The sophomore feature from Celine Song, the director who had everyone crying into their popcorn with Past Lives, Materialists is all about the high-stakes, maximum-dollar world of New York City matchmaking. Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy, a professional love-broker who fixes up wealthy elites but can’t seem to sort out her own damage. She finds herself locked into a classic, agonizing love triangle between Harry (Pedro Pascal), a ridiculously smooth, billionaire unicorn client who represents the ultimate material jackpot and John (Chris Evans), her rough-around-the-edges, emotionally raw ex-boyfriend who is still dreaming about growing old, getting wrinkles and having kids together.

Song uses this glossy, high-society setup to deliver a deeply cynical, yet strangely hopeful examination of how modern capitalism has basically colonized our love lives. It’s a rom-com where people actually talk about the financial math of marriage, the cost of a twelve-million-dollar apartment and the cold reality of trading youth for security.

The pacing can be incredibly deliberate, and some dialogue-heavy scenes drag out just a few beats longer than they need to. But if you appreciate a movie that takes a trashy, daytime-television plot structure and elevates it into a sharp, beautifully shot critique of modern existence, it’s well worth the entry fee.

The A24 Blu-ray has a director commentary, a making-of feature, a composer deep dive with Japanese Breakfast and six postcards. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Matt Jaissle has earned a “forever pass” in my book. Anyone responsible for the unhinged, DIY madness of The Necro Files — a film featuring a flying, murderous baby doll — has proven they have the gonzo spirit required for true cult cinema. Jaissle is also one of the few directors to tackle the Amityville brand and bring original ideas to the table, rather than just filming a dusty hallway for 90 minutes. So, when I saw the cover for Night of the Rats, looking like a spiritual successor to Rats: The Night of Terror, I was all in.

The setup here is classic, meat-and-potatoes eco-horror. A quiet Midwestern town (and the second a TV announcer casually refers to the setting as Evans City, my Western Pennsylvania heart grew three sizes, and I fell deeply in love) becomes an all-you-can-eat buffet for a mutated, subterranean colony of rodents. These aren’t your average dumpster-divers, either. We’re talking fast-breeding, hyper-aggressive, radioactive pests that have developed an insatiable taste for human flesh. We follow a pair of scientists desperately trying to stem the tide as the furry, red-eyed swarm moves rapidly from the rural cornfields into the local kitchen sinks.

Against all budgetary odds, the way the rat swarm spreads through the back roads, isolated barns, and farmhouses actually feels genuinely claustrophobic. Nowhere is safe, not even the wide-open, agoraphobic spaces of the Midwest. But Jaissle throws an incredible curveball into the standard eco-horror formula: these rats carry a pathogen that can actually take over the minds and bodies of the people they bite.

If you’re coming to a Matt Jaissle movie, you’re looking for those moments of “did they really just do that?” The way the rat swarm spreads through the back roads and farms feels claustrophobic. Nowhere is safe, not even the wide-open spaces of the Midwest. They can even take over people who have been bitten, which leads to a scene that’s at once both horrific and hilarious, as a woman is trapped in her car as a zombie pounds on the windows. The camera pulls back to reveal…about ten fake rats. That’s the kind of absurdist magic that I watch movies for.

There’s also a rat in a bathtub scene done twice — yes, Jaissle hasn’t just seen Nightmare City, he’s going to reference it to the point that The Nightmare Becomes Reality comes up on screen — that reminded me of the time vermin climbed up our toilet and as a three-year-old, I looked down between my legs into the eyes of a rodent. 

Jaissle’s love for the golden age of Euro-sleaze drips from every single frame of this thing. Even the closing credits are a masterclass in cinematic trolling and fan service, hilariously naming “Fulvio Cozzi” and “Umberto Margherti” (glorious portmanteaus of Luigi Cozzi,  Antonio Margheriti and Umberto Lenzi) as the wardrobe crew. The special thanks section reads like a holy litany of grindhouse gods, sending love to Evans City, PA; George A. Romero; Lucio Fulci; Umberto Lenzi; Luigi Cozzi; Bruno Mattei; Enzo G. Castellari; Antonio Margheriti; Dario Argento; Andrea Bianchi; Lamberto Bava and multiple energy drinks.

When you break it down, Night of the Rats boasts a rumored $2,000 budget, a horde of rats that look like they were rescued from a pet store bargain bin or a claw machine, characters running around in yellow hazmat suits, stuffed rodents being physically thrown at actors’ faces from off-camera à la Mattei and older dudes with long ponytails having vivid, waking nightmares (I have never felt more seen). Plus, it all gets done in 70 minutes and has a great poster!

You can watch this on Tubi.

I love the original Naked Gun movies so much that I knew that no matter what, this probably wouldn’t make me happy. Taking on the mantle of Leslie Nielsen is basically a suicide mission, like trying to out-drink Oliver Reed or out-scream Klaus Kinski. It shouldn’t work and it really doesn’t, but I still had some fun with this.

Liam Neeson steps into the oversized, slapstick-covered shoes of Frank Drebin Jr. He’s investigating the death of a software engineer that smells fishier than a cannery in a heatwave. Along for the ride is Pamela Anderson as Beth Davenport. She honestly handles the deadpan absurdity better than most “serious” actors could (after her Criterion Closet appearance, I love her even more) and Paul Walter Hauser, who is slowly becoming the patron saint of character actors, is decent.

The villain is Richard Cane (Danny Huston), a tech billionaire who wants to use a P.L.O.T. Device to turn humanity back into primal beasts. It’s the kind of high-concept nonsense that would make the Zuckers proud, and it gives the movie an excuse to jump from a threesome with a magical snowman to a chase scene involving an electric car, a swarm of bees, and a replacement windshield.

The thing about the original films—and the short-lived Police Squad!—is that they weren’t just funny; they were relentless. They attacked the frame from every angle. Schaffer (the man who gave us Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a film I will defend until the day I die and Becca buries me with my Jess Franco blu-rays) understands gags.

Neeson is the secret weapon here. We’ve spent the last twenty years watching him growl into burner phones and punch people’s throats, so watching him use a bank robber as a literal human shield or get airlifted by the spirit of his father—who has manifested as an owl—is fun.

Is it high art? No. Is it as good as the 1988 original? Nothing is. But in a world of elevated horror and meta blockbusters that take themselves way too seriously, seeing a man lose his pants at a Ponzi-scheme.com Arena while trying to save the world is a cinematic palette cleanser.

I love dystopian end-of-the-world movies.

I adore most dangerous game movies.

I heart future game-show movies about violence. 

By all rights, I should love this movie, and no, I didn’t.

It comes close, so close to what I want it to be, but it feels like it can barely get out of its own way.

If you grew up in the 80s, Paul Michael Glaser’s The Running Man was a neon-soaked, Lycra-stretching movie filled with Arnold one-liners and Richard Dawson’s oily charisma. It wasn’t Stephen King. It wasn’t even Richard Bachman. It was a cartoon. It also came several years after the book, as did much better versions of this story, like Endgame, Warriors of the Year 2072, and Death Race 2000.

Edgar Wright—the man who gave us the Cornetto Trilogy—has spent years obsessing over the actual book. He didn’t want sub-zeros and chainsaws; he wanted the grim, soot-stained nihilism of King’s 1982 novel. It also feels weird that they gave him such a huge budget and that he took on a very mainstream film, but we’ll get to that.

In a future that feels uncomfortably like next Tuesday, the U.S. is a bankrupt wasteland ruled by The Network. If you aren’t rich, you’re starving, and the only thing keeping the lights on is the high-def bloodsport of The Running Man.

Glen Powell plays Ben Richards, but forget the tanned, grinning flyboy from Top Gun: Maverick. Here, he’s a desperate, blacklisted union worker in the slums of Co-Op City. His kid is dying of the flu, he’s broke,  and his only option is to sign his life away to executive producer Dan Killian (Josh Brolin).

The rules are simple: Survive 30 days. You get a head start, a camcorder and the entire world is encouraged to murder you for cold, hard cash.

Wright and co-writer Michael Bacall turn the hunt into a paranoid, cross-country trek through a decaying America. Along the way, Richards meets a gallery of losers and rebels, including Michael Cera as an ill-fated activist in Derry, Maine (nice King nod there), and William H. Macy as a black-market disguise artist.

The film pulls no punches on the media satire. We get deepfakes, manipulated live feeds, and Colman Domingo as Bobby T, a game-show host who makes modern influencers look like saints. Even Lee Pace shows up as Evan McCone, the lead hunter who is less a gladiator and more a state-sponsored executioner.

Wright ditches his usual stylized editing for a more grounded, gritty approach. Powell does well, carrying the weight of a man who knows he’s already dead. As for Arnold, he shows up on the face of the $100 bill.  And it’s bleak. Really bleak. Audiences in late 2025 apparently weren’t in the mood for a $110 million bummer about the end of the world and the death of truth, which explains why it sank at the box office like a stone. It only clawed back $69 million, making it a certified bomb.

I wonder, beyond the love of the book, why Wright made this. It feels like anyone could have made this movie and not him. It’s missing his style and only retains the needledrops, which are more annoying in this than fitting. It all feels very static, perhaps because it also feels like something I could turn on the news and watch for real. Maybe that’s the beauty of the original film: it has these themes but also realizes that, as a cartoon, the medicine and message go down a lot smoother.

If you saw The Climb back in 2019, you know that Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin have turned toxic male friendship into an endurance sport into a high art form. In Splitsville, they’re back to poke at the bruises of the modern ego, this time with Neon backing the play and Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona along for the ride to wonder why they ever let these two into their lives.

The film kicks off with the kind of chaotic energy that only Covino can direct: Carey (Marvin) and Ashley (Arjona) are attempting highway sex when they witness a horrific car crash. It’s the kind of traumatic inciting incident that makes most people cling to their partners. Instead, Ashley looks at the wreckage, looks at Carey and basically says, “Yeah, I want a divorce. Also, I’ve been cheating.“

Carey does what any broken man in a Covino/Marvin script does: he retreats to his best friend, Paul (Covino). But Paul and his wife Julie (Johnson) aren’t exactly the rock of stability he needs. They’ve gone enlightened with an open marriage. Naturally, Carey, in a mix of grief, confusion, and “why not?” ends up sleeping with Julie after she smashes a piece of pottery over a stranger’s head. If Dakota Johnson smashing things is your vibe, this is your movie.

What follows is a tangled web of ethical non-monogamy that is anything but ethical and mostly just hilarious. Carey tries to save his marriage by suggesting an open relationship to Ashley, then proceeds to move all of her lovers into their house just to be a passive-aggressive weirdo. The montage depicting their romantic encounters was filmed as a single, extended continuous take, with actors repeatedly changing wardrobe and staging positions off camera to create the illusion of multiple time jumps within a single shot.

Meanwhile, Paul’s life is cratering with bankruptcy, indictments and the realization that he only suggested the open marriage because he was insecure. It turns out everyone was lying. Paul and Julie weren’t actually sleeping with other people; they were just playing a high-stakes game of emotional chicken. By the time Nicholas Braun shows up as Matt the Mentalist, the movie has devolved into a glorious, fire-damaged mess of birthday parties, jail time and paternity questions.

Splitsville is a mean, lean, mid-budget comedy that reminds us that no matter how much we talk about boundaries and openness, we’re all just one stolen jet ski away from a total breakdown.

Directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky, this movie is all about honor among thieves within a jagged, frozen landscape. We’re in the middle of a brutal winter where an indigenous game warden, Harlan (Joel Kinnaman), and a poacher he’s just busted, Ani (Cara Jade Myers), find themselves in a precarious alliance when they discover a plane carrying millions has gone down in a lake that’s more ice than water. 

As you can imagine, they aren’t the only ones looking for the payday.

This isn’t just a race against the clock; it’s a race against hypothermia. The film leans heavily into the atmosphere of the high-altitude wilderness. You can almost feel the frostbite creeping in through the screen.

Kinnaman plays it stoically, carrying that weary, “I’ve seen too many winters” energy. While Myers, who was in Killers of the Flower Moon, is the standout here, providing the spark of unpredictability that keeps the dynamic from feeling like a standard buddy-cop retread.

Icefall succeeds because it understands that the environment is a more effective villain than any guy with a gun. The sound design is punctuated by the terrifying crack of thinning ice, a sound familiar to anyone who grew up watching 70s disaster cinema. 

It’s a lean, mean, and cold-blooded thriller that doesn’t waste time on flowery dialogue when a flare gun or a survival knife can do the talking.

Lynne Ramsay doesn’t make movies; she makes scars on film. From the sensory overload of Ratcatcher to the stone-cold dread of You Were Never Really Here, she’s a filmmaker who understands that the loudest screams are usually the ones kept inside.

With Die My Love, she takes Ariana Harwicz’s accidental trilogy of domestic horror and turns it into a neon-soaked, dirt-stained Montana nightmare that feels like a spiritual successor to Possession by way of a Sam Shepard play.

Jennifer Lawrence is Grace, a woman who hasn’t just lost the plot; she’s actively burning the book, the encylocpedia and an entire library. She’s moved from New York to a dead uncle’s house in rural Montana with Jackson (Robert Pattinson). If you think this is a finding yourself in the country flick, you haven’t been paying attention. This is a house haunted not by ghosts, but by the suicide of the previous owner and the crushing weight of a newborn baby that Grace can’t seem to connect with.

Jackson is rying his best but failing miserably. He brings home a stray dog to fix a broken heart, but Grace isn’t looking for a pet. In a scene that’ll make your skin crawl, she handles the dog’s injury with a shotgun because Jackson won’t. If this makes you hate her, I doubt she cares.

Despite having a fling with a biker (LaKeith Stanfield) and throwing herself through a glass door, they still get married. What a ceremony: Grace headbutts a mirror in a bridal suite while a concierge sings to her.

The supporting cast is legendary. Nick Nolte and Sissy Spacek show up to remind us that generational trauma is the gift that keeps on giving. When Grace is finally cured and released from the asylum, she returns to a house that’s been scrubbed clean of her personality and a baby that’s been renamed after a dead man. It’s the ultimate gaslight, so why not just set the whole house ablaze and, well, run right into it?

This isn’t a fun watch, but if you love melodrama, this is for you.

Four buddies— — including NFL stars Marquis Cooper (Quentin Plair) and Corey Smith (Terrence Terrell ) — sailt out for a day of fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. A stuck anchor, a nasty storm and a capsized boat turn a bro getaway into a wet, freezing nightmare. Only one man makes it back to tell the tale.

Joe Carnahan is a guy who usually specializes in action movies like Narc, The A-Team and Boss Level. The men in his movies are rugged, the dialogue snappy, and the stunts in-your-face. Seeing him take on the real-life tragedy of Nick Schuyler feels like a bit of a pivot, even if it still fits into his wheelhouse of masculine endurance.

Based on Schuyler’s book, Not Without Hope tells the story of the 2009 tragedy in which a fishing trip turned into a desperate fight against the elements. If you’ve seen The Perfect Storm or Adrift, you know the beats: the hubris of men against nature, the one last trip vibes and the realization that the ocean doesn’t care about you or your Pro Bowl stats.

Nick (Zachary Levi), Tim(Josh Duhamel), Cooper and Smith head out to Cooper’s Hole, a prime fishing spot fifty miles offshore. They ignore the storm warnings. Then, the anchor gets snagged, they try to gun the engine, and the boat flips. Suddenly, our heroes are clinging to a hull in the middle of a storm.

The irony of the film and the real-life story is a bitter pill: the NFL players, Cooper and Smith, were in such peak physical condition that they had almost no body fat. When hypothermia set in, they had no insulation. They succumb to the cold and the sheer mental break of the situation, eventually drifting away into the dark.

As the Coast Guard (led by Timothy Close) hunts for them, the film cuts back and forth between the wives waiting by the phone and the men losing their minds in the water. In the end, it comes down to Nick and Will. In a moment of ultimate sacrifice, Will refuses the life jacket to give Nick a better shot. Nick survives not just because of his will to live, but because, ironically, he wasn’t as shredded as his NFL friends, giving him just enough biological fuel to last until the rescue helo spotted him.

The end credits show real-life footage of the men,a s well as Nick’s interview with Oprah to remind you that while the movie might feel like a template, the grief of these families was very real.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Official synopsis: From the legendary cult filmmaker Takashi Miike comes the story of Ikuto and Ryoma, troubled teens who meet in juvenile detention and make a plan to fight their way to freedom. Inspired by MMA fighter and Breaking Down founder Mikuru Asakura, the two boys make a plan to compete in Asakura’s popular tournament. When released, they discover that they’ll have to defeat their past outside the ring, before they can be champions inside of it…

B&S About Movies readers are most certainly well acquainted with director Takashi Miike, so it should come as no surprise that his Japanese action drama Blazing Fists (AKA Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors) is well helmed, sports terrifically choreographed fight sequences, and boasts fine performances. Any surprise should come from the fact that the film follows the expected beats and tropes of the subgenre rather than bringing much new to the proceedings.

Ryoma (Kaname Yoshizawa) and Ikuto (Danhi Kinoshita) form a friendship and a determination to succeed at becoming MMA fighters at the juvenile detention center where they meet. Screenwriter Shin Kibiyashi provides plenty of drama and obstacles for the young men to work through, along with a ruthless, violent gang led by Mido (Gackt) that greatly outnumbers the small-time gang led by Jun (Chikashi Kuon) that was already giving the protagonist duo trouble. 

Family problems, grudges old and new, and naturally trying to beat the odds are some of the difficulties and hurdles that stand in the way of Ryoma and Ikuto. Yoshizawa and Kinoshita shine in their roles as they lead a strong supporting cast, and Miike turns in impressive work with a story that comes across as quite familiar. The impressive fight sequences, including a third-act showdown between a majority of the good and bad guys that viewers have already met plus some new ones, should help to partially take viewers’ minds off of the tropes, at least temporarily. 

Blazing Fists, from Well Go USA, debuted on Digital, Blu-ray & DVD on March 31, 2026.