CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 4-4-25
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- 15 min read
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My Film Critic pants are on, pressed, and ironed, and I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, April 4th, 2025.
Movies based on video games have a long and storied history… of being terrible.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: any movie that begins with "based on the popular video game" should come with a warning label — "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." And A Minecraft Movie, based on the wildly popular 2011 game that's basically digital Legos, is no exception.
This thing is loud, obnoxious, messy, aggressively stupid, and not even remotely entertaining — unless, maybe, you're a hardcore Minecraft kid who's already built a functioning replica of the Millennium Falcon in the game. Otherwise? Good luck.
Let me be clear right up front: I'm not a gamer. I never have been. The last video game system I owned was Pong. That's it—not Atari, not Nintendo, not PlayStation, not Xbox. Pong. So, no, I've never played Minecraft.
I don't know what a Piglin is. I don't care what Redstone does. And I'm not looking for inside jokes, Easter eggs, or shoutouts to YouTube streamers named BlazeMaster5000. I go to a movie to be entertained. And this movie didn't even come close to doing that.
The plot — and I'm using that word loosely — centers around four misfits who are sucked through a portal into the Overworld, a cube-shaped fantasy world where creativity is currency and monsters are a constant threat.
The team is led by Garrett "The Garbage Man" Garrison (Jason Momoa), who, along with the teens (played by Emma Myers, Danielle Brooks, and Sebastian Hansen), have to survive, adapt, and defeat the pixelated baddies to get home. Oh, and they get help from a legendary Minecraft hero named Steve, played by Jack Black, who is doing his usual loud Jack Black thing at full volume with the dial stuck on 11.
Let's break this down.
Jason Momoa — Once again proving that he might be the least interesting action star currently working. He is terrible in this. The idea that this guy is supposed to carry the emotional weight of this group or deliver any sort of comedic timing is laughable. He's not charming, funny, or even particularly fun to look at when animated.
I've never been a fan of Momoa, and here he is in full Jason-Momoa-Mode™, which is to say, yelling a lot, grunting, making dumb faces, and hoping his muscles carry the rest. Spoiler: they don't.
Jack Black: A guy I generally like. I'm a fan of School of Rock. I liked Nacho Libre. He's funny. But here? He's wasted. This feels like someone told him to just riff and go nuts — and then forgot to give him any jokes. He's mugging for laughs that aren't there, and the shtick wears out its welcome fast.
The rest of the cast—Emma Myers (Wednesday), Danielle Brooks, Sebastian Hansen—all do what they can with paper-thin roles and canned emotional arcs. A couple of fun voice cameos give the movie tiny moments of life, but nothing can sustain 100+ minutes of chaos.
Visually, it looks like a music video that exploded. You've got these blocky, Minecraft-inspired landscapes and characters rendered in a way that's meant to look whimsical and "faithful to the game," but it ends up just looking like someone animated an energy drink commercial using old PlayStation graphics.
The color palette is over-saturated, the camera never sits still, and everything is cut like it's trying to induce a seizure. Which brings us to…
The tone — Think Pixels (that Adam Sandler disaster) crossed with The Lego Movie, but without the wit, charm, or intelligence of either. And yes, I realize The Lego Movie was actually good. This is like if someone watched The Lego Movie once, didn't understand what made it work, and then decided to make it with fart jokes and Minecraft skins.
The script—credited to SIX writers (always a red flag)—is a Frankenstein monster of studio notes, gamer pandering, and forced moralizing about teamwork and creativity. And somehow, despite being set in a fantasy world where you can build literally anything, the movie still manages to feel completely uninspired.
Also, let's talk about its history. This movie has been in development since 2014. That's over ten years. During that time, it's gone through five directors, at least ten drafts of the script, multiple cast changes, and countless delays.
And all of that chaos is baked into the final product — you can feel the indecision, the studio meddling, the "let's make this work for everyone!" desperation. Which means it doesn't work for anyone.
And honestly, if this is meant to be the start of a new video game movie franchise — God help us. Haven't we suffered enough? For every halfway decent video game movie, there are a dozen unwatchable ones. Assassin's Creed. Warcraft. Doom. Pixels. Need for Speed. Now add A Minecraft Movie to the pile.
The only thing this movie builds is a case for never adapting video games again. It's noisy, hollow, and emotionally manipulative in the worst way—trying to use real-world loss and grief as fuel for character arcs that don't land while dressing it up with giant blocky chickens and pig monsters.
And it ends, of course, with a climax that looks like a video game cutscene designed to sell action figures and Happy Meals.
A Minecraft Movie is a movie for no one. It might appeal to 9-year-olds who've played 600 hours of Minecraft and want to see Steve on the big screen — but even then, they deserve better. Everyone deserves better. - ⭐️
Hell of a Summer is one of those movies that's been bouncing around for a while, and for good reason. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, made barely a ripple, and vanished—until now.
NEON is finally putting it out in theaters a year and a half later, and honestly, it feels less like a release and more like a mercy dump. Despite all the hype around its creators, this is one of those films that should've stayed buried at the bottom of the summer camp lake with Jason Voorhees.
The hook here—the thing that got people's attention—is that it's the writing and directorial debut of Finn Wolfhard (the Stranger Things kid) and Billy Bryk, both of whom also star. So yes, there's a novelty in seeing Gen Z horror nerds make a movie that's clearly meant to be a love letter to the '80s slasher films they grew up hearing about (because they sure didn't grow up watching them live).
You want to root for these guys—you really do. But effort alone does not make a good movie, and what they've delivered here is a tired, unfunny, uninspired retread that fails to be scary, clever, or even mildly entertaining.
The premise is Horror 101: a group of counselors arrives at Camp Pineway to get things ready before the campers show up, and surprise—there's a masked killer knocking them off one by one. It's a setup as old as the hills, and that's fine if you're going to do something fresh with it.
Scream pulled that off in the '90s, breathing new life into a dead genre by being sharp, self-aware, and genuinely thrilling. Hell of a Summer, on the other hand, just feels like a freshman film class project that can't stop quoting movies it doesn't fully understand.
Tonally, the film wants to be a mix of Friday the 13th and Superbad—which, in theory, sounds kind of fun. In practice, it's a mess. The humor is broad and lazy (naming the lead character Jason in a summer camp horror movie? Really?), and the horror elements are toothless.
The kills are unimaginative, the scares don't land, and the entire thing is so sloppily shot and edited that even the parts that should work—like the occasional gory set piece—just come off as clunky.
What's most frustrating is how flat the satire is. Slasher movies are already self-parodies half the time, and when you layer on another level of meta-commentary without any actual insight or cleverness, you end up with something that's trying so hard to wink at the audience that it goes cross-eyed. There's no actual perspective here. No twist on the formula. Just reheated clichés and half-baked jokes.
And yet, somehow, in the middle of all this, two performances emerge that are actually pretty good. Fred Hechinger, who's been steadily proving himself as one of the best young character actors around, plays Jason—a camp counselor who genuinely loves being at camp and doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the hormone-fueled party kids.
He's charming, weird, and committed in a way the rest of the cast isn't. Pairing him with Abby Quinn, who plays fellow counselor Claire, gives the film its only emotional anchor.
Their chemistry is natural, and their scenes together have a pulse. If the movie had focused more on them instead of the noise around them, we might be talking about a different kind of film.
But alas, we're not. We're left with a slasher spoof that arrives about 20 years too late to feel relevant, directed with the kind of visual inconsistency that suggests a lack of experience rather than a unique vision.
Even the best gags are undercut by sloppy pacing and weird tonal shifts. It's all just so meh—not terrible enough to be enjoyably bad and not smart enough to be good.
In the end, I can't entirely trash Hell of a Summer because I do respect the attempt. It's kind of sweet that these guys love old horror movies and want to make their own. But this isn't the movie that revives the genre. It's a movie that reminds us how dead the genre can feel when there's nothing new to say.
So, to recap: A few funny lines? Sure. A couple of standout performances? Definitely. But overall? This is a tone-deaf, unoriginal slog through every tired summer camp horror trope we've already seen done better—and funnier—dozens of times before. It's a swing and a miss. Let's hope their next project isn't such a bloody mess. - ⭐️1/2
There's a line that runs through my mind every time I see a movie that takes a great true story and mangles it into something almost unrecognizable: Why? Why take something so inherently compelling, so well-documented, so weird and tragic and human—and twist it into a fictionalized mess that does a disservice to everyone involved? That's precisely what The Luckiest Man in America does.
Directed by Samir Oliveros and starring the always-intriguing Paul Walter Hauser, this dramatization of the infamous Press Your Luck "scandal" involving Michael Larson in 1984 had the potential to be something truly special. I say that as someone who remembers watching the original episodes when they aired.
I'm a game show freak—I watch Buzzr and Game Show Network regularly. I adore old reruns of classic shows, and Press Your Luck was one of my favorites back in the day. It was mind-blowing when Larson hit that board, cracked the pattern, and just kept winning spin after spin after spin. A true, strange slice of American TV history.
So believe me when I say that there is a great movie to be made about this story. This is not it.
First, the good: Paul Walter Hauser is compelling in almost everything he does. He brings a weird, twitchy sadness to the character of Michael Larson that occasionally peeks through the chaotic mess of the script. Brian Geraghty gives the best performance in the film as Ed Long, the contestant seated next to Larson. He's grounded and believable and actually feels like a real person caught in the middle of something crazy.
The cinematography? Strong. The period detail? Nicely done. The recreation of the game show set and the 1984 vibe is solid. The synth-heavy score works. And for a few brief moments, the film does find a pulse.
But that pulse flatlines because the biggest issue with The Luckiest Man in America is that it's almost completely historically inaccurate. Sure, they slap on a title card at the beginning, saying, "Some events have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes," but what follows is so absurdly disconnected from reality that it makes the story less compelling, not more.
The truth was already dramatic, weird, sad, and funny. Unfortunately, this script doesn't trust that. It adds unnecessary fantasy sequences, a real-time timeline that never happened, and a series of wildly over-the-top characterizations that make everyone involved look like cartoons.
The film sometimes plays like a surreal dream sequence, as if most of what we're watching takes place in Larson's head during commercial breaks. Johnny Knoxville makes a bizarre cameo as the host of a fictional show inside the film, walking Larson through some metaphysical nonsense about TV patterns and fantasy.
I suppose it's supposed to represent the internal unraveling of our main character, but it plays more like a sketch that got lost on its way to an episode of Mr. Show.
And while we're on the subject of tonal messes, this film absolutely reminded me of Jason Reitman's Saturday Night, that dreadful behind-the-scenes real-time dramatization of the first SNL episode back in 1975.
In that film, Reitman claimed everything was accurate, yet anyone who knows anything about Saturday Night Live's history could tell you that 95% of what happens in that movie is fabricated nonsense.
The Luckiest Man in America pulls the same trick—but at least Oliveros has the good sense to warn us that liberties have been taken. Still, that doesn't excuse the storytelling mess that follows.
The movie plays out in real-time, covering the few hours it took to tape the infamous Press Your Luck episodes. But the script tries to cram in every possible dramatic beat, subplot, and invented conversation into that window, and it just doesn't work. There's no time to breathe, no depth given to any of the supporting players, and the end result feels more like a fever dream than a compelling biopic.
The real tragedy is that Michael Larson is fascinating. Here was a brilliant man—he figured out the pattern in the game board and pulled off a perfect storm of obsession, calculation, and guts. But he was also deeply flawed, a guy who would later blow all his winnings on a radio contest, get scammed in a Ponzi scheme, and eventually die broke and alone.
All of that is fascinating—and almost none of it is explored in this movie. Instead, we get a hacky father-daughter subplot, complete with a generic "estranged ex-wife" character and a child who serves as the sole justification for everything Larson does.
The real guts of the story—the why of it—are glossed over. There's no exploration of his obsessive tendencies. No real look into how he studied hours of tapes to crack the code. There's a scene where his van gets broken into, and someone finds his VHS collection, and, boom, just like that, everyone magically knows how he did it. That's how this movie handles information: by shoving it into your face in the clumsiest way possible.
Then there's the portrayal of the Press Your Luck crew. Walton Goggins, who I normally love, plays host Peter Tomarken as a weird hybrid of Gene Rayburn and Ron Burgundy. It's not accurate, it's not funny, and it does a real disservice to the memory of Tomarken, who was a professional and a great game show host.
David Strathairn plays Bill Carruthers, the show's creator. His character is given actions and lines that have no basis in reality. The things they have him do during the taping are absolutely absurd.
Ultimately, The Luckiest Man in America is a frustrating missed opportunity. There's a great story here—a really great story—one that's been told better in the Game Show Network documentary Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal, various articles, and even a fine graphic novel.
Hell, Bill Murray owned the rights to this story at one point, and that's the movie I wish we got—Murray as Larson, directed by Howard Franklin, leaning into the sadness, the obsession, the broken dreams.
Instead, we get a movie that tries to do too much, does most of it wrong, and ultimately adds up to very little. There's some entertainment value here, some interesting performances, and a few scenes that sort of work.
But if you're a game show fan or remember when this story happened, this movie will just annoy you. And if you don't know the story? You'll probably walk away confused, wondering if any of this was real.
Spoiler alert: most of it wasn't. - ⭐️⭐️
There's a line in one of my all-time favorite movies, Alan Parker's Shoot the Moon, where Albert Finney—disgusted, fed up, and exhausted—turns to Diane Keaton as they drive through San Francisco and delivers this beauty: "This city could die from quaint."
I think about that line a lot. And it's the first thing that came to mind while watching The Ballad of Wallis Island—because this movie? This movie could absolutely die from quaint. And I don't necessarily mean that as an insult… but I'm not handing it a medal either.
The Ballad of Wallis Island is the feature-length expansion of a 2008 short called The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island, which was a BAFTA-nominated crowd-pleaser in its own right.
The original duo—Tom Basden and Tim Key—are back, this time bringing along Carey Mulligan for some star power, a lovely seaside Welsh village for ambiance, and just enough sweetness to give you a sugar headache.
Here's the setup: Charles (played by Tim Key), a reclusive and eccentric lottery winner, lives alone on the titular island. He's a sentimental soul, and his life's dream is to see his favorite band—McGwyer Mortimer—reunite. The problem is that the bandmates (Tom Basden and Carey Mulligan) are ex-lovers who haven't spoken in years.
Somehow, Charles manages to convince them to come perform a private gig just for him. Old wounds open up, awkward reunions unfold, and everyone learns a little something about themselves over tea and toast and softly strummed guitars.
Now, don't get me wrong—there's stuff to like here. The cinematography is lush and romantic, lovingly capturing this quaint little coastal town that feels practically laminated in charm.
The music is genuinely good (the band's original songs are surprisingly solid), and Carey Mulligan adds some real emotional heft to what could have been a featherweight role. She elevates things, as usual, with a naturalism and grace that gives this thing legitimacy.
Basden and Key—who also wrote the script—clearly know the terrain they're playing in. They understand awkward British humor, unrequited emotions, and the gentle sting of regret. And to their credit, they're not afraid to let some of those bittersweet notes ring out, even amid the whimsy. But man… sometimes the whimsy drowns everything else out.
Take Tim Key's Charles, for example. He's this endlessly chipper, painfully earnest man-child who wants nothing more than to orchestrate a perfect evening of music and emotional reconciliation.
That's nice. But after a while, his puppy-dog enthusiasm becomes grating. It's like he wandered in from a Wes Anderson movie that got rejected for being too twee.
And then there's Akemnji Ndifornyen, playing Mulligan's husband. This character seems to exist solely to gum up the works a little before being unceremoniously written out of the movie because, well… he's a birdwatcher. I'm not kidding. He just wanders off halfway through the film to go look at birds. Talk about lazy screenwriting.
But for all its faults—and there are plenty—The Ballad of Wallis Island is still a movie that I'm recommending. Why? Because it's nice. Not groundbreaking, not challenging, not even particularly original—but nice. And sometimes, a little nice goes a long way.
Especially when it's wrapped in lovely visuals, some solid tunes, and a tone that genuinely wants you to feel good. It's a hug of a movie, albeit one that might overstay its welcome.
And here's the most important thing it did for me: it reminded me of Local Hero, Bill Forsyth's 1983 masterpiece. Now, that is how you do a quirky, small-town, character-driven comedy with heart.
That film is one of the greatest examples of humanist filmmaking ever made—funny, moving, quiet, and profound all at once. The Ballad of Wallis Island wants very badly to be Local Hero, and while it never quite gets there, it deserves credit for trying.
So here's the final verdict: this is a flawed, overly sweet, occasionally gimmicky little movie that still managed to win me over, if only just. And if it inspires even a handful of people to revisit—or discover—Forsyth's Local Hero, then that's a win in my book.
A good film, not a great one. But quaint? Absolutely. Maybe too quaint. And that's okay. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Sometimes, a movie is such a wild, unhinged ride that you almost have to recommend it for the sheer audacity of its ambition. Freaky Tales, the latest from Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, is exactly that kind of movie. It's messy and uneven, and it absolutely bites off more than it can chew — but man, it swings hard. And honestly? I kind of admire the hell out of it.
This thing is basically four interconnected short films, each a standalone mini-movie drenched in '80s Bay Area specificity, genre homage, and blood—lots and lots of blood. It's a love letter to Oakland circa 1987—not just a time but a vibe, a scene, and a political moment, all mashed together and filtered through the brains of filmmakers clearly relishing the opportunity to cut loose.
From a filmmaking standpoint, this thing is all over the place — and I mean that as both a criticism and a compliment. The movie is a blender of styles: comic book panel transitions, '80s music-video lighting, kung fu fight choreography, horror movie gore, animation, slo-mo shootouts, and shoutouts to Repo Man, The Last Dragon, Dead Presidents, and yes, even Scanners. It's like they threw their entire Criterion collection and a VHS stack of cult classics into a film school thesis and hit "purée."
Some of it works. Some of it doesn't. But Boden and Fleck — who've made some seriously great films in the past like Half Nelson, Sugar, and the criminally underseen Mississippi Grind — clearly just wanted to have a blast with this one.
And even if you're not from Oakland or you don't catch every cultural reference they make (I'm from Chicago, and I still vibed with it), you'll feel the energy and love for a time and place that mattered deeply to the filmmakers.
And let's not forget the performances. Pedro Pascal and Ben Mendelsohn are MVPs, Ji-young Yoo is a discovery, and the movie is packed with musicians, dramatic actors, and comedians all doing wild, weird, energetic work. There's a sense of community behind the scenes here — like everyone was invited to the same giant genre party and just said, "Yeah, let's get weird."
Now look — this isn't perfect, far from it. The first half drags a bit, the tone can be wildly inconsistent, and not every story hits its mark. But when this thing finally finds its rhythm, it becomes something genuinely exhilarating. It's flawed, for sure, but it's fun, and it's got heart. That counts for something.
So yeah — I'm recommending Freaky Tales. If only for the second half, if only for the go-for-broke attitude, if only for the sheer ballsiness of making something this ambitious, messy, and original in an era when most studios would rather reboot a toothpaste mascot than greenlight something this unpredictable. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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