Jung_E frontloads a pile of fairly unnecessary background worldbuilding, but the important bits are that they’ve developed the means to put human brains into robots, and that two major factions have been at war for 80 years. When Yun Jung-yi (Kim Hyun-Joo), one of the best, most inspiring fighters gets killed in action, of course they build a robot that looks exactly like her: Jung_E; and of course they put ...Read More

Plenty of other killer robot and creepy doll movies to make comparisons to—take your pick—and from the trailer you can pretty much predict the arc of the plot. But there’s something about M3GAN. It seems to have taken on a life of its own.

M3GAN is constructed from very basic building blocks: Orphaned girl’s (Violet McGraw) aunt (Allison Williams) gives her a robot (Amie Donald/Jenna Davis) as a replacement ...Read More

Actor, poet, activist, and musician Saul Williams writes and co-directs (with Rwandan filmmaker Anisia Uzeyman) Neptune Frost. Variously described as an Afrofuturist-cyberpunk-scifi-musical*, the film certainly defies expectations and easy categorization.

Neptune Frost connects to Williams’s “Martyr Loser King” multimedia project—originally envisioned as a graphic novel and stage play—which also includes his 2016 studio album. The plot centers on Burundi coltan miner Matalusa (Bertrand Ninteretse), who forms a romantic relationship ...Read More

Wakanda Forever follows the events of the original Black Panther as well as some of the other Marvel titles, but importantly, it also follows the real-life event of Chadwick Boseman’s death – the actor who played Black Panther/T’Challa. The opening of the film is a tribute to Boseman, as well as the way he embodied the title character. Making effective use of silence, sound, imagery, and the raw emotions of ...Read More

Today’s major-brand superheroes have an onscreen lineage going back at least to the ’40s, including iconic serials starring Superman, Batman, and Captain America. But Marvel and DC aren’t the only cinematic superhuman universes. During the great superhero revival of the 1980s, wedged between memorable Christopher Reeves films Superman and Superman II, came 1981 television series The Greatest American Hero. Standing alongside the tradition of filmmakers and TV showrunners ...Read More

This South Korean movie blends magic, time travel, robots, aliens, alien robots, spaceships, and shapeshifting cats all into 140 minutes of action, comedy, horror, and even a lil bit o’ luv. Something for everyone! In fact, it’s hard to take any two still frames from Alienoid and believe that they’re from the same movie, but the fun is in the bridging of genres. Not to give too much away, but ...Read More

Josh: I hyped up the previous Predator movie because it was so over-the-top and ridiculous, just straight out campy fun. Prey is a completely different pace, and I actually enjoyed it a lot more.

Arley: We were talking about how Nope is a departure in vibe from Jordan Peele’s previous movies, and I felt like this was a departure in vibe from the usual Predator movie. Especially the first third ...Read More

When was the last time we had a properly decent UFO movie? Was it The X-Files movie from 1998? Close Encounters of the Third Kind? All the way back to 1953’s The War of the Worlds? It’s hard to imagine anyone coming up with a fresh take on such an old trope,* but in keeping with his work on Get Out, Us, and even The Twilight ...Read More

Picking up after Thor: Ragnarok and Avengers: Endgame, the fourth Thor standalone film reunites the God of Thunder (Chris Hemsworth) with his scientist ex-girlfriend Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), his rock-alien-monster friend Korg (director Taika Waititi), and the fresh king of New Asgard, Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson). After a stint of adventuring with the Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor is shocked to discover that normal Earth mortal Jane has somehow reassembled ...Read More

Finney and Gwen (Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw) are siblings in 1978 Colorado. Finney is a shy boy who wants to be tougher than he is, including wishing he had the nerve to get between his tougher younger sister and their physically and mentally abusive alcoholic father. The kids have to navigate their relationship to each other while dealing with bullies at school and the potential psychic abilities Gwen seems ...Read More

It’s the third major movie this year premised on a fundamental misinterpretation* of quantum theory! (We also reviewed this one and this one, and there’s at least one more scheduled for later in 2022.) It’s also the third comic book/superhero movie we’ve reviewed this year (with many more on the way), and a sequel to a pretty average film in its own right. So, does Doctor Strange in the Multiverse ...Read More

When a rupture threatens the multiverse, ordinary mother and laundromat owner Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) is recruited by a shadowy organization. They tell her that only she can save the multiverse… but can they be trusted, is any of this real, and besides all of this, can she really help? Evelyn has to figure it out fast – and sort out her taxes at the same time, or the IRS ...Read More

Batman was first introduced in Detective Comics #27 in 1939, and this year’s The Batman tries to bring him back to that super-sleuth tradition: showing up at crime scenes, looking for clues, outwitting criminals and police alike. There’s nothing fantastical, futuristic, or even particularly outlandish about this story — without the Batman name on it, it could be any other crime story. There are explicit Chinatown influences in the length ...Read More

There are always a number of film reviewers who plaster their reviews with quotable hyperbole, regardless of the quality of the film itself. Perhaps because they want to keep getting free movie tickets. Or perhaps because they hope to see their quote floating over an action snippet in a TV commercial.

In the case of Spider-Man: No Way Home, you can believe the hype.

Peter Parker’s secret identity as ...Read More

And… we’re back! Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) are still stuck in the Matrix. Versions of Morpheus and Agent Smith return, played by new actors (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Jonathan Groff, respectively). There are new characters, such as Bugs (Jessica Henwick) and the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris). Niobe (Jada Pinkett Smith) and the Merovingian (Lambert Wilson) reappear, though their characters are essentially unrecognizable.

That’s about it. It’s The ...Read More

Josh: Here’s one that I think deserves a little more attention than it got. It got delayed a couple of times, was in and out of theaters really quick, and didn’t make a lot of money.

Arley: I’d been waiting a while to see this one! I’m a horror fan, and this was a solid horror movie.

Josh: Definitely a horror movie, but it ended up being more sad than ...Read More

Thousands of years ago, the godlike Celestial Arishem (voiced by David Kaye) sent a squad of immortal, humanoid Eternals to Earth to hunt down alien monsters called Deviants, and to provide humanity with guidance and assistance in developing civilization, from Babylon all the way through to the modern world.

In the present day, believing that the Deviants were eliminated 500 years earlier, the Eternals mostly settle into human-seeming lives, getting ...Read More

Reporter Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is washed up. Worse, he and his alien symbiote, Venom (also Tom Hardy), aren’t getting along too well. In classic serial killer movie fashion, incarcerated murderer Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) declares that he’s willing to reveal where the bodies are buried but will only talk to Brock, who seizes the opportunity to try to get his career back on track. During one of their visits, ...Read More

A motley crew of costumed characters with highly questionable morals is compelled – upon pain of death – to undertake a covert military mission in the “island nation of Corto Maltese.” What they uncover is much larger than any of them expected….

The Suicide Squad is exactly the over-the-top bloody, just-ridiculous-enough not-a-superhero movie you need. It’s pretty rare for sequels* to be better films than the originals, but James Gunn’s ...Read More

It’s not often one sees the theatrical release of a 700-year-old poem, and just as rarely is there a modern adaptation of an Arthurian myth that does not involve either the Sword in the Stone or the Holy Grail. The Green Knight (or, as it calls itself onscreen, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous) is about Arthur’s (Sean Harris) nephew Gawain (Dev Patel), who embarks on a ...Read More

Two blockbuster-scope films dropped within a week of each other, with similar budgets and big-name casts. They could have been the summer’s perfect popcorn movies, yet were overall disappointments — so we’ll just do brief discussions of both in one review.

Josh: All right. So, what are we going to talk about first? Let’s do Black Widow first, because you hated it so much.

Arley: Yeah, I mean, I think ...Read More

Five hundred years before the start of Raya and the Last Dragon, the vibrant land of Kumandra is attacked by the Druun, monsters that turn their victims into stone. Kumandra’s guardian dragons band together to defeat the Druun, but in doing so are petrified, leaving behind only a magic gem infused with their power.

In the struggle for control of the dragons’ power, Kumandra splits into five tribes — ...Read More

In our review of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, we said, “The weakness of this movie was the humans and the strengths were the monsters, and there were not enough monster moments.” Well. The movie studios listened. Godzilla vs. Kong centers the monsters more than ever, not only offering several fight scenes of decent length and in varying locales, but even developing a story arc for Kong: this monster ...Read More

Down on their luck and drowning in debt, the crew of the spaceship Victory — Captain Jang (Kim Tae-ri), Tae-ho (Song Joong-Ki), Tiger Park (Jin Seon-kyu), and a robot, Bubs (Yoo Hae-Jin / Kim Hyang-gi) — work as “space sweepers,” salvaging broken satellites and other orbital garbage. Society has stratified so much that the poor live on a near-uninhabitable Earth while the rich live in luxurious orbital habitats. The richest ...Read More

Disney/Pixar returns to the afterlife in Soul, the story of middle school teacher and jazz musician Joe Gardner (voiced by Jaime Foxx) who winds up in a coma after his body and spirit are separated in an accident. While trying to avoid going into the Great Beyond, Spirit-Joe escapes into the Great Before, where newly created souls are prepared for corporeal existence.

There he teams up with 22 (Tina ...Read More

Some 70 years or so after the events of Wonder Woman, 1984 finds the titular hero (Gal Gadot) whiling away her time curating artifacts and impressing mortals with her beauty and charm. She seems to be keeping a low profile, at least until struggling entrepreneur Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) acquires an ancient magical device and threatens to destroy the world in his quest for ultimate power. Wonder Woman must ...Read More

Four friends living together and working to develop an app discover a hidden room in their house and, in it, a magic mirror that can portal them to different, but nearly indistinguishable, parallel universes. Eager to capitalize on the nearly unlimited resources of the multiverse, Leena (Georgia King), Noel (Martin Wallström), Devin (Aml Ameen), and Josh (Mark O’Brien) soon devise a number of get-rich-quick schemes, mostly at the expense of ...Read More

After a high-stakes operation at an opera house in Ukraine, a CIA agent (John David Washington) is recruited into a mysterious organization, given the codeword “Tenet” as a key to establishing contact with other members. Their objective is to stop an international criminal named Sator (Kenneth Branagh) who uses “time inversion”: a technology which reverses the effects of entropy and essentially causes objects to move backwards in time. The organization ...Read More

In this installment, Locus will be taking a look at two indie films that found their way into our inbox: full-length LX 2048 and short film The Speed of Time, both available on streaming services, and both offering up a slightly different selection than what we’re used to seeing in theatrical releases.

Josh: Let’s cover LX 2048 first. I think when I initially emailed you about it, I said ...Read More

A fresh batch of young mutants has arrived, but don’t call them X-Men just yet, and don’t call them superheroes, either. After surviving a freak storm that kills every person on her reservation, including both of her parents, Danielle Moonstar (Blu Hunt) finds herself in a nearly abandoned hospital occupied by four other teenagers — Rahne (Maisie Williams), Illyana (Anya Taylor-Joy), Roberto (Henry Zaga), and Sam (Charlie Heaton) — and ...Read More

Originally pitched as “a Russian Alien,” this low-budget SF horror film opens on a promising scene: it’s 1983, and two cosmonauts orbit the Earth in a Soyuz capsule. Their spacesuits are exactingly replicated from the real deal, and the Soyuz interior is also Cold War authentic, down to the fonts on the control panel. A wooden doll floats gently around the two men, serving as a zero gravity indicator. ...Read More