The year’s most Spielbergian movie not directed by Spielberg, an intense mix of Jurassic Park-inspired rampage and small-scale E.T. family drama. Some modern movies venerate the 1980s without fully understanding that decade’s rude but upbeat vibe, and then there’s The End of Oak Street, a deeply subversive summer blockbuster about realistic feathered velociraptors eating screaming Reagan-era suburbanites. It’s great fun.

This movie embodies the sentimental/mean-spirited shlock popular at the time, like Gremlins and Poltergeist. Oscar-winner Anne Hathaway stars with a doofus-y, bewigged Ewan McGregor as an unhappily married couple: she’s trapped, he’s emotionally unavailable. It turns out, however, that mom and dad are pretty good at fighting dinosaurs. Director David Robert Mitchell isn’t interested in plot; he just plops an All-American neighborhood in a prehistoric jungle. The action is unrelenting, almost pitiless; legs are bitten off. Our focus is on Hathaway and McGregor’s family, though. I cheered for the dog.

RANDOM RANKING

Top 5 Anne Hathaway Movies

5. ‘The Idea Of You’ (2024)

4. ‘Colossal’ (2016)

3. ‘Les Misérables’ (2012)

2. ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ (2006)

1. ‘Rachel Getting Married’ (2008)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Tony’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Baby Doll’ (1956)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Straight Time’ (1979)

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Gunfighter’ (1950)

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Rules Of The Game’ (1939)

Advice For Men: What Would Coach Taylor Do?

Carroll Baker shimmers as the title character: an immature, coquettish 19-year-old married off by her father to a down-on-his-luck, middle-aged cotton gin owner in Elia Kazan’s second feature film collaboration with playwright Tennessee Williams. Their first, A Streetcar Named Desire, became a Pulitzer-winning classic and made brooding Marlon Brando a superstar.

Baby Doll is not a Great Work of Drama. It’s almost a Williams parody: it’s trashy and sweaty. There’s a fiesty, lonely woman, a sexual awakening, a swarthy brute, and syrupy Southern accents.

Karl Malden is wild-eyed as Archie, a horny loser whose mansion is a ruin emptied of furniture by debt collectors. Archie repels Baby Doll. He’s driven by desperation and sexual frustration to burn down the gin mill of a rival played by Eli Wallach, in his Hollywood debut, hilariously miscast as a hot-blooded Sicilian whose idea of revenge is cucking ol’ Archie. Miscast, but a hoot.

In director Jane Schoenbrun’s erotic/confounding/exhilarating horror-slash-meta-comedy Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Gillian Anderson is a former ‘final girl’ who waits in the woods like the witch in Hansel and Gretel for Hannah Einbinder’s earnest young director, hired to reboot B-movie-within-a-movie Camp Miasma. Cinematic references include Wes Anderson, David Cronenberg, Friday the 13th. Instead of a hockey-mask-wearing mama’s boy hacking horny teens, TSADACM’s killer is an avenging gender-fluid slasher with a helmet and spear.

TSADACM is more than a tongue-in-cheek mashnote to lurid midnight movies; it’s a tumbling dryer of bloody psychosexual madness. Anderson and Einbinder are fearless as age-inappropriate lovers/creative collaborators who bond over chicken nugget dipping sauces. Art is life, life is art. Schoenbrun transmutes their affection for the shock culture that shaped their imagination growing up into a unique Pepto-Bismol-colored vision of queerness. I can’t think of any other American directors who are as boldly introspective.

150 Word Review Flashback: ‘I Saw The TV Glow’ (2024)

There are two secrets to a good Spider-Man movie. Number one: long scenes of our red-and-blue pajama-wearing hero swinging through the canyons of Manhattan. Number two: casting the right actor as Ol’ Web-head. Tobey was genuine, goofy. Garfield was sinewy, emotional. Tom Holland? He’s the Lawrence Olivier of Spider-Men. Effortless. Perfect. Born to play Peter Parker.

He’s the best thing about Spider-Man: Brand New Day, along with Zendaya and Jacob Batalon. Holland’s Spidey is exactly as he was imagined in Lee and Ditko’s original comics: a smartass/sweetheart in over his head, just trying to do the right thing.

This sequel (the third!) is a heartstring-plucking delight specifically because audiences already care about Peter/Mary Jane/Ned. But do they care as much about the Scorpion? The Red Hand? The Hulk? Jon Bernthal’s The Punisher, a homicidal vigilante? Or [SPOILER], a powerful telekinetic that connects to more valuable Marvel IP? Sure! Yes! Thwip!

Tony works because you don’t have to know anything about the late Anthony Bourdain to grow attached to the title character, a selfish little shit. Director Matt Johnson and his co-writers don’t wrestle with the chef’s considerable culinary/literary legacy. This is not “Bourdain: The Myth, The Legend.” It’s a bildungsroman about one summer that changed a young man’s life.

Dominic Sessa’s messy Tony is likably unlikeable. Like any (cliché) poet, he’s a romantic (creep) inspired by a woman. He chases her to a seaside vacation town where she’s working. He is broke and trapped in a lie: his family believes he’s in New York on a writer’s fellowship. Tony’s drunkenness and desperation lead him to a seafood restaurant run by an aging chef, a vibrant/crusty Antonio Banderas. He’s offered a job in a kitchen of misfits, and the biopic becomes two love stories: Boy meets girl and boy meets cooking.

Director Jean Renoir knew something in the 1930s that’s still very relevant: the rich can get away with almost anything. And they will party and distract themselves as the rest of society collapses around them. The Rules of the Game is a dark comedy of manners about decadent French aristocrats amusing themselves during a weekend of hunting in the country, each of them pampered by an army of servants. Outside their champagne bubble, another world war looms.

Nora Gregor’s Christine is bored by all the men in her life. Marcel Dalio’s Robert, her faithless, fabulously wealthy husband, is also blase about his debauched life. Renoir is wonderfully shlubby as one of the couple’s many two-faced hangers-on. Julian Carette plays a wily poacher who talks his way into the family. There are betrayals! Secrets! Murder! One scene captures a real pheasant hunt, a massacre. The laughs stop. There is only death.

Portrait of an ex-con as a forty-something-year-old man. Dustin Hoffman gives a nervy performance as Max Dembo, a career thief freed after six years for armed robbery. Max wants love/respect/etc, but the system has him on a leash.

The cast in Straight Time, director Ulu Grosbard’s sun-drenched street drama, includes fresh-faced greats like Gary Busey, Kathy Bates, and Harry Dean Stanton, as a veteran crook sick of living an honest life. Theresa Russell is Jenny, a temp worker. She gives Max a chance at a job, and later, says “yes” to a date. Russell is gentle, a little naive, but strong-willed. She sees goodness in Max, but he’s an old dog struggling to learn new tricks. In one heartbreaking scene, Max is suddenly arrested by his grinning parole officer (a menacing, sadistic M. Emmet Walsh). What was Max’s crime? Doesn’t matter. The state giveth, and taketh away for any reason.

Millard Mitchell’s Marshal Mark Stratton gave up the gun and settled down. But it’s too late for his old friend, Gregory Peck’s haunted Jimmy Ringo, a tired gunfighter who spends his days hunted, unable to have a peaceful drink without some greenhorn daring him to draw, which he does, faster than any other man. Ringo’s time has run out, and all he wants is to see the woman he loves and his son, maybe for the last time.

The Gunfighter is a beautiful, morally clear-eyed movie about regret and responsibility. Director Henry King’s West is a lonely, unfriendly, small town surrounded by uncivilized desert. Karl Malden stars as the local barkeep who met Ringo once. Helen Westcott is a single mom and schoolteacher; Peggy, Ringo’s great love, is a woman with a deep sadness who knows her ex-beau is doomed. The warmth between the leads—Mitchell, Peck, and Westcott—is almost familial.

I had dinner with old friends—a married couple I am quite fond of—and during a long conversation full of laughter and honesty, I was told to watch the Academy Award-nominated Barbara Streisand-directed romantic drama The Prince of Tides, starring Barbara Streisand and Nick Nolte. And so I did.

Exactly how The Prince of Tides came up isn’t that important. Maybe I was talking about therapy? Or musicals and she brought up Yentl? I just know that at one point, he looked at me and said, “You have got to see The Prince of Tides.” He emphasized the word “got.”

So later that night I rented the movie and watched it.

In 1991, there were two movies about psychiatrists helping Southerners with bad childhoods who weren’t actually their patients. The first was Silence of the Lambs. The second, The Prince of Tides, is a movie about a hunky good ol’ boy who travels to filthy New York City to help his sister’s therapist figure out why she tried to end her own life, only to fall in love with that therapist. I saw only one of those movies, and it was the one about serial killers (Silence of the Lambs, FYI)

Anthony Hopkins’ iconic performance as educated man-eater Hannibal Lecter earned him his first Oscar. Barbara Streisand was not nominated for her performance in The Prince of Tides, and she should have been. She also wasn’t nominated for director, which she should have been, too. Anyway, in 1991 there were two strong therapy archetypes in pop culture: homicidal and fabulous.

The legendary singer-actor-filmmaker stars as Dr. Susan Lowenstein in The Prince of Tides, a big-city psychiatrist. Brilliant. Sensitive. Sexy. She is charming and confident and will make you coffee in her fancy Manhattan office.

Barbara Streisand is the undisputed star of The Prince of Tides even though her character exists only to help Nolte’s character grow, and also to sleep with him and fall in love with him. She is just a prince charming sent to help Nolte’s damsel.

The Prince of Tides is based on Pat Conroy’s bestselling 1986 novel, a celebrated work of pop literature about an American family’s secrets. The movie streamlines the book’s narrative, turning it into a very mature romance between two middle-aged people, with some thoughtful psychobabble snuck in. The therapy dramatized in The Prince of Tides is simplistic and unrealistic, but that’s not the point —a shrink’s couch is a popular and efficient plot point delivery vehicle.

Without it, we’d never learn the awful secret that bonds Nolte’s character and his troubled siblings. And it’s pretty bad.

Nick Nolte’s character, Tom Wingo, is an idealized manly man, a Southern-fried football coach who is cool with his sister’s gay neighbor (a thinly written role played respectfully by comedy legend George Carlin), and her Jewish therapist. The Prince of Tides sells one of my favorite flavors of masculinity: the man with the hard candy shell. For years I thought I was tough on the outside but sensitive on the inside. It turns out I was only half-right.

I’d call Nolte’s Tom Wingo a relic of another time if men weren’t still wrestling with their mental health. Wingo scoffs at therapy from the get-go, and the only reason he opens up to Streisand's character is that she’s trying to solve the mystery of his sister’s suicide attempt, so he plays her game of trauma hide-and-seek. The climax of the movie is his emotional breakdown as he reveals a horrible event in his family’s life that scarred him, his sister, and brother. He then collapses in Dr. Lowenstein’s arms as she whispers, “Cry, cry.”

One of my favorite scenes is a macho confrontation between Wingo and Lowenstein’s horrible, snobbish, faithless husband, a professional violinist. After mocking Nolte’s southern heritage during a penthouse party, Nolte strikes back by threatening to throw his million-dollar Stradivarius off the balcony. This act of unboundaried aggression moves Streisand so much that she goes home with Nolte. I do love a swaggering dick-swinging contest between a redneck and a goody-goody during a fancy dinner party.

As someone who grew up in the South and who moved to New York City as soon as he could, I very much enjoyed the cartoonish Southern and NYC stereotypes in The Prince of Tides. Nolte’s drawl is fickle, showing up whenever it wants, like a cat. But, otherwise, his trademark “lion with a sore throat” roar remains blessedly intact.

It’s obvious that Lowenstein is attracted to his cornpone ways, though. His manners, his humor, and the way he teaches her spoiled son how to play football in Central Park, like a father figure. The relationship between Streisand and Nolte’s characters isn’t completely unethical. He’s never technically her patient. His trauma is his sister’s trauma. He’s not on the couch for himself. He’s being a hero.

To Nolte’s Wingo, therapy is emasculating. It’s what women do; they talk. A real man is strong enough to wrestle his pain, put it in a headlock, lock it in the dungeon of his subconscious, and then learn to ignore its howls. The fact that he’s not her patient makes it easier for Wingo to surrender to Lowenstein. It also helps that he ends up having sex with her in a pile of pillows next to a roaring fire.

Men turn to the women in their lives with their problems. They open up to those they are already sexually and physically intimate with and dump their fears and pain on them. Open communication is a key part of any relationship, but a romantic partner is not a mental health professional. That’s a lot of responsibility and… well… work. Wingo’s fling with Lowenstein doesn’t last — he returns to his philandering wife, and I’m assuming he never returns to therapy.

Lowenstein has cured him, with a mix of traditional talk therapy and coitus.

Streisand isn’t given enough credit as a director. The Prince of Tides is a well-made drama, and the opening scenes depicting Nolte’s childhood on an island off the coast of South Carolina are dreamlike and desolate. I have seen Yentl, of course, and my opinion is simple: It could have used more songs. Otherwise, for its time, it was a very smart rom-com about religion, education, and gender.

But The Prince of Tides? It’s mawkish. Melodramatic. Nolte is charming, and the scenes where he begrudgingly falls in love with the hustle and bustle of New York are entertaining. The movie comes to life whenever Babs is on screen, of course, but that’s because nothing happens without her penetrating questions. It’s an excellent timepiece and a reminder not only of Streisand’s raw star power but her talent behind the camera.

The movie also ends with my second favorite final words in a movie, right after Citizen Kane’s immortal “rosebud.” Nolte has been unburdened — his childhood wounds healed by the Jewish therapist — and is happily reunited with his family, but in a voiceover, he admits that he still carries a certain someone in his heart. There are times when he is driving home that these words come to him in a whisper: “Lowenstein, Lowenstein.”

Bwah-ha-ha. I love it.

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Invite’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Sherman’s March’ (1986)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Masters of the Universe’ (2026)

Advice For Men: Find your team

Oh, thank god, a grounded sex comedy about messy middle-aged adults. There’s a loose and improvisational energy fueling The Invite, a one-set, one-night trainwreck about would-be swingers. But director Olivia Wilde’s four-hander is never self-indulgent or, even worse, boring. She keeps this runaway train on the rails (but just barely).

Wilde also stars as one half of a failing marriage, a high-strung stay-at-home mom. Seth Rogan gets all the funny lines as a terminally unhappy stoner. They’re a pair of exposed nerves. Ed Norton and Penelope Cruz play their upstairs neighbors, invited, last minute, for a get-together. Rogan’s character resents their noisy sex. Wilde’s is desperate for connection with anyone but her husband.

Norton and Cruz are unbearably charismatic as enlightened lovers with an offer. Who wouldn’t say yes? The Invite is a rare and irreverent conversation about desire, aging, and loss. The laughs are uncomfortable, but so is life.

In the early-to-mid 80s, filmmaker Ross McElwee was preparing to direct a documentary about Civil War General Sherman’s ‘March to the Sea’ military campaign and its lingering effects on the South. But before he could begin filming, he was dumped by his girlfriend. This sudden heartbreak sends him into a personal crisis, and he turns the camera on himself, his relationships with women, and his fears of nuclear war while meandering the South. The result is a droll, reflective masterpiece about loneliness.

McElwee is emotionally adrift. Melancholy and horny. He hangs out with his caring, slightly judgemental sister and an aspiring actress, and is briefly involved with a linguist living on a remote island off the coast. He stalks Burt Reynolds. We meet Charleen, an eccentric poet, teacher, and mentor, desperate to play matchmaker. In between awkward (and funny) vignettes, he mentions Sherman. McElwee is compassionate to everyone but McElwee.

This sci-fi action movie—Hollywood’s second attempt to turn Mattel’s classic ‘80s barbarian space dolls into a blockbuster—is a little bit of everything and not enough of what works.

Masters of the Universe is a cynical cash grab with an Amazon Prime delivery-truck cameo that must have delighted head honcho Jeff Bezos. It’s also very silly, a winking, interdimensional Cinderfella story that mixes eye-pleasing practical effects with flat yet colorful CGI.

There are a few naughty jokes that feel out of place, but a few more wouldn’t have hurt. Nicholas Galitzine is a boyish, relatable, musclebound He-Man. Idris Elba is bored but upbeat as an armored mentor. Cyborg Trap-Jaw is a toy come to life. Jared Leto is literally faceless as the archvillain Skeletor. This blue-skinned character has a skull for a face. He’s also a campy bitch.

By the power of Greyskull, this bomb could be a future cult classic.

1 Long Essay: ‘He-Man Is My Gender Icon’

The (only?) flaw in director Christopher Nolan’s earnest, spare-no-expense, anti-war adaptation of the ancient epic poem The Odyssey is familiar: he’s a deeply sentimental, serious-minded storyteller trapped in the body of a brilliant, technically proficient popcorn-movie mythmaker.

He desperately wants his audiences to weep. The loyal old dog almost wrecked me. Matt Damon gives a career-best performance as Odysseus, a middle-aged warrior lost at sea who isn’t as clever as he thinks. The practical and in-camera effects are transporting: a cyclops, armored giants, a witch sculpting men into pigs. Anne Hathaway is powerful as Penelope, the brave wife who waits. Samantha Morton, Elliot Page, and Zendaya are striking and vulnerable. The Odyssey is intoxicating at times. Occasionally apocalyptic. The fall of Troy is a tragedy. The final act is pure Jason Bourne and the Argonauts. Nolan dramatizes Western Civilization’s timeless values. Be kind. Show mercy. Don’t piss off the gods.

RANDOM RANKING

Top 5 Christopher Nolan movies [UPDATED]

5. ‘The Prestige’ (2006)

4. ‘Tenet’ (2020)

3. ‘Dunkirk’ (2017)

2. ‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)

1. ‘Interstellar’ (2014)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Maddie’s Secret’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Evil Dead Burn’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Sword of Doom’ (1966)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Desk Set’ (1957)

Advice For Men: Always have a roll of duct tape handy

New 150 Word Review: ‘Ticket Of No Return’ (1979)

150 Word Review Flashback: ‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

For decades, television networks produced low-budget full-length dramas about modern problems, like drug addiction or domestic abuse. Actor John Early’s directorial debut, Maddie’s Secret, is a mostly sincere, sometimes silly homage to gauzy, schmaltzy made-for-TV movies.

Early is Maddie, a blonde sweetheart catapulted to internet fame at the food-obsessed content farm where she washes dishes for influencers. Maddie’s passion is food; she loves her devoted husband and is oblivious to the advances of her co-worker/bestie, a swaggering, scene-stealing Kate Berlant. There’s an extended Girl, Interrupted riff, too.

Early doesn’t play Maddie for laughs; the wig is fake, the pathos genuine. His performance recalls John Waters’ muse, Divine, who was always outrageous but grounded. As a director, he’s patient. The comedy is straight-faced. But that doesn’t mean his light satire is toothless: Early mocks social media, queer allyship, and Millennial culture. There is no wink. Maddie isn’t perfect. No one is.

A nameless woman, beautiful and fashionable, buys a one-way plane ticket to West Berlin with a plan: drink. Cognac. Champagne. Large stines of beer.

Director Ulrike Ottinger’s atmospheric German-language dramedy is a sort of urban travelogue of loneliness, as our hero, the Drinker, dressed in colorful, clownish, haute couture, gets in and out of taxis and glug-glugs her way between cafes and casinos.

She coolly regards Berlin’s various nightcrawlers, takes in a homeless woman, and ignoes/avoids a Greek chorus of well-dressed sociologists on vacation who are constantly discussing feminism, alcoholism, and cultural trends. Cold War-era West Berlin is also a character: grimy, funky, dangerous.

The Drinker is played by an aloof and mischievous Tabea Blumenschein, painter, actress, and actual West Berlin legend. There are moments of sublime weirdness and long stretches of head-scratching nonsense. Ticket of No Return is cerebral/ridiculous/cynical. Freedom is just another word for drinking yourself to death.

More West Berlin: ‘The American Friend’ (1977)

Even More West Berlin: ‘Possession’ (1981)

The funniest, most humane movie made about A.I. came out almost 70 years ago, a bubbly rom-com starring screwball vets Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as a network TV research chief with a beautiful mind and the irascible but charming “methods engineer” hired to replace her with a giant computer brain.

Walter Lang’s adaptation of William Marchant’s play Desk Set sticks to the corporate library, where Hepburn and her good-girl Fridays answer questions from employees across the company. They’re like Living Google Search Engines. Katharine Hepburn was one of a kind; brilliant and down-to-earth. She’s naturally, effortlessly likable. Spencer Tracy was one of those actors who never looked like he was working hard. His every expression radiated compassion and intelligence. They’re one of the great oddball Hollywood couples. Their banter zings. Desk Set is about the modern conflict between technology and people. Are we replaceable? Because Hepburn and Tracy weren’t.

More Hepburn: ‘Bringing Up Baby’ (1938)

More Spencer Tracey: ‘Bad Day at Black Rock’ (1955)

A society on the verge of an apocalypse. Director Kihachi Okamoto’s foreboding, hopeless The Sword of Doom takes place during the slow-motion fall of the once-powerful shogunate in 1860s Japan. Samurai are drunken mercenaries. Lords prey on young women. A few men have honor, but not many.

Ryunosuke Tsukue is a pitiless swordsman who murders an old man for sport the moment we meet him. Tsukue is a sociopath with cold, dead eyes who does not care about his wife or his baby. He has no moral code. He kills and sips sake. The cast is superb, from Yoko Naito’s bright, hopeful courtesan Omatsu to Ryunosuke’s wife, a vulnerable, strong-willed Michiyo Aratama. But this is Tatsuya Nakadai’s movie; his gaze is demonic. Hypnotizing. There’s a hungry mass of evil inside him trying to crawl out through his eyeballs. The sword fights are swift ballets of butchery. It snows in hell.

I’m sure Evil Dead Burn is a meaningful, blood-soaked horror meditation on themes like abuse and generational trauma to some horror fans. But to me, it felt like private equity bought this franchise: it’s a slick, hollow approximation of what was, without any of the demented charms that made the Sam Raimi originals fun.

I am not squeamish, but the gore—both the real-life splatters and CGI corpses—is excessive. Sloppy, but not in a good way, like oversauced hot wings. There’s an art to gross-out shlock that this installment lacks. (There is a gratuitous tongue-kissing scene between two demonic “deadites” that is superb, and I wish there had been more of that chaotic energy.) Director Sébastien Vaniček earns his paycheck while trying to say something about family. Souheila Yacoub is a perfectly adequate final girl, a poor French woman trapped with her American in-laws in a Texas Chainsaw-esque house. Quelle horreur!

150 Word Review Flashback: ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ (1974)

Obsessed, but not at first. I was initially underwhelmed by Obsession’s muddy cinematography and tiptoe pacing. My patience was rewarded, or punished, depending on how you view writer-director Curry Barker’s harrowing meditation on rape culture. Be careful what you wish for, or else.

Michael Johnston should win the Oscar for Best Incel. He plays a mopey weasel wrecked by unrequited love. Inde Navarrette is the object of his affection. She is the villain and the victim. Cursed, abused, smiling. Navarrette does to emotional dysregulation what Psycho did to showers.

Barker mines a generation’s insecurities and fears about dating and sex, power and consent. He borrows from, and subverts, 80s classics like Big and Fatal Attraction. He’s drawn to massive Ari Aster-esque head traumas, too. There are a few offbeat/funny moments, but Obsession isn’t drowning in irony. It is a proud feel-bad movie: there’s an underlying sadness that verges on despair.

New 150 Word Review: ‘Supergirl’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘I Love Boosters’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘The Death Of Robin Hood’ (2026)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Giant’ (1956)

New 150 Word Review: ‘Gone In 60 Seconds’ (1974)

Advice For Men: Grow a mustache

Superhero movies shouldn’t be taken seriously. Supergirl wants to be taken seriously, but c’mon. When we meet the title character, she is on a multi-planet bender, celebrating her 23rd birthday with her dog, Krypto.

Milly Alcock is dashing as our traumatized hero, but director Craig Gillespie doesn’t seem to have any confidence in her. There are two plots: “kill the pirates who killed my father” and “someone poisoned my dog.” Jason Momoa drops in as fan-favorite Lobo, a cigar-chomping, wisecracking bounty hunter who should be more fun but isn’t. Alock has the charisma, but this is a movie drained of joy by either suits or a mediocre screenplay, or both. There’s a sex trafficking subplot that is timely, I suppose, but also exploitative. The needledrops are A.I. (they must be.) On the positive side, there are a ton of non-CGI aliens—let’s hear it for weird rubber masks and puppets.

Best of 150 Word Review: ‘Superman’ (2025)