Fallen behind so doing a catch-up in three parts: two on (4) movies (each) and a third on (3-4) books.

Also, if you haven’t read about me jumping out of a plane yet, you should! 

The End of Oak Street (David Robert Mitchell, 2026)
What a year Anne Hathaway is having, huh? This is the fourth of five films, and every single one has been at least good (so I've got some hope for Verity) with Mother Mary still sitting up there as my #1 of the year so far.

But its competition keeps getting stiffer. I’m officially done saying “Movies Are Absolutely Fucking Back” because it’s just self-evident at this point, but this was another one where my fist involuntarily pumped because they say They Don’t Make Em Like They Used To but The End of Oak Street sure is Like They Used to Make Em (complimentary). People have half-joked that the best Spielberg movie to come out this year is not the one he directed, and while I liked Disclosure Day more than most, I certainly liked it less than The End of Oak Street, which just fucking rules. Here is a novel take on “Dinosaurs fucking up our world” that brings heart and humanity into its suburban hellscape: what would happen if your idyllic little town suddenly found itself 65 million years ago? How would people react? Would people survive?

What really matters when the chips are down? You know the answer: it’s family. When Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor >:( and their kids :( you know that whatever the fuck is going to happen it’s going to bring their family closer together.

And, sure… but absolutely not in the way you expect.

I interviewed director David Robert Mitchell for Filmmaker Magazine more than a decade ago, and I’ve always just had nice feelings about him. He’s a good guy who made an exceptionally good horror movie and then made some different things because that’s what he wants to do: he wants to mix it up. But even though The End of Oak Street is primarily a sci-fi story, it is obviously from the guy who made It Follows: it has the same rhythms and even some of the same camera moves (I nearly laughed when they finally did the full pan). You feel him in it, and you’re mad that he hasn’t gotten anything made in nearly a decade. 

We can only hope that he is as back as the movies are.  

It Ends (Alexander Ullom, 2026)
You find yourself on a road that seems it will never end. You and three friends(?) will be driving tens/hundreds/maybe millions of miles together because you took an unfortunate turn down the wrong road. If you stop the car, people in the woods will try to take it from you. You can give up like they did (some of you will), or you can keep on going because you truly believe that this must be leading to something, that It Ends.

You find yourself trying to film the above on a budget. You have four characters in a car that you have to shoot through an infinite expanse of forest. Exteriors are easy enough: you can actually just go to a forested road. But any real road will eventually end, and if you want any kind of continuity of background, better to do it in a studio.

But you can’t afford the highest end screens or the highest end computers to run them, so every once in a while the digital tree world you have running behind your characters hitches for a frame or two. And it looks super fucking weird, but this is the downside of using screens: if it looks good, the work is done. If it looks bad? The work is even more difficult, and clearly it was too difficult for the team behind It Ends because it’s in the finished product and it looks terrible in the same way the whack-ass color grading in several of the day-for-night scenes looks terrible. I get that it was cheap, but come on…

In any case, I like what It Ends is trying to do. Unlike, say, Exit 8 which follows a man wracked with uncertainty as he tries to navigate a maybe-eternal nightmare of his own, the horror of It Ends it more cosmic; there is no explanation of what is happening or indication that anything else will happen. These four kids, and all the people in the woods, are just caught up in whatever it is that’s happening. They keep looking for answers, digging deep into themselves to see what evils they had committed that may have ended with them here. Maybe they’re dead? Maybe maybe maybe. 

And so it becomes a story about what it takes to keep going, the radical faith that there will be an end in the end as well as what happens when people don’t have that faith. 

I just wish it had a little more money to do that with.

Buddy (Casper Kelly, 2026)
I’m sure that as a very young child in the mid90s, I watched at least some mascot-based television (I’m a few months older than Barney), but I don’t actually remember doing so.

And this could mean that I was doing so before I was really making memories. Or that they were just not especially memorable… Or maybe one night a big friendly-seeming, fluffy-suited entity dragged me through the screen and I spent weeks or months or years stuck in a never-ending cycle of life lessons and also murder.

😱😱😱

If you had asked me what the man behind the Adult Swim classic short Too Many Cooks would do if given a feature film, I would have described something not entirely unlike Buddy. Casper Kelly’s brain has clearly been fried by a very specific era of television that hasn't actually existed in decades but will never really leave those of us who were alive to see it. The film immediately transports you to Way Back When, starting with three back-to-back episodes of the show (including, crucially, opening and closing credits)… with each one getting increasingly demented. Only after this do we learn that there is a “real” world at, not in a grainy 4:3 but something rather more cinematic. (Narratively motivated aspect ratio changes are fun.)

And the line between reality and television quickly collapses, so yeah of course it all reminds me of Too Many Cooks. That short just keeps on going: it is way too long, but if it was any shorter I don’t think it would work at all. It’s always gotta one-up itself and commits and commits to that bit so fucking hard that you just have to appreciate the sheer gumption of it.

And Buddy is the same way. It never stops escalating, never stops surprising you with its twisted turns. Which is fun, but also let’s be real, he has no choice. It’s been 214 years since Too Many Cooks, and so much of horror has been influenced by it. Plus, mascot horror is so normalized that it’s already had its boom and bust cycle in the gaming space. Plus plus, Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared has been doing fucked up takes on children’s entertainment for literally a decade. Kelly is coming into well-worn territory at this point, and all he has to set him apart is that gumption.

But that gumption gets him plenty far.

Coyote vs. Acme (Dave Green, 2026)
I may not remember watching Barney, but I sure as heck remember watching (and loving) Looney Tunes. The constant cartoon chaos was just endlessly enjoyable, yet there was an end to it for me. For whatever reason, in my older age I just kinda stopped watching it. Maybe it’s because there wasn’t new stuff being made (and then when new stuff was being made, it wasn’t as good as the classics), or maybe I had just moved onto anime and was too good for classic Western animation.

But Coyote vs. Acme brought all those feelings roaring back. I guess I can thank David Zaslov for being a total piece of shit who decided to kill the completed film to ease his tax burden, because he gave it a real life after death. The film will make more than WB wrote down, which feels like a fuck you to that guy even if there must be an acknowledgement that were it not for what he did, most of us probably wouldn’t even know this thing existed let alone gone out of our way to see it.

Then again, maybe I’m not giving the movie enough credit, because while the whole Thing that WB did makes its message hit ~1 million times harder, it didn’t need that to make its comedy work, and it definitely didn’t need it to make the emotion work. And this has both of those in spades: I never imagined that a Looney Tunes movie about the damage that the Acme Corporation has done to cartoon characters with its shoddy products would be able to genuinely tug at heartstrings, and yet there I was damn near tearing up at a Morse code message from a witness testimony in front of congress.

What.

So the word of mouth that’s happening now would have happened then, because everyone has the same kind of shocked-and-awed reaction. I haven’t cared much about any of these characters in decades, but Coyote vs. Acme brought all those fuzzy feelings roaring back. But it’s not about the nostalgia: this movie puts in the work to make these characters genuinely relevant and compelling in a new way for a new audience.

And even if I’m old, I’m gonna speak on that new audience’s behalf: well fucking done.