. Sloper’s brutality knows no bounds…but you find yourself thinking: what if he’s right? Certainly, Townsend is completely genuine in his love for Catherine, or at least seems to be. He knows exactly what to say, and when and how to say it. Is it an act? He’s handsome enough to be an eligible catch for any number of society women in the city, so why waste his time on such a plain-Jane girl as Catherine?

This conflict occupies the main thrust of at least the first half of the film. What transpires and how and when, I will not say. I will say that the story led me in one well-traveled direction, took a left turn, then took another unexpected turn that left me kind of breathless at its audacity. The movie as a whole has been compared in some circles to Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), and deservedly so.

Olivia de Havilland’s performance as Catherine is one of the greatest performances I’ve seen in any film of that era. It trumps even her powerful turn in The Snake Pit a year earlier. Clearly, de Havilland was anything but plain and awkward in real life, but careful makeup and performance nuances helped her bring off one of the most commanding roles of her career. There is an emotional transformation that occurs at one point where she is able to affect a complete one-eighty in her character, and it never once feels histrionic or gimmicky. She shares a scene with her father in which she has “found [her] tongue at last,” as he puts it, that I would rank as one of the greatest two-handed scenes I’ve ever watched. The surgical application of language to inflict harm on another person is breathtaking. Neil LaBute or David Mamet couldn’t have written it any better.

The Heiress left me feeling a little wrung out at the final credits. I remember watching this movie many years ago, but nothing stuck with me except that ending. Despite this foreknowledge, the movie still worked its spell on me, leaving me with a dropped jaw and a blown mind. The ending is somehow definite and ambiguous at the same time, a screenwriting miracle. (And I don’t mean in a Sopranos kind of way, either.) The Heiress is officially one of my new favorite films.

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Anthony Mann
CAST: James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephen McNally, Millard Mitchell, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

The movie plops us right into the action with nary a flashback nor an expositional monologue in sight. The legendary town of Dodge City is holding a shooting contest to celebrate Independence Day, 1876. Sheriff Wyatt Earp (!) is officiating, and the prize will be a rare model of the Winchester ’73 repeating rifle. Arriving in town that day is Lin McAdam (Stewart) with his partner, High-Spade Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell).

(Around this part of his career, Stewart’s trajectory was on the decline, as he was getting too old to play the aw-shucks-y kind of roles that were his bread and butter in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Winchester ’73 was an opportunity to showcase his range, and he delivered. Lin McAdam is not the villain, but neither is he the kind of character Stewart had ever played before. It’s been written that, when audiences of the day saw Stewart get violent and pin a man to a saloon bar, there were gasps.)

Lin is none too friendly towards another man in town, Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), who reciprocates in spades. There is clearly some kind of history, but what that history entails would take too long to explain, so the movie wisely doesn’t try. They’re enemies, and that’s enough. Somewhat predictably, they both enter the contest for the prize Winchester, but in the first of many twists, the contest doesn’t play out exactly as you would expect. Then the rifle is stolen, Dutch and his pals skip town, and Lin and his partner give chase.

From there, the movie gets episodic. There’s the Indian trader, the Indian himself, Young Bull (Rock Hudson in a fake nose and braids!!!), the obligatory feisty lady, Lola (a luminous young Shelley Winters) and her beau who behaves in a most unmanly manner, a run-in with some cavalrymen (featuring an unknown young actor billed as “Anthony Curtis”), and winding up with a real sleazeball, Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea). How the rifle makes its way from place to place I will not reveal, but it’s all perfectly feasible.

(I will leave it to wiser minds than I to discuss the racist portrayal of Indigenous Americans, including using Rock Hudson in “red-face” to play a tribal chief. Yes, it’s shameful and unfortunate, but it happened, and I use the term “Indian” earlier because that’s how they’re referred to in the film, for better or worse.)

If I had to explain what this movie is actually about, beyond its brilliant plotting, I’m not sure I could do it. I can report that it was engaging and crisp and surprising and almost demands a rewatch after the end credits, but aside from just being a darn good entry in the Western genre, it’s hard for me to pin down its message. Is it a screed against the violence in the real West? How some men searched for violence because it was in their nature, or because they felt it was their duty? I mean…yeah, I guess, but that feels like just scratching the surface. What were Mann and Stewart trying to say?

Maybe it’s one of those movies where the message depends on the viewer. If you look at it as an anti-violence film with a bittersweet ending filled with moral ambiguity, it’s there. If you look at it as just a travelogue or tapestry of the old West, made by a director who loves the genre and an actor sinking his teeth into a great role, that’s there, too. (Mann and Stewart would go on to make seven more films together, five of them Westerns.) There’s even melodrama and a hint of romance along the way, but never too much to drown everything else out. For me, Winchester ‘73 is much harder to unpack than Unforgiven (1992), whose message is crystal clear from beginning to end. Both movies are equally entertaining, though, don’t misunderstand me.

If any active readers have made it this far, feel free to let me know what the “true meaning” of Winchester ’73 is. Whether I find out or not will truly not matter, because the movie is still hugely entertaining with or without an explanation. I might have a tiny bone to pick with the final battle, with its foregone conclusion, but it comes with the territory, so I have to forgive it. This is a great entry in the genre, featuring a star pushing his boundaries and a director who knew how to harness that energy.

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Carl Th. Dreyer
CAST: Julian West, Maurice Schutz, Rena Mandel, Sybille Schmitz
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh

The story is fairly simple, but it belies the complex imagery that awaits the viewer. A young drifter, Allan Grey, happens upon an inn from which he thinks he can hear animal sounds, or perhaps a young woman screaming. The village doctor, who looks like a bespectacled long-lost relative of Doc Brown from Back to the Future, vehemently denies the presence any animals or young women on the property. The innkeeper invites Allan to stay the night. In the middle of the night, Allan’s sleep is interrupted by a mysterious visitor to his room who intones, “The girl must not die!” The gentleman then leaves a package on Allan’s desk and writes a most portentous message: “TO BE OPENED ONLY UPON MY DEATH.”

What is this book? What did Allan hear? And how do you explain the shadows he saw on his way to the inn? Shadows of people running along the lane – with no corresponding people attached to them? Wouldn’t YOU like to know.

Vampyr is positively drowning in atmosphere. Dreyer apparently shot many scenes with a piece of thin gauze over the lens, creating a misty layer that makes everything feel like a dream, even when Allan is awake. Allan goes on frequent excursions around the inn and the surrounding property, and it’s here where most of the fantastical imagery is seen, especially when it comes to disembodied shadows. In one mildly unsettling sequence, a shadow of a man with a peg leg descends a ladder and appears to sit on a bench…re-joining itself to a peg-legged man already sitting on the same bench.

There’s a lot more, but I don’t want to just write a list. However, I am compelled to mention one sequence in particular that exudes as much creepiness as anything I’ve ever seen from this cinematic era.

It turns out there is, not one young woman at the inn, but two: Gisèle and Léone. Léone is seen early on, confined to her bed with a mysterious illness, which we later learn has been brought on by her contact with a seldom-seen old woman who lurks somewhere on the property. And there are some odd injuries on her neck…UH oh.

At one point, Léone awakes while Gisèle is alone with her. I don’t remember what they discuss, but Léone goes into this weird sort of trance. Without the use of any strange Chaney-esque makeup or camera tricks, Léone’s face becomes an object lesson in creepiness. Her eyes open wide, her face breaks into a creepy grin, and she slowly moves her head from side to side, while Gisèle backs away in terror. It might be the scariest sequence in the film, one which could easily compare to any subsequent monster or vampire movie.

Later, Dreyer throws more camera tricks at us in increasingly imaginative ways. Allan dreams of a skeleton handing him a bottle of poison. A dead man’s face appears in the sky during a sudden thunderstorm. Dreyer includes camera moves that would fit right into any modern film. And in a sequence that reminded me of Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), Allan watches as his own body is sealed inside a coffin with a tiny square window for his apparently dead eyes to look out of.

If nothing else, Vampyr is an interesting artifact of cinema’s transitional era from silent to sound. Even though there is a conventional soundtrack and we hear people’s voices as they speak, a lot of expository information is provided via title cards and long looks at passages from a book of vampire lore. Given that the vampire mythology was then not as popular as it is today, I can forgive these beats that tend to bring the momentum to a halt.

While Nosferatu (1922) and the Bela Lugosi Dracula are much more famous, Vampyr is worth a look if you’re a horror fan. While it doesn’t involve the kind of fear factor I tend to expect as a child of the 1970s and ‘80s, it is nevertheless creepy as hell.

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Michael Cacoyannis
CAST: Irene Papas, Kostas Kozakos, Tatiana Papamoschou
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: [Not scored]

Director Michael Cacoyannis’ filmed adaptation of an ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides (Iphigenia in Aulis) does not immediately seem like the kind of film I would cotton to. I’ve never read any of the ancient Greek plays, nor have I ever read the Iliad or the Odyssey, though I am familiar with their plots…barely. This is not the kind of literature I have traditionally sought out, and I am content in my decisions. But a weird thing happened while watching Iphigenia. After a somewhat rocky start, I became enthralled with the language these characters were using. I don’t mean the Greek language itself, but the subtitles used in the English translation. I cannot say with any certainty how closely the subtitles mirror what is actually being said, but if they’re even just fairly accurate, then I now understand, at least to a small degree, why these plays have endured for millennia.

The story itself is one that has undergone countless interpretations and revisions over the course of history. King Agamemnon (Kostas Kozakos) and his vast army are ready to set sail for war against the kingdom of Troy, but their ships are stranded by a lack of wind. The seer Calchas informs Agamemnon that the winds will not blow until he sacrifices his eldest and favorite daughter, Iphigenia, to the goddess Artemis, who is withholding the winds because his men have offended her by killing a sacred deer. (And now I know where the title of The Killing of a Sacred Deer [2017] comes from…knowledge really IS power!)

Agamemnon agonizes over this decision, but his hand is forced by the eagerness of his troops to sack Troy; he’s afraid they’ll mutiny if he doesn’t go through with the sacrifice. He invents a pending marriage of Iphigenia to the great warrior Achilles to get Iphigenia to the encampment, but Clytemnestra (Irene Papas), her mother and Agamemnon’s queen, tags along unexpectedly. The rest of the movie churns with gloriously over-the-top melodrama, as Clytemnestra rages at Agamemnon, Iphigenia pleads for her life, and Achilles swears to defend Iphigenia at all costs. Agamemnon also argues with his brother, Menelaus, in a terrific scene during which they both change each other’s minds just a little too late. In the meantime, the winds never blow, the Greek troops grow restless, and the seer waits a little too eagerly for the chance to carry out the impending sacrifice.

It was during Agamemnon’s argument with Menelaus that I really started to perk up. This is not an easy scene to write or act out. Even with English subtitles, the sentence construction and syntax were occasionally overworked. I remember thinking at one point, “Huh…this is almost Shakespearean.” Except these scenes were written roughly two thousand years before Shakespeare was born. When that concept smacked me in the face, I started paying attention a little more to the style and the passion of the words. And I can’t explain it, but everything acquired a new dimension. It started to feel more like a play than a film. It became – at the risk of sounding a tad abstract – poetic.

That feeling permeated everything after that scene. Throwaway scenes felt more immediate, and really important scenes felt monumental. Sure, there is some overacting, particularly from the actor playing Achilles, but really, it’s called for in this scenario. When Clytemnestra promises her husband that, if he goes through with the sacrifice, she will accept his will but hate him for the rest of her life…I really felt it. And it’s not just the language, but the zealotry of the acting on display, especially from Irene Papas, who must have salivated at the chance to play this fiery woman, a proto-feminist who accepts her duty as a queen but never lets the king forget who truly rules the roost.

And then there’s Iphigenia herself, played by a waifish, almost elvish actress I’d never heard of before seeing this movie, Tatiana Papamoschou. In her first scenes, she’s almost too innocent to be taken seriously. It’s only when Iphigenia learns of her father’s plans to murder her for the sake of war that Papamoschou’s acting style allows her to really embody the character, and she delivers a speech late in the film that is, for lack of a better word, biblical. She accepts her fate and shames the men around her with the same surgical precision that can be found in the Gospels when Jesus accepts His own fate while dismantling the Pharisees with His words. There are monumental themes at play behind the scenes, and “normal” dialogue just would not feel adequate.

And then there’s that final shot. I did a tiny bit of research on the original play, and when you learn what historically happened to the main characters after the play’s events, that last look carries even more weight, foretelling decades of death and tragedy without saying a word. That a foreign film of a 2,200-year-old play was able to affect me this greatly was very pleasantly surprising to me. I doubt any newer version with today’s technology or modernized dialogue would affect me the same way. Iphigenia was a very pleasant, surprisingly effective discovery.

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Paul Schrader
CAST: Richard Pryor, Harvey Keitel, Yaphet Kotto, Ed Begley Jr.
MY RATING: 6/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 96% Certified Fresh

Blue Collar, the directorial debut of eminent screenwriter Paul Schrader, author of Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and American Gigolo (1980), is a film with a good story to tell. Not just good – important. This is an important story about loyalty, friendship, and duty to your family. Richard Pryor turns in a great performance, flexing his dramatic muscles as he seldom did, unfortunately. Schrader’s screenplay, co-written with his brother, Leonard, and using source material from Sydney A. Glass, pulls no punches regarding corruption within the powerful auto workers union. Character motivations are crystal clear from the opening scene to the final, cynical freeze frame.

But…but…I wish this story were contained in a film that made me care about these characters while the movie itself was playing. Intellectually, I see the value of the story. But as a moviegoer, I was less than moved. Schrader’s direction is competent, but the film moves from beat to beat with the energy of a sloth.

Zeke (Richard Pryor), Jerry (Harvey Keitel), and Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) are three working-class friends on the line at an automotive plant in Detroit. Their closeness is established in a bar scene that gave me hope for the rest of the film. It plays almost like an Altman film, with some overlapping dialogue, simple but clear direction, and conversations that give us an instant picture of who these three disparate characters are.

It’s unclear what Smokey’s financial situation is until later in the film, but Zeke has back-taxes to pay because he has declared too many dependents for the last three years, and Jerry has a teenage daughter who is so desperate for expensive braces that she tries making some herself, with exactly the kind of results you’d expect. Their union, which is supposed to help them, is a joke as far as they’re concerned; they can’t even fix Zeke’s broken locker door. So, after Zeke makes some observations at the union’s local office, he and his pals hatch a plan to rob the office vault.

What they find there drives the rest of the plot, so I’ll tread lightly from here on out. But the vault robbery is a good example of where the movie is lacking for me. The plan is simple and relatively risk-free, but I was hoping for at least SOME suspense during the robbery. A moment occurs when they’re about to be discovered, so they don their masks…but the masks that Zeke bought aren’t masks. They are, in no particular order, plastic vampire fangs and a funny hat, a pair of sunglasses covered by an American flag design, and a pair of googly-eye glasses – you know, the ones where the eyeballs are attached to the glasses by long springs? This crucial moment was ruined by the utter ridiculousness of their “costumes”; it felt like a transplant from some other Richard Pryor comedy about incompetent criminals.

After that, the screenplay feeds us important chunks of information, but there is no dynamic energy to the editing or the direction or something. It just felt…boring. Which is a shame because, again, there is a good story here. The union local blatantly lies about the contents of the vault after the robbery. An FBI agent tries to get Zeke, Jerry, or Smokey to spill what they know about union corruption, but they are too loyal to turn stool pigeon. Zeke has to make some hard choices in one of the movie’s better scenes towards the end. Smokey displays strength when threatened by union thugs, but he pays for it later. And Jerry just wants to do the right thing without anyone getting hurt.

But there was just zero energy to the narrative. I never felt carried along by the tide of the story. And without that forward momentum, every scene felt like it was just marking time before the next. To the degree that I understood the plight of these blue-collar workers, the movie just didn’t make me care enough to feel anything about it. I did feel empathy for Zeke, mostly due to Pryor’s powerful, angry performance, but even that empathy was turned on its ear by the time we got to the closing credits.

There is, I guess, something to be said about how the screenplay is constructed so that, at any given point, you could say that any of the three main characters are the true lead of the film. The story is truly balanced, and I give it credit where it’s due. I just wish the storytelling was more dynamic. Like I said, the day may come when my opinion of this movie will change.

Today is not that day.

…tomorrow’s not looking good, either.

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Sidney J. Furie
CAST: Stan Shaw, Andrew Stevens, James Canning, Michael Lembeck, Craig Wasson, Noble Willingham, R. Lee Ermey
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: [no score]

PLOT: In 1967, five young men undergo Marine boot camp training before being shipped out to Vietnam. Once they get there, the experience proves worse than they could have imagined.

[This review contains MILD SPOILERS concerning the film’s finale.]

I remember a short while ago, when I watched the original The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974) for the very first time. I remember asking myself, “Why did it take me so long to finally watch this movie? It’s fantastic!”

I’ve just had the same exact experience after watching Sidney J. Furie’s The Boys in Company C, which I think (someone correct me if I’m wrong) is the first attempt by Hollywood to provide a genuinely realistic portrayal of being a combat soldier during the Vietnam War. There are some obvious parallels to Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980), but this one was first out of the gate. Company C is just as visceral, just as riveting, and just as entertaining to watch as those other films. I have only seen a handful of Furie’s other films (including Iron Eagle [1986] and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace [1987]), so I can’t make a 100% informed opinion, but in my limited experience, this is far and away his masterpiece. It goes on the list of my favorite war movies ever made, and I think it’s a real shame that it appears to have been nearly forgotten.

Like so many other war films that came after it, The Boys in Company C begins at boot camp. More properly, it begins right outside the recruitment center (I think?) in late 1967, as several young men – boys, really – kiss their loved ones goodbye before getting on a bus. In a weird way, this sequence reminded me of the opening scene in The Breakfast Club (1985) as each student is dropped off for detention by their parents (except for Bender, of course). We are introduced to the boys who will become the key players: Washington, the angry black man (Stan Shaw); Pike, the country boy (Andrew Stevens); Foster, the aspiring writer (James Canning); Fazio, the Italian American from Brooklyn (Michael Lembeck); and Bisbee, the pacifist who is put on the bus in handcuffs (Craig Wasson). Stereotypes? Sure, I guess. But the screenplay doesn’t limit them to JUST their stereotypes. Washington, for example, starts out in camp as a guy who is looking out for himself, but after a surprisingly passionate speech from his drill instructor (R. Lee Ermey in his film debut!), he assumes the mantle of leadership and wears it exceedingly well.

We get the by-now standard scenes of the recruits getting their heads shaved, struggling through exhausting training runs, being called names that would’ve made George Carlin blush, and, eventually, graduation, where their reward for making it through boot camp is being assigned to combat duty in the ‘Nam. Their problems begin even before they disembark from their troop carrier when the Vietnamese port comes under artillery fire. It all sort of goes downhill from there.

The movie so far is nothing incredibly new, at least not to someone watching in the present day, but I had to keep reminding myself that this was probably the first time American audiences had seen a relatively honest representation of combat that wasn’t filtered through layers of self-censorship and jingoism. M*A*S*H (1970) did show us the bloody reality of surgery in the field, but it didn’t concern itself too much with actual combat – plus it was set in Korea, not Vietnam. A minor quibble.

There are a LOT of plot details I won’t relate here – the clueless captain, the “vital” convoy, Washington’s drug trafficking plans – because of the soccer subplot that reveals itself to be the film’s beating heart and real cry of protest. Much like Kilgore and the California surfer in Apocalypse Now (1979), the squad captain learns that Pike, the country boy, is pretty good with a soccer ball. There is a squad of elite Vietnamese military men who are also good at soccer. The captain dreams up a plan: put together a soccer team of American soldiers who will play the Vietnamese men in an exhibition match. If the American team wins, they will get a reprieve from combat and go on a “goodwill” tour of southeast Asia, including Tokyo and Bangkok.

Sounds good, right? But complications arise when, at the match, the American general watching the match is approached by his opposite number in the Vietnamese army. With the Americans leading at the half, the order is passed to the team: lose the match so the Vietnamese can save face in front of their own people. If they throw the match, they will still get reprieved from combat to go play mare matches against Vietnamese teams…and lose every time.

The Americans can’t believe it. Pike (and everyone else) wants to get back home, but he is afraid he can’t live with the shame of intentionally throwing a match, no matter what the big picture looks like. But the orders contain no ambiguity. Throw the match and go on tour, or win and go back to frontline combat the next day.

This is what the movie has been driving towards the whole time. The squad has to collectively decide what is more important: winning or surviving. I hope I don’t come off like an amateur historian here, but to me, that is the same question that could have been asked about the entire Vietnam conflict. As a country, we had a chance to ask ourselves: is winning this war worth the price we’re paying? How much more are we willing to spend, in money and lives? In the film, the squad is asked to balance that equation themselves on a smaller, but no less important, scale.

Is this about honor? Should they win the match to preserve their own personal integrity, even if it means going back to fighting in the jungle and maybe never making it back home? Or should they throw the match, increasing their odds of making it home alive and boosting morale for their Vietnamese allies, but leaving them with a stain on their integrity? Is this kind of thinking the reason the American government participated in possibly the most unpopular war in American history? Because losing face was worse than losing lives?

These are questions I would not presume to think I could answer. I know, of course, what I would have done in that situation, but I can only speculate because I have never been a soldier in a time of war. The Boys in Company C put me right there and allowed me to understand the whys and wherefores of each major character in a way that we’ve seen in every notable war film ever since. This is an incredibly important artifact in the history of war films, and it deserves to be seen by every movie fan.

[Trivia note: this movie was executive produced by none other than Raymond Chow, the man behind Enter the Dragon (1973) and nearly 200 other Hong Kong films, and virtually the entire movie, including the boot camp sequences, was filmed in the Philippines.]

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTORS: Dan Berk, Robert Olsen
CAST: Jack Quaid, Amber Midthunder, Ray Nicholson, Jacob Batalon
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 82% Certified Fresh

Because this machine has only one purpose, any criticisms accusing it of not doing something it wasn’t designed for are moot. You don’t eat a cheeseburger and then complain it didn’t taste like chateaubriand. I got what the movie’s goals were after 10-15 minutes – or, actually, even after just watching the red-band trailers. I went in with eyes wide open, and I was not disappointed. My only real complaint is that those same trailers gave away a little too much of the very best fight scenes in the film, ruining two of the best gags (the deep fryer and the ball-and-chain). But I forgive the trailer editors because the rest of the movie was so freaking entertaining.

Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid, whose father’s famous smile will haunt his face for the rest of his life) is an assistant bank manager living with a very real genetic disorder called Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, or CIP. He literally cannot feel pain, to the degree that he can’t even chew solid food because he could theoretically chew off bits of his tongue and not realize it. His obligatory meet-cute with the love interest, Sherry (Amber Midthunder), involves him spilling scalding hot coffee on his hands, but of course he doesn’t feel a thing. One thing leads to another, and they spend the night together. Apparently, Nate can’t feel pain, but pleasure is another story. (I thought that scene might include a homage to Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis’s love scene in Some Like It Hot [1959], but alas.)

Next day, as is revealed in the trailers, three robbers dressed as Santa Claus rob his bank, kill his boss, and take Sherry hostage. On impulse, he takes off after them in a stolen police car, which of course leads authorities to believe he’s in on the case. This also leads to the first of several jaw-dropping fight scenes, not because they’re insanely choreographed like a Jackie Chan movie, but because the physical violence shown on screen goes beyond anything I can remember seeing before in a fight scene. Maybe Oldboy (2003) comes close.

Fair warning: if you are squeamish, this movie is simply not for you. Just in the first fight scene alone, we see Nate get kicked, punched, seared by a scalding hot frying pan, and burned horrifically, which results in him wearing a bandage (and a disturbingly realistic prosthetic) on his hand for the rest of the movie. The comedy comes from equal parts watching as Nate gets injured and simply powers through it, and from cringing and cursing and covering your face as those injuries occur.

I won’t give anything else away. The movie does include an intriguing story development that I did not see coming. My fellow Cinemaniac, Anthony, also made an interesting observation. It was unusual to see a clearly comic film featuring so many actual deaths: multiple cops murdered after the bank robbery, a death inside the bank itself, and the body count keeps adding up as Nate gets closer and closer to rescuing Sherry. Nate himself contributes (minimally) to the body count, but it’s mostly the bad guys killing anyone who gets in their way. Is it possibly to balance almost slapstick physical comedy with so many, almost gratuitous deaths?

For myself, I didn’t think so. I look at a movie like Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), with umpteen deaths, but it’s a movie that’s clearly having fun with the kung-fu genre, which requires lots of death. Novocaine felt to me like a riff on the John Wick movies. John Wick mows through LEGIONS of bad guys, getting punched and shot and sometimes falling from four-story buildings onto vans and just getting up, brushing himself off, and moving to the next fight scene. Nathan Caine does the same thing, just not with legions of bad guys, but you’re constantly aware that he could be killed at any minute. That kept the stakes raised, so I didn’t feel like I was watching a video game come to life.

Novocaine might be the most fun I’ve had at the movies in 2025 so far. I laughed a lot, I CRINGED a lot (usually while I was laughing), and uttered more curse words at the screen than I have in a long time (usually “JEEEsus!” or “Oh SHIT”). The story doesn’t quite reinvent the wheel, but the execution is superb. Just to restate my warning from earlier: if you don’t like graphic onscreen violence, stay away. Everyone else, enjoy!

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Robert Altman
CAST: Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, Janice Rule
MY RATING: 6/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 83% Certified Fresh

That was me after watching 3 Women and reading about it a little. I didn’t get it while I was watching it, and I still don’t get it after I learned more about it.

Robert Altman’s 3 Women is a dreamlike psychodrama that explores concepts of identity, self-discovery, and, I guess, femininity that reminded me, oddly enough, of the Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer (1968), mostly because a lot of it centers around water, but also because of the similar atmosphere created by both films: creepy and reluctant to give up its secrets. There are numerous shots that are filtered through one of those store-bought wave machines that were so prevalent in the ‘70s and ‘80s, so the shot achieves a surreal effect that’s hard to describe. It feels like foreshadowing, and in one respect it is, but for the most part it’s just there to either illustrate someone’s mental state or…I’m not sure what else. I’ve had a day to think about this, and I’m no closer to interpreting exactly what those shots are supposed to mean.

Anyway. We meet two women, Millie Lammoreaux (an impossibly young Shelley Duvall) and Pinky Rose (an even younger-looking Sissy Spacek). We’ll get to the third woman later. They both work at a physical therapy center, assisting elderly patients as they walk through a pool or sit in a hot tub – more water. Millie is a wannabe sophisticate who is very friendly on the outside, but she doesn’t seem to have any actual friends. Her co-workers and her neighbors at her hotel do their best to ignore her and her endless patter about articles in McCall’s and what she’s cooking for dinner tonight. Pinky, whose real name is Mildred, is a young woman whose emotional maturity seems to have peaked around the age of fifteen. She is immediately awestruck by Millie and contrives to be as close to her as possible at all times. It’s essentially hero worship, though Millie hasn’t given her anything to really worship aside from being…herself. They will eventually become roommates.

Millie is fond of yellow; Pinky dresses in, you guessed it, pink. Millie will talk to just about anyone; Pinky is shy and introverted. Millie has a large closet full of clothes; Pinky seems to own only one outfit, including underpants. They are as opposite as it’s possible to be. These points are drummed home in scene after scene. The two women frequent a themed saloon called Dodge City, where we will eventually meet the third woman, Willie Hart (Janice Rule). Willie, who is pregnant, communicates with glares. She also paints these amazing, disturbing murals featuring what appear to be harpies or something like the mythological Furies.

I could go on with the story, but why bother? This is not a movie about a story. This is a movie about conveying a mood. Altman literally conceived of this movie in a dream, pitched it to 20^th Century Fox almost on a whim, and insisted on shooting without a finished script. The pervasive mood of the film is one of suspense and foreboding. There are a pair of twins who lurk in the background of scenes of Millie and Pinky at work. Foreboding. The musical score is atonal and creepy. Foreboding. Pinky starts to read Millie’s diary. Foreboding. You may have noticed that the last part Millie’s last name, Lammoreaux, is phonetically similar to Pinky’s last name, Rose. Foreboding.

So, okay, Altman’s movie is about creating a mood. To that degree, he succeeded. It’s nothing if not creepy. Events occur that were surprising. Mystery abounds. But…there came a point about halfway where it all became repetitive to me. How many scenes of Millie being snubbed socially do we need to get the idea that Millie is not popular? How many times do we need those shots that are filtered through the wave machine? How many lingering panning shots do we need of those murals? I’m just saying. I got the point after five each. Call me crazy.

And when we get to the final sequence…man, if I wasn’t confused before, I was completely at sea when the credits rolled. I’ve seen some open-ended movies before, some I loved (Mulholland Drive, 2001), some not so much (The Lobster, 2015). When it’s done right, I find it exhilarating to see a film that trusts a viewer’s intelligence so much that it doesn’t spoon-feed you. But 3 Women gave me an ending that is so open to interpretation that it backfired. Because it could mean so many different things, it ultimately meant nothing and left me feeling a little cheated.

I get it. This is not that kind of movie, by Altman’s own admission. Fair enough. I give it 6 out of 10 based purely on the craftsmanship and sheer chutzpah of the film, and because the performances by Duvall and Spacek are worth the price of admission. (And I just wanna say, Duvall may have won Best Actress at Cannes, but my vote would have gone to Spacek, who is utterly convincing as a woman-child in a state of arrested development.)

But I cannot really call this movie “entertaining.” I don’t mean in the sense that I didn’t laugh or cry or whatever. I just mean that watching it felt like a homework assignment, not an escape. I never connected to it emotionally, so I ultimately didn’t care what was happening, or why. I have enjoyed so many of Altman’s other films, but this one might have just become my least favorite Altman film that I’ve seen, finally replacing [name redacted so I don’t get doxxed].