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)

Any metaphor where marginalized people are represented by something nonhuman is a deeply flawed place to start from, but District 9 is interesting enough to make it worth criticizing anyway.

Twenty-some years ago, an alien mothership essentially broke down over Johannesburg. When nothing happened for a few months, humans busted it open to find the surviving aliens inside had become refugees, starving and needy. Enclosing these aliens in slums turned into a generational problem. Now a local organization is responsible for “evicting” the aliens and relocating them to a concentration camp 200km north of Jo’burg.

District 9 is essentially told from the perspective of Wikus van der Merwe, a bureaucrat in charge of the legal procedural elements of this relocation. One morning he’s merrily genociding the unborn children of the aliens; within hours, he becomes a fugitive.

From a filmmaking standpoint, I have no complaints. I love the world building in the front half of the film. Fake documentary is a delightful format. Foreshadowing with interviews is such a fun way to build tension and grow that sweet, sweet curiosity gap. The back half is such an exciting action movie!

This was not a particularly high budget movie ($30 million in 2009, compared to Avatar’s $237 million), but they made very good use of it. The CGI holds up well. The physical effects are disgusting. I love every revolting minute. And can we talk about how they made insect-like aliens so freakin cute? Those pedipalps sure emote.

It’s hard to get past the metaphor, though. Even though I think it’s a really easy flaw to engage with. I’ve written books that did similar, without intending to say “marginalized people are werewolves,” but I think this is something that someone who comes out of a society’s dominant caste is much likelier to do than the marginalized, yeah?

There *is* something different between aliens/humans (or werewolves/humans), but in reality, humans do this to humans who are not different. We invent lines to fabricate excuses to treat each other terribly. And then we, as creators, decide it’s easier to tell this story with some metaphoric Other to overcome the biases that prevent us from humanizing humans. It’s a problem. I’m not equipped to evaluate whether we can place the blame for this flaw on the stories when they are reflecting the problems of the societies they grow out of.

If nothing else, District 9 isn’t lazy about the metaphor. The characterization of Wikus as a selfish, horrible human is marvelously consistent to the point that I think the filmmaker understood what a bad person he was portraying.

It’s also true that members of a dominant caste are never “safe” from the violence they enact on the marginalized. Wikus’s evolution into an alien hybrid could be compared to what happens when a member of the professional class becomes profoundly disabled. No longer is this person protected. They become “a body” subject to all the same injustices as anyone else. Wikus was married to the daughter of one of the executives making these calls and it still wasn’t enough to protect him.

There are no good humans in this movie. Wikus is given depth–he’s a wife guy, which butts up against endearing until he fokkin destroys all those fetal aliens–but the only characters who behave like protagonists are Christopher Johnson (the lead alien) and his adorable son, whose “humanity” are unfaltering.

It’s sorta fun having an action movie where you’re happy to see all the humans meet terrible, blasty deaths, and Christopher Johnson gives us a reason to remain invested until the end. I wish we had gotten a sequel three years later when he returned. I like to think the movie could have been a complex political thriller about the diplomacy that would unfold between aliens and humans when they’re on more equal footing.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about District 9 sixteen years later; aside from my reservations with the metaphor on a fundamental level, I think it held up very well. I’d prefer watching this to James Cameron’s contemporary Dances With Wolves a thousand times over. It’s nauseatingly relevant to 2025 America. And there’s a cool sequence with a mecha.

(image credit: Sony Pictures)

Harold Crick is a very regimented, very ordinary tax auditor whose life gets strange when he starts hearing an English woman narrating his every action. It turns out he’s the main character in a literary novel. Unfortunately, it’s a tragedy. He’s going to die.

Stranger than Fiction is a clever story wrapped up in a cozy, charming film, starring a sedate but heartfelt performance from Will Ferrell. Much like the way that Jim Carrey used his comedy chops to provide a lot of emotional nuance to a less-comic character, Ferrell makes us care so deeply about a very tedious man that I cry every time I reach the film’s climax. And I know how it ends!

I’m a writer myself, and you can tell where I am in the process on a book based on how similar I am to Karen Eiffel. If I’ve relapsed on any substance usage, standing on tables, and writing on typewriter instead of a sensible computer program, I am at the hard part. (Side note: I want an IBM typewriter with a type ball. Please let me know if you can hook me up.)

Somehow I am also all the other characters in this movie, too: the anarchist baker, the guy who counts tooth brush strokes, the English professor who thinks a meaningful death is important enough to literary history that it should be allowed to happen, the auditor who wants to go to space camp…

It’s a sweet movie that feels very grounded and colorful, a lot like good literature. It’s a nice romcom. It’s very funny sometimes, though not in the same way as many Will Ferrell movies. It somehow feels much older than nineteen-years-old (almost two decades now!), but also very current — which is, I guess, the very definition of timeless.

(image credit: Sony Pictures Releasing)

Watching “Hero” is just me saying, “This is my favorite part!” thirty times, and then it’s over.

Hero is a martial arts film about a figure called Nameless who claims to have killed three would-be assassins of the King of Qin. By bringing their swords to the king, Nameless can get within ten paces of the throne. The truth unfolds as Nameless tells his story.

This is in my top 10 favorite films of all time, even though I extremely disagree with its politics.

It turns out I actually don’t mind imperialist propaganda if it’s awesome.

In the style of Rashomon, Hero proceeds through three intertwined narratives: the stories Nameless first tells the king, the king’s interpretations of the story, and then the truth.

Every narrative is punctuated by distinctive martial arts sequences with different palettes. This remains one of the most visually stunning movies ever, twenty-one years after its American release. (Fun fact: Quentin Tarantino talked Miramax into releasing Hero in the USA.)

The use of CGI is sparing relative to modern movies. You can see where it’s used (mostly in water effects), but it kinda makes the places they didn’t use CGI even more impressive. The color themes are mostly achieved through set dressing and costuming rather than heavy-handed grading. Huge numbers of extras are used in the king’s palace and battle sequences. The divine casting allows for much of the fighting to be performed by the lead actors themselves.

Such killer visuals and a majestic score demand a worthy story, and the “he said/she said” story is beyond elegant. Most of what you learn about the characters telling their stories is expressed through the differences in the way they’re told. It’s paced brilliantly.

I disagree with the philosophy so much, though. Everything is in service of an autocratic message. Characters die to support the empire. We’re meant to believe this king-led war is noble, the king himself is soft-hearted, and all the dying is worth it. It goes against everything I believe politically.

Even so.

I often say, “I like movies that are good,” and I’m sorta joking…but not really. I will watch any genre. I don’t have a lot of preferences outside seeing art executed with intention, skill, and meaning. The meaning of this one is wholly unpalatable to me, but God, does it do it well.

Not once in my entire life have I looked as cool as Nameless walking away from something. Not even once.

(Image: Beijing New Picture Film)

Materialists is about a late-30s matchmaker who fundamentally doesn’t believe in love because she thinks she’s a bad person. She doesn’t value herself, so she can’t value anyone else, and she insincerely walks through her job saying things about love that feel hollow to her. She’s good at her job because the hollow things are generally true. She just can’t put anything into it.

Two men enter her life at a time when her job gets hard. She used to date one, and she dumped him because she didn’t value what he could offer. She tries dating the one who is “good on paper,” but ultimately doesn’t value what he offers either (which is actually economic security, in this case).

The heroine must learn to value herself in order to value her poor ex-boyfriend’s offering, which is simply love.

You’ll notice I keep saying the word “value.” That’s because the characters do, too. Materialists, in its title and screenwriting, is not going for subtlety of message.

I don’t expect a lot out of romantic movies (whether romcom or romdrama). What I want is a happily ever after, chemistry between the leads, and a fundamental belief in the redemptive power of love.

Materialists gave me two out of three of those. I never believed the chemistry. The other two are the more important elements, so that’s okay.

The acting is…not good. None of the leads seemed comfortable with the highly stylized dialogue. Please note it’s not *bad* dialogue; it’s just definitely not the way people actually talk, and everyone is talking to the theme of the movie, using the same keywords. And the lead trio simply do not sell it.

Their acting was worst when it needed the highest intensity, too. I swear, none of the actors believed what they were saying. Pedro Pascal’s emotional moment seemed almost like he was laughing at the material instead of crying with vulnerability. I think Chris Evans hated the way his character talked to Dakota Johnson’s.

Even so.

It’s quite a good script (which was not a good fit for these generally competent actors). I liked the airy editing and the gentle pacing. It had nice music. I enjoyed the themes that they were uncomfortably talking around.

My takeaway was pleasant because it’s hard to get fussed about a movie that does, genuinely, believe in love. Even poorly delivered dialogue doesn’t kneecap the heroine’s character arc.

It’s got a bit of a dreamy feeling, not unlike Serendipity. It’s a lot warmer and less cynical than basically anything post-Pretty Woman in Julia Roberts’s career. It has the grounded look at real love of a Reese Witherspoon movie. And the filmmaking of an Oscar nominee, of course.

I usually watch romcoms around the holidays, and Materialists will fit nicely in my rotation, which is the highest compliment I can pay. I think this will age well and perform favorably in the context of other romcoms. It’s not exactly an enthusiastic four star, but a very comfortable one.

(image credit: A24)