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August '26 Digital Week I

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Wednesday, 12 August 2026 23:58; Written by Kevin Filipski

CD Release of the Week

Paul McCartney—The Boys of Dungeon Lane

(Capitol Records)

Now 84, Paul McCartney has released his first album since 2020’s lively McCartney III, which he recorded during the COVID lockdown. The Boys of Dungeon Lane has gotten some of the best reviews of McCartney’s storied career, although to these ears it’s an unsurprisingly tuneful but often familiar-sounding attempt that doesn’t approach his best work, from Ram and Band on the Run to Tug of War and Electric Arguments. But it sits comfortably ahead of lesser efforts like Wild Life, Pipes of Peace and Off the Ground.

The album’s title is a line from “Days We Left Behind,” the most nakedly autobiographical of Paul’s compositions here, a beautifully realized reminiscence of earlier times that uses his aged, cracked but still formidable voice to great advantage. Not far behind in the nostalgia sweepstakes is “Home to Us,” a charming if slight duet with Ringo Starr (who also drums on the track, and whose jam with producer Andrew Watt was the genesis of this song) about growing up in a run-down part of Liverpool, with cute backing vocals from, of all people, the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Texas’ Sharleen Spiteri. “Down South,” describing a bus trip out of Liverpool, revisits the observations of two songs from McCartney’s 2013 album New: “On My Way to Work” and “Early Days.”

It all goes down very smoothly and often indelibly in the mostly one-man-band approach McCartney and Watt employ; the jam on the opening “As You Lie There” is a good example of Paul’s genius at arranging—although, as usual, it’s his effortlessly melodic bass playing on songs as disparate as “Ripples in a Pond,” “We Two” and the insanely catchy “Never Know” that makes The Boys of Dungeon Lane a cut above other legacy artists’ new music.

When we get to the quartet of melancholic but powerful ballads that ends the album—“Life Can Be Hard,” “First Star of the Night,” “Salesman Saint” and “Momma Gets By”—we realize that, if these are the final songs Paul has recorded in an unparalleled six-decade-plus career, it’s quite an unabashedly emotional statement to go out on.

In-Theater Release of the Week

Late Fame

(Magnolia Pictures)

Based, of all things, on a posthumously published novella by the great Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler (who also wrote Traumnovelle, which Stanley Kubrick adapted as his last film Eyes Wide Shut), this low-key character study stars a perfectly cast Willem Dafoe as Ed Saxberger, who wrote a forgotten book of poems decades earlier and who’s been an anonymous post office employee since then—until he is recognized by a group of pretentious young artists that want to give him the long-awaited notoriety they think he deserves.

Kent Jones directs economically, Samy Burch’s script has finely-etched characterizations and dialogue, and the rest of the cast—especially a dazzling Greta Lee—superbly backs Dafoe. But there’s simply not enough here for a 95-minute feature, which spreads everything—and everyone—thin.

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Mars Attacks!

(Warner Bros)

Director Tim Burton could never be accused of coddling the masses, as his cheerfully cheesy 1996 spoof of sci-fi movies—which was released several months after the insipidly self-serious alien invasion blockbuster Independence Day—delightfully demonstrates. In a large and jokey cast, Jack Nicholson shows off his unique ability to be hilariously over the top in the dual roles of the harried U.S. president and a shady Vegas casino owner, while there are also delicious turns by Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Pierce Brosnan and Michael J. Fox.

Even the goofily gory special effects help make this a dopey but hip satire. The film’s bright colors explode in 4K; extras are two new featurettes with screenwriter Jonathan Gems and some of the film’s technical crew.

Streaming Releases of the Week

The Drama

(A24)

Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s darkly comic look at Emma and Charlie, an engaged couple navigating pre-wedding jitters, has some insightful and funny moments, but when Emma confesses to the worst thing she’s ever done, contrivance precariously hangs over the rest of the film.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson make this couple charming, vindictive, self-pitying and impassioned, but they fight an uphill battle as Borgli directs with a sledgehammer, making what happens during the preparations and reception more obvious and less pointed as the film goes along. When their photographer keeps saying she’ll “shoot” them or when Emma’s dad gives a reception speech that makes clear he doesn’t know how she became deaf in one ear, you know you’re dealing with a director who stacks the deck, which for a film like this, is fatal.

Blu-ray Release of the Week

Good Manners

(Distrib Films US)

In Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s disturbing modern 2018 fairy tale, nanny and housekeeper Clara becomes quite close to her boss, single mom-to-be Ana, and as their relationship grows more intimate, she discovers that Ana might have been impregnated by a werewolf. That revelation is the jumping-off point for a film that, after switching gears halfway through, turns out to be startling, unsettling and risible simultaneously.

Even though it outstays its welcome—and could be shorn of 20 minutes, particularly scenes like a young boy being stalked as prey—it’s brilliantly done. The film’s colorfully unnerving look shines on Blu-ray; extras are a two-minute making-of featurette; the shorts A Stem (2007), directed by Rojas and Dutras, and Doppelganger (2012), directed by Rojas; and commentary by critics Shelagh Rowan-Legg and Carolyn Mauricette.

In “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” Actor Tom Holland Capably Expresses the Webbed Wonder’s Existential Crises While Fighting Multiple Threats

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Tuesday, 04 August 2026 14:27; Written by Brad Balfour

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Director: Destin Daniel Cretton

Cast: Tom Holland, Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Tramell Tillman, Michael Mando, Mark Ruffalo

It seems like the only way to make an epic feature film these days is to pack it on with multiple plot turns and odd secondary characters. That was certainly the case with “The Odyssey,” “Disclosure Day,” and “Supergirl.” Now we have “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” It’s much the same in this case as well. It goes from one twist to another with one Marvel Cinematic Universe character after another joining the fray with various and complicated plot twists as well.

This is the fourth edition of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man iteration. In the earlier editions of his Spider-Man, the character too often fell back on a cliched emotionality. “Ahhh, teen angst;” ahhh, the great responsibilities of being a super powered being; Ahhh the coping with all the teen cliches.”

When Spidey was first invented by artist/writer Steve Ditko — with Marvel’s master Stan Lee — he was a character truly coping with personal and social traumas, some of his own making, some societally driven and a lot due to the radioactive spider bite that transformed him into Spider-Man. When Sam Raimi directed Tobey Maguire as Spidey, their versions emphasized Peter Parker’s nerd side, that teen he was originally meant to be in the comic books.

In the earlier three films of the Tom Holland cycle, Spider-Man was fraught with sorting himself out while the world around him gets more complex with multi-verses, deceptive villains and magic spells. As young as he was, Holland’s version of Spider-Man had to grow into one nurturing an on-going existential crisis, but one that was less teen-driven.

Now with this fourth go-round, director Destin Daniel Cretton can reset him without the world knowing his secret identity of Peter Parker. That leaves Spider-Man to become a great crime-fighting machine — albeit a perplexing one without any apparent source of financing — which brings him back to ground zero without any additional identity crisis.

There’s still the matter of this film as a continuation of the previous one. With Spider-Man’s reset in the world at large, after the debacle of the previous film, he gets an opportunity to re-do his life and become the hero he was trying to be in the first place. Albeit, this time, without his former best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon) and former girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), which leaves him with an empty space he struggles to fill. He is determined somehow, to bring them back into his life. Alone without his high school buddy or best girl, he nonetheless is more focused.

In "Brand New Day," the villains and enhanced beings populating this film are, for the most part, neither as heroic nor villainous. Jon Bernthal’s Punisher and Mark Ruffalo’s the Hulk are certainly ambiguous as to their hero status. Oh, Scorpion and Tombstone are clearly villains, but they’re not the real threats in this film. This edition really addresses a far more ambiguous and serious menace — ultimately one of the government’s own doing.

Once Spider-man becomes absorbed in finding this mysterious villain who can jump into anyone’s mind and control them -- a villain bent of attacking Damage Control, the government agency meant to address superhero and supervillain messes -- the film shifts focus. It then brings to the fore, an important character from another part of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, a mutant.

To make us feel he is the superhero he is, the film includes many dynamic scenes of swinging action and fight sequences rendered with overwhelming angles and motion. Incorporated into the narrative is a side of Spider-Man not seen before — his arachnid side is now trying to take over his life adding further to the existential crisis he’s fraught with throughout this film. He starts to develop arachnid-generated organic web shooters instead of the mechanical ones he had created adding to Parker's confusion.

Besides being Spider-Man, Parker is one hell of a scientist so he’s capable of addressing the arachnid threat leading him to create an inhibitor as a solution — one that can be used with The Hulk and the mutant threat as well. Without addressing all the quirks and narrative glitches to this film — and there are many — this film still succeeds as a humanistic thriller as well as an absurd costumed hero drama.

That aside, when the film focuses on the mysterious psychic villain, one who confounds Parker, he seeks out his old friends and begins to incorporate them again in his life. As this expands the film, it lends itself to the integration of this new Spider-Man — as a crime fighter and as a person.

Of course, it takes some time to set up who this villain is other than a mysterious “someone” capable of switching bodies and taking over minds. Once revealed as Jean Grey, the X-Men mutant whose psychic powers rival Professor X’s, Sadie Sink’s character’s identity may be the worst kept secret in MCU history. Nonetheless, it adds a whole new dimension as to where the Spider-Man saga sits in the larger Marvel universe.

All of this — Parker’s existential struggle, a rigorous crime-fighting persona and a more fully evolved emotional identity — makes “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” an inspired take on a superhero film. It demands a lot more acting from Holland to make it feel convincing. And with a rich cast of supporting characters, it offers a wealth of personalities for him to bounce these identity crises off of.

July '26 Digital Week IV

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Thursday, 23 July 2026 20:25; Written by Kevin Filipski

In-Theater Releases of the Week

I Want Your Sex

(Magnolia Pictures)

Gregg Araki has been making weirdly off-kilter sex comedies-cum-dramas for more than three decades, and his latest shows that, for better or worse, he’s still at it, combining trenchant social commentary and crude sexual antics, all wrapped in sentimentality. Olivia Wilde is intoxicating as Erika, a performance artist and dominatrix who makes her latest assistant, young and naïve Elliott (a well-cast Cooper Hoffman), her sexual slave.

But that’s the only the tip of this provocatively ridiculous satire of sexual consent, modern art, social media and whatever else Araki and cowriter Karley Sciortino toss in—including possible murder. In the end, it’s both too much and not enough, its bullseyes weighed down shallow silliness. But Wilde gives an eye-opening performance that helps negotiate the bumpy parts.

Lost Chapters/Los capítulos perdidos

(Several Futures)

This modest but affecting documentary/fiction hybrid was made by Venezuelan Lorena Alvarado, who cast her grandmother Adela, her father Ignacio and her sister Ena as versions of themselves to tell a poignant family-history story that is both introspective and universally accessible.

The 67-minute feature shows the beauty in the everyday alongside the attempt to hang onto one’s cultural history, with neighborhoods of Caracas shown lovingly by Alvarado and her cinematographer José Ostos. (Alvarado also shot parts of her film, and she’s responsible for the subtle editing as well.)

Brunello—The Gracious Visionary

(Blue Fox Entertainment)

While watching this hagiography of Italian designer Brunello Cucinelli by director Giuseppe Tornatore—best known for his Oscar-winning foreign film Cinema Paradiso—I kept thinking that there’s material for a decent documentary, but since Brunello is the producer as well as the “star,” there’s no way Tornatore had free rein to show the warts and all of Brunello’s life and career.

There are beautifully cinematic moments, notably when Tornatore visualizes the world of the young Brunello through the older’s memory, but this basically sanitized look at a genial billionaire celebrity relies too heavily on reenactments and fawning interviews with family and celebrity cheerleaders like Oprah.

4K/UHD Release of the Week

Mortal Kombat II

(Warner Bros)

Based on the hugely popular video-game series comes a sequel to the 2021 reboot that, despite its overlength (it’s nearly exhausting two hours), has some excitement in its well-paced martial-arts battle sequences, which help keep the dreary melodramatics among its characters to a minimum.

Director Simon McQuoid (who also directed the reboot) and writer Jeremy Slater balance the inherent self-seriousness with a cleverness that makes it watchable and entertaining. The film looks fantastic in 4K; extras include several making-of featurettes.

Streaming Release of the Week

Due West

(Cineverse)

This earnest to a fault melodrama stars an appropriately stern-looking Adrianne Palicki as a bartender who desperately tries to have an abortion in one of the most repressive places on earth for women: rural West Texas. She asks for monetary help from her brother and gets a visit from the bothersome Pastor Mike, played by a game Henry Thomas, but the deck is stacked against her and even the very air carries around an aura of stifling masculinity.

Director Evan Miller and cowriter Hardy Janson shrewdly underplay their heroine’s dilemma in a place where politics is never brought up, it’s Palicki’s memorably no-nonsense portrayal that makes this more than mere propaganda.

Rock Album Review—“Dear God” by the Pretty Reckless

Details: Parent Category: Film and the Arts; Category: Reviews; Published on Saturday, 18 July 2026 22:00; Written by Kevin Filipski

Pretty Reckless—Dear God

(Fearless Records)

If 2021’s Death by Rock and Roll was an unsparing self-portrait of Pretty Reckless singer-lyricist Taylor Momsen’s descent into depression and drug abuse after the shocking deaths of Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell and the band’s producer Kato Khandwala less than a year apart, the band’s new album, Dear God, is another musically diverse and emotionally varied group of songs that deal honestly with the consequences of a life lived in excess.

Although recorded in spurts over the past couple years in between world stadium tours as an opening act for AC/DC, Dear God sounds remarkably cohesive. From the slashing chords of “For I Am Death”—one of the band’s most potent slabs of devilish mayhem—to the mournfully hymnal conclusion, “Dark Days,” this powerful exploration of self-abuse, self-denial and self-discovery
explodes from the speakers.

Momsen, who sings and writes the songs with lead guitarist Ben Phillips—who plays in superb lockstep with bassist Mark Damon and drummer Jamie Perkins—has said that the Beatles and Soundgarden are her favorite artists of all time, and the Pretty Reckless’ now-patented blend of grunge influence, heavy-rock riffs and Beatlesque melody, coupled with Momsen’s confessional lyrics and commanding vocal ability, is on display throughout Dear God.

The irresistible punk-pop sizzle of “When I Wake Up” and the exquisitely soulful prayer “Love Me” give way to the killer Fleetwood Mac-meets-Heart cut “Dragonfire,” which chugs along on Perkins’ propulsive drumming. Then there’s the epic, six-minute title track, a glorious Momsen vocal workout on what she has called desperation set to music; the subtle arrangement, with each verse giving way more quickly to the anguished chorus, underlines that torment brilliantly.

“About You” blisteringly describes an acrimonious breakup, while the seductive “Spell on You” nods back to Death by Rock and Roll’s incendiary “Witches Burn” to defiantly get revenge on a faithless partner. In the stirring “Eye of the Storm,” Momsen opens with a snapshot of universal despair (“Everything has gone to hell/While the rich get rich/And the poor get, well/Nothing at all, it seems to me”) before movingly tackling her own brush with mortality:

Tell the band I’m doing fine

Even though I

Almost died

But I’m still alive, alive, alive

Momsen sings those lines with a quiet poignancy that’s turns into stark defiance. It’s no coincidence that “Devil in Disguise”—a lovely eulogy to actress Michelle Trachtenberg, one of Momsen’s best friends, who died last year at age 39—follows, covering similar emotional territory with equal intimacy.

Momsen has said that the lyrics for Dear God came from her journal, and it’s true that there are guileless lines like the chorus for “Rollercoaster of Life”:

The rollercoaster of life is so nice

If you do it well, you can go through it twice

But the song itself is so infectious—and includes a wonderful Easter egg of sorts during the funky middle section, as Momsen sings about “that chili pepper heat” and Mark Damon slyly plays a Flea-inspired bass line—that all is forgiven. Dear God is as candid, aggressive and raw as its predecessor, no mean feat in today’s assembly-line pop and rock world.

Reviews

August '26 Digital Week I

In “Spider-Man: Brand New Day,” Actor Tom Holland Capably Expresses the Webbed Wonder’s Existential Crises While Fighting Multiple Threats

July '26 Digital Week IV

Rock Album Review—“Dear God” by the Pretty Reckless

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