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.

Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum) is a divorced U.S. Army veteran living in North Carolina who decides to rob McDonald’s to pay for his kids’ welfare. He knows how to break in at night and be ready for the next morning. He treats people well and uses his powers of observation, but is still a criminal. When the police catch on, he’s arrested at his daughter’s birthday party. That doesn’t stop him, as he escapes from jail and lives inside a Toys ‘R Us before starting to rebuild his life with his widow, Leigh Wainscott (Kirsten Dunst).

Directed by Derek Cianfrance, this is an incredibly sweet movie that may just humanize the real Manchester, who really did commit these crimes and then escaped from prison twice more. In an article in The Charlotte Observer, Elaine Snyder, who worked at one of the restaurants that Manchester robbed, said, “I just don’t understand why they would want to praise him and give him all this recognition for something very devastating to some people. I’m not sure that I agree with that.” In the same article, the real-life Leigh Wainscott said, “I just hold onto the good stuff. I just know what a kind, sensitive, caring person he is.”

Corrections 1, a website devoted to law enforcement that states that it is “the leading online community and resource for corrections worldwide”, said “The film wants audiences to like Tatum’s Manchester despite overwhelming evidence they shouldn’t. It attempts balance but misses the mark entirely, divorced from the reality corrections professionals cannot escape: charm is often predation, circumstances are context, not justification, and every crime has material consequences the camera never captures.”

As nice as Tatum seems, I couldn’t help thinking about the people that the protagonist charmed and how he would soon let them down. Maybe I watched this in the wrong mood, but I came away thinking he was the villain, not the dashing Robin Hood. 

The Paramount 4K UHD of this movie has featurettes, deleted scenes and alternate scenes. You can get it from Deep Discount.

Is Spinal Tap II strictly for the devotees who can recite the exact dimensions of a Stonehenge prop? Probably. But as a card-carrying member of the Tap-heads, I couldn’t care less. Getting eighty more minutes with Nigel Tufnel, David St. Hubbins, and Derek Smalls feels less like a movie and more like a family reunion where everyone is slightly more deaf and significantly more delusional.

The plot kicks off with a brilliant piece of continuity: Hope Faith (a pitch-perfect Kerry Godliman), the daughter of the band’s legendary, cricket-bat-wielding manager Ian Faith. She’s inherited the band’s contract, which is a legal albatross that forces the trio into one final show.

The problem is that Nigel and David won’t speak to each other. They may not even know why. At this point, Nigel owns a cheese-and-guitar shop; David is making music for true-crime podcasts and on-hold messages; and Derek is still into rock operas like Hell Toupee and running a glue museum.

Despite struggling to find a drummer — no one wants to die of misadventure or choking on someone else’s vomit — Didi Crockett (Valerie Franco, whose girlfriend Annie Gordenier also shows up in the movie as her parner) joins up and adds the positivity the band needs as they nevigate growing old, advice from Paul McCartney and nearly murdering Elton John during a performance of “Stonehenge.”

Sadly, live concert footage was filmed at Stonehenge, Wiltshire, for the concert Spinal Tap at Stonehenge: The Final Finale. The project was delayed indefinitely after Rob Reiner, who directed and played director Marty DiBergi, and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were killed.

Seeing Paul Shaffer’s Artie Fufkin still looking for a kick in the ass, Fran Drescher’s Bobbi Flekman still holding it together as a Buddhist and June Chadwick’s Jeanine Pettibone trading her zodiac charts for a nun’s habit made me smile.

I didn’t think too deeply about any of this. I just wanted to laugh and, as always, Tap provides.

Over the course of this movie, the Taylor family will be destroyed.

At first, they get together for the parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. Georgetown professor Ellen (Diane Lane) and restaurateur Paul (Kyle Chandler), attended by their four children: lawyer Cynthia (Zoey Deutch) and her husband Rob (Daryl McCormack); out lesbian stand up Anna (Madeline Brewer); young scientist Birdie (Mckenna Grace) and failed writer Josh (Dylan O’Brien) and his fiancee Liz (Phoebe Dynevor), who was once one of Ellen’s students.

Liz surprises Ellen by gifting her with her new book, written with Josh’s help: The Change: The New Social Contract. The cover shows an American flag with the stars centered, supposedly to represent Americans uniting around the political center. Instead, it leads to a one-party system that is somehow even more fascist than the fascist state we live in right now.

Within a few years, The Change has taken over the United States, and everyone worries about the future. Liz gives Birdie a password to a noted virology database to help her in her career and eventually gets her an internship with the Cumberland Corporation, which has sponsored this movement. Yet Ellen won’t play nice; she vandalizes The Change flags and eventually gets confronted so many times that she goes missing.

As time passes, Josh becomes more assured and changes into nearly an archenemy to the family. Cynthia gets pregnant but aborts the child without telling her husband. As if these family gatherings couldn’t be more tense, Ellen tells Liz that if she messes with her family, she will kill her.

Eventually, The Change has taken over the country and soon, the world. Enumerators come to the house, looking for Anna, while Cynthia is drugged out of her mind. Birdie uses her knowledge of viruses to suicide bomb a bio-weapon attack at the Washington, D.C., Cumberland headquarters while the family is gathered for the 30th anniversary. Police arrive and begin attacking people; Cynthia stabs Josh, and the parents are arrested, their heads bound like the painting they met in front of, René Magritte’s The Lovers.

Wow, right?

Directed by Oscar nominee Jan Komasa (Corpus Christi, The Hater), the film is a brutal political allegory that uses a 10-year timeline to show how quickly civilized society can pivot into authoritarianism through the lens of one family’s collapse. The tension between Ellen and Liz  isn’t just political. It’s a personal vendetta. Liz was a former student whom Ellen once publicly humiliated for her radical one-party thesis. The Change movement is, in many ways, Liz’s long-game revenge against her former mentor.

Interestingly, the film never specifies if The Change is far-right or far-left. Komasa intentionally kept the ideology vague to focus on the mechanics of fascism: the vertical flags, the stars in the center (symbolizing the death of federalism) and the way neighbors turn on neighbors.

I saw this on a plane and had no expectations. Obviously, Lionsgate buried this. How would you sell it today? Polish director Jan Komasa makes this melodramatic yet in the finest ways. It’s a powder keg, and I couldn’t believe these things were happening in a modern film. Do what you can to find this.