Tuner (2025)

Daniel Roher's Tuner is surprisingly good. It’s a strong thriller with sound as its central element. The sound in Tuner is amazing. It’s a storytelling element that really allows the audience to identify with the protagonist and experience his pain and curiosity and vulnerability. I loved the music, too. Will Bates composed a lot of music for this. Marius de Vries is responsible for other music, I think: it’s not a score per se—the soundtrack is more jazz inflected than anything else—but he’s done thrilling work with the diegetic music in this film. 

I thought this was very well cast too. Dustin Hoffman is the perfect person to cast in this, and Leo Woodall (who I don’t think I’ve seen in anything before) is really excellent. 

The all important feature here though is the screenplay. In many ways it is conventional, but the writing is so good and the characters so well realized, that the whole thing feels novel.

The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026)

I checked my watch so many times.

The Mandalorian and Grogu was interesting for several minutes—maybe a quarter of an hour or so—when the helmet was off; we finally got some emotion from the protagonist. A short list of other things I liked:

The monsters in that pit were cool, as was the poisonous pink Cthulhu thing, plus it was in the water.

I liked Jeremy Allen White's character for the most part, although he has no depth whatsoever: I think he said "I'm not like my dad" about five separate times. 

There is a short but cool chase sequence after he escapes the fighting pit.

Mostly, though, this feels like something all of us have seen before. And if the Mandalorian was supposed to be somehow morally ambiguous (I thought I read that somewhere), what we get in this film is very, very clear good vs. very, very clear evil.

Also, PG-13 movies are an outrage. This movie is filled with violence from start to finish. Some of it is committed for almost no reason at all. The Mandalorian shoots up a bar to get someone's attention, killing (one presumes) many people. But it's PG-13 so we never see anyone suffer or die, we can just enjoy all the shooting and punching and kicking and stabbing without reckoning with the pain that might cause to the actual bodies of humans and animals. Fun for the whole family!

Disclosure Day (2026)

Disclosure Day is really good for a while. It’s mysterious and a little quirky, and Emily Blunt is stellar. Then the movie takes a really dumb turn toward religion, “empathy”, and saccharine Spielberg nonsense. This starts during Jane and Daniel’s discussion about whether people will stop believing in gods if they know there are aliens (pro tip: lots of people already don’t believe in gods), it continues with Jane’s unsubtle stigmata and her asinine call to her nun-friend, and it's truly brought home with an absurd monologue Colman Domingo is forced to deliver about how empathy is the solution to WWIII, an idea that Spielberg apparently actually believes. 

It’s a shame this went south, because I was having a good time for a while. In many ways, I think this is a more personal film for Spielberg than The Fabelmans. Disclosure Day actually explores the big questions that Spielberg has been asking in his films since the late 1970s. To wit: 

• How would knowing about alien life affect how we see one another? 
• Could it stop violence on earth or would it exacerbate it? 
• Would it take the place of a belief in a higher power? 
• Is believing in aliens the same thing as believing in a god? 
• How do we reconcile feelings of faith, certainty we know in our bodies, with the skepticism of those around us? 

These are deeply personal questions for Spielberg, and so I think he’s made quite a personal movie. I wish those questions were of more interest to me… If they were, I might have enjoyed where his movie went a bit more than I did. 

Side note: An actress named Courtney Grace plays a New York NBC anchor in the film’s final act who tells the world about what she’s seeing in the footage, and she gives an incredible performance. Cast her in everything, please.

Supergirl (2026)

Supergirl isn't hateful or anything; indeed Milly Alcock is quite charming, but the script is absolute nonsense. Even the real stakes that the movie sets up—Supergirl's dog will die in three days if she doesn't get the antidote—are obviously not a real motivation for the film's protagonist, since she clearly could have gotten the antidote numerous times from the dozens of brigands she beats up (it's preposterous there there would be only one vial of the stuff being carried by the main baddie).

Unfortunately, Supergirl is also another offensively PG-13 violence-fest, in which hundreds of acts of violence are committed yet not one drop of blood appears onscreen. At one point, Kara even touches her head and says "I'm bleeding": in fact, she is not. There's no blood to see here. People don't actually get hurt in this movie. They just stop fighting. It's violence without consequences.

Matthias Schoenaerts is excellent as always, and Jason Momoa is fun. I also really liked Emily Piggford in a small role. And I love me some David Krumholtz, who speaks Kryptonian for his entire part.

He-Man

Masters of the Universe is so much better than it ought to be. The trick that Travis Knight's film manages to pull off is that it takes an ironic view toward He-Man and his universe while at the same time it revels in it. It's a clever ploy that doesn't always work, but works most of the time. The film, for example, constantly refers to the entire world of Eternia or whatever it's called as something invented by a ten-year-old. He-Man, Goddess Lady, Ram-Man, Fisto... it ends up being a series of very funny dad-jokes actually, and Idris Elba gives a really hilarious performance at the movie's center. 

Nicholas Galitzine is good, and (I can't believe I'm gonna say this but) Jared Leto is very, very funny—even though I couldn't have told you it was him. 

One very significant gripe: There wasn't nearly enough of that green tiger for my taste. I love big cats, especially when they're magical (I still think about that tiger in K-Pop Demon Hunters), and poor Cringer was criminally underused.

Deux Procureurs (2025)

Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors is an incisive and difficult-to-watch but compelling exploration of the banality of evil. This is not a thriller, really. What it is, instead, is an examination of a set of choices that fascism makes possible. The acting here is uniformly good—the eponymous two prosecutors are excellent—and the score is haunting and intriguing. This is a powerful screenplay and it's filmed well, though I admired Two Prosecutors more than I enjoyed it.