This was my first time watching RoboCop, and it fully earned its legendary status. I don’t have enough superlatives for it.

What economy of storytelling! The amount of worldbuilding and character construction they accomplish in about 90 minutes is bananas. This is the length of a two-part episode of Star Trek: Voyager, more or less, and it manages to establish the hyper-violence of 2030 New Detroit, the police state, political conditions, advancements in technology, and so much more while leaving ample room for a delightfully unpredictable story. The structure meant I really didn’t know exactly what story they were telling until the very end, at which point I was *deeply* satisfied by a conclusion that felt inevitable.

Some of this storytelling economy is done through its amazing cinematography. Take the bathroom scene: A couple of corporate young guns are shit-talking elder leadership, and positioning the camera on the floor of a stall so we can see a man’s leg lets us know they’re making a huge mistake. They have been overheard. It’s such an elegant visual that establishes an entire scene so we can whizz through dialogue and resume our gun-blasting, store-exploding action with hardly a breath’s pause.

Murphy, our titular RoboCop, manages to become sympathetic amid overwhelming police violence with a short conversation about his son. The pistol spin he learned so his son sees him as a hero is a brilliant character gesture: as soon as RoboCop is activated and sent to the gun range, spinning the pistol tells us that Murphy remains present inside the machine to some degree. His tour of his former home, abandoned by his grieving widow, serves dual roles in ever-prescient worldbuilding and glancing at the heart-aching loss incurred in his death.

The editing does a lot of heavy lifting. Quick cuts between news cheerfully reporting on horrible global events, morbid commercials about board games where you nuke everyone, and police violence feels very much like scrolling TikTok nearly forty years after RoboCop’s release. Although everything has a deliciously 80s retrofuturism to it, they still managed to predict a lot about the modern world. I mean, they’ve got robot drone dogs. If the movie did anything wrong, it was expecting us to take forty years to get there.

RoboCop hates cops, hates greed-is-good capitalism, and hates gentrification. It condemns late-20th century America with a brush so broad that it extends far into the future. Yet it doesn’t exactly feel cynical: We care deeply about Murphy and the loss of his family. Ending the story with Murphy’s self-identification with its human side feels like choosing humanity, a wholeness of self that technofascism denies the individual.

Many later movies I love are clearly in homage to RoboCop, and RoboCop did it better in every metric that matters. This was fun to watch and just a hoot and a half. I can only hope that in another forty years, we’ll look back with relief at what we’ve left behind.

(image via Orion Pictures)

Some movies don’t need dialogue and are worse off for its presence. The Northman is among their number. If you took away every scene where characters are having conversations, or made them mostly indiscernable (say, speaking a period- and regionally appropriate dialect, without subtitles), The Northman would be vastly elevated.

The strength of visuals make mediocre dialogue a bit insulting. Do we really need Amleth and Olga talking about their shared offspring when we also see children appear on the family tree after some Beltane forest lovemaking? Do we get anything out of Gudrun’s monologue about betraying her dead husband that we wouldn’t understand from her weirdo, feral performance? Filmmaking is a visual medium, and Eggers is so marvelously good at it here, talking feels like a gauche redundancy.

The actors don’t do any justice to the dialogue–although these are normally great actors. The casting is another thing that fails this movie. Anya Taylor-Joy plays herself (I say affectionately), Nicole Kidman’s iPhone face is *extremely* distracting (though I do love her, always), while Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe are clearly overgrown theater kids enjoying a chance to get paid for puppy play.

Give me The Northman exactly as it is, but take away its dialogue and cast a passel of nobodies–I’d have no criticisms. I wouldn’t even notice the pacing slows *way* down during the dialogue because I’d be nodding along cheerfully with all the talking I didn’t understand.

Those are pretty serious, foundational criticisms. I gave this movie five stars anyway on account of leaving me absolutely pumped, hyped on testosterone, punching the air over REVENGE. Yesss, Viking Hamlet, murder everyone! Hammer their bodies to trees! Follow Bjork’s advice! Why does the valkyrie have braces? Is there dental care in Valhalla? Who cares!

This pushes my buttons so hard. I have a deep love of berserkers, Iceland’s landscape, and longboats. A sword with a name (Draugr, in this case) will always own my heart. Mythic tales of betrayal among the ruling class are so good.

Consider the battle on an erupting volcano. Does it make any sense that these men can heavily breathe volcanic gases among the extreme heat of magma? No! Is it an extremely vibey, homoerotic battle that leaps off the TV screen straight into my loins? Yes!

I am smitten with the thing Eggers does where he treats mythology with the most sincere care. I don’t care if it’s Puritan-hunting witches or conversations with Willem DaFoe’s head. I’m so happy watching it.

Every time I watch The Northman, I grow twenty chest hairs and rip off my shirt, roaring, to show them to the world. Note that these chest hairs are entirely donated by the irrationally shredded, hairless-as-seals men central to the movie.

(image via Universal Pictures)

The year is 2002. I’ve just graduated eighth grade, we spent the day at Great America theme park, and I am terribly sun burned on the bus ride home. The driver and one adult are awake; everyone else is very much asleep. Outside the windows, it’s pitch black. The bus smells like bus toilet, but I can’t get there because people are sleeping across the aisles. I am sun sick and motion sick. I am pretty sure I’m going to die.

After enduring back-to-back watches of The Sandlot, the chaperone has decided to reward herself by watching The Others. I have long since learned that adults want nothing to do with me when I’m feeling poorly at night, so I’m not sure she knows I’m also watching.

Isolated and ill among a sleeping crowd, The Others proceeded to traumatize me FOR LIFE.

There was a lot about The Others I couldn’t grasp as a dehydrated 13-year-old, but I recognized its quiet moodiness and unhingedly terrifying ghost moments. The little girl talking about Victor? Drawing the scary witch lady? All the curtains vanishing? The girl turNING INTO WITCH LADY? And then the kids hide in a wardrobe. “Stop breathing!”

The Others doesn’t get the same cultural recognition as Shyamalan’s Sixth Sense, but it’s every bit as good, and it’s got similar elements: terrifying-to-me as a child, the twist, great kid actors, and a surprising emotionality.

Nicole Kidman’s character Grace is utterly unhinged, in an amazing way. I think this is my favorite performance from her. There is a tightly wound quality natural to Kidman that works with a mother struggling after the German occupation in Jersey. She is tending disabled children alone, with no hope for her husband’s return from the war. She looks like she’s made out of the most frail glass, about to shatter — although we later learn that already happened.

It’s not *really* a surprise to learn the Irish servants are ghosts the whole time. By the time we learn Grace and her family are also ghosts, you can kinda see it coming, too. But I think it would be hard to guess that Grace smothered her children in their sleep before turning the shotgun on herself. The signs are there. The daughter hints at it. It’s just so *horrible*, you don’t *want* it to be true.

As an adult, there are levels to the horror that I never could grasp before.

The husband stumbling out of the fog, confused, suggests that he is trapped in an eternal war. He chooses to return to the infinite battlefront (“sometimes I bleed”) rather than remain with the horrifying knowledge that his wife killed their babies.

The children are stuck with their mother who killed them. It’s hard to call their father cowardly considering where he died and where he is dead, but it’s a hell of a choice to leave one’s offspring with the woman who killed them. It’s not like she’s gotten more even-tempered in death. Then again, maybe he doesn’t have a choice.

I found myself disturbed to realize the Irish servants of the house are…servants in the afterlife? They died before the Irish War of Independence, but they’re still serving a psychotic English woman fifty years later, and presumably will be in this house together indefinitely, based on the last monologue from the Mrs. Mills. Is it any worse than children trapped with the parent who killed them, or a soldier who never leaves the battlefield? Probably not.

But it has disturbing implications for where the lot of them have ended up.

Grace’s family are Catholic — and I would love to hear the filmmaker discuss why they chose Catholic over Protestant, how this faith interrelates to the Irish servants. I think there must be some kind of social implication I am too 21st Century American to grasp. It’s possible they chose Catholicism because it’s just so darn punishing. Catholic concepts of sin and the afterlife are a running theme throughout The Others. I need to watch it a couple more times to guess at what they were saying, but I’m inclined to think it boils down to “they’re all in Hell.”

Even so, it’s got a reasonably happy ending. Grace’s family stays in the house. The children are no longer sick and can enjoy themselves in death. Grace remains isolated, her children are still trapped with her, and the servants are servants, but the tone is one of peace.

It’s a stunning horror movie. A few really terrifying moments overlay the kind of existential questions that can keep you up at night, bothered for hours. It works if you’re a frightened young teen who already knows adults aren’t safe, or if you’re a mom who’s questioned her sanity during the fever of lonely childcare. I personally prefer it to The Sixth Sense. But it’s great we can have both.

(image via Dimension Films)

In Red Sonja (2025), a variety of character actors chew scenery, look super hot, and swing swords at each other. Sonja is a feral horse girl who thinks class traitors should be beaten to death by Cyclops. She is better at bouldering than your college boyfriend.

If this were one of the seven DVDs I had in 2003, it would be my favorite movie. I would have pulled it out of the bargain bin at Walmart by lowering myself into it waist-deep, and selected it exclusively because it has a hot woman with a sword on the cover, only to be surprised I actually liked it.

I would have terrorized my siblings by making cardboard swords and hunting them around the house.

This movie doesn’t have the budget to be anything except what it is: the meat-and-potatoes of fantasy genre that we don’t get nearly enough of anymore. We used to have Dragonheart! We had Mists of Avalon! Then we started getting a lot of dispassionate high-budget money laundering blockbusters. Every fun fantasy concept was stretched out into TV shows that Netflix cancelled after two seasons.

Not Red Sonja. This movie is the chosen one, like Dungeons and Dragons, meant to reunite massive fantasy nerds with other fantasy nerds who deeply care about the genre and will watch it without caring if the armor is made out of PVC.

Is it great? I mean, no, probably not, but nor is it bad outside the limitations of a lower budget movie. The extremely solid story only ever sags in the penultimate act, and there is one cut between scenes that confused me, but literally those are my two entire complaints about Red Sonja.

Its heart is in the right place.

I could entertain myself by watching this in constant rotation with my other six DVDs for years, getting encyclopedic knowledge of the flick, memorizing the lines, and devoting myself to the scary white sword lady.

If you liked those kinds of movies, you’ll like this, and you should watch it. Set your expectations appropriately. Don’t take it too seriously. Have a great time.

(image credit:  Samuel Goldwyn Films)