Thoughts on the things I experienced over the past week: 4 Movies, 1 TV show, 1 TV special taping of a play, & 1 novel

The Furious (Kenji Tanigaki, 2026)
👊👊🦵👊👍👍

Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg, 2026)
I didn't actually watch it again, but 1200 words into the review it became really clear that I didn't have much worth saying about the movie and my plan to talk about how humanity would act in the event of a true Disclosure Day (e.g. irrefutable evidence that we are not alone in the universe) hit the stumbling block of “Actually I don’t know what I think” so that wasn’t going to be worth writing let alone reading. In short, really liked Disclosure Day. Spielberg’s the GOAT, and for all of its flaws (and there are many), my brain screamed “MOVIES ARE BACK” multiple times. I know Spielberg has always been a big Empathy guy, but it’s genuinely nice to see big movies just outright reject the worldviews of the worst people in our society. (I should rewatch Superman… looking forward to seeing the girl one this weekend!)

The Furious (Kenji Tanigaki, 2026)
The Furious’s final flight is I think the most impressive piece of action choreography I've ever seen, and I've seen a whole lot of it – enough that I can say with medium-high confidence that it's in fact the most impressive choreography in cinema period. I genuinely cannot wrap my brain around how they pulled it off. And throughout there is so much complexity in the dance: an interlocking of bodies that results in a lot of genuinely unique images (the trailer shows the, like, cheerleader pyramid the guy builds). 

And yet… it is also imperfect in a way that I found kinda depressing? This film invites comparisons to The Raid and its sequel, but I recently rewatched the former specifically to pick out my favorite moves for a presentation party, and man does it does not hold up to that scrutiny. Like, when I saw the guy pick up a hammer I was expecting something akin to the subway flight in The Raid 2, yet it barely seemed to do much more than his first other than add little spots of VFX red to wherever it struck. 

I was ecstatic to see Joe Taslim and Yayan Ruhian face off again fifteen years after The Raid… until it became clear how the passage of time has limited Ruhian’s abilities. No longer can he be just chucked across a room or run up a wall. The very obvious stunt double does liven things up a bit, but like that hammer the fight feels weak in comparison to so much of what’s happening around it. It is less technical and less intense, and it features this guy who we’ve seen do such things and yeah it’s sad! It feels less like Jaka vs Mad Dog and more like John Wick vs Viggo Tarasov at the end of the first film. (Bleak!)

And then you have everything that's happening with Bryan Le, martial arts YouTuber who was previously most visible for his role as the main security guard in Everything Everywhere All at Once. He plays a monstrously strong baddie here whose every move is visually enhanced in some way. I expect it's mostly wire removal, but there are some shots that are either fully green screened or have crazy background removal and it’s extremely distracting when surrounded with action that may be over the top but still conforms to something like reality. 

And I guess it makes sense that The Furious’s director was in charge of the action for 2024’s Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a movie that was totally ruined for me when out of nowhere it introduced a literally magically invulnerable big bad. That kind of thing just kills it for me: this utterly human action dance turns into utter nonsense, and while The Furious isn’t that bad, it definitely diminished the overall effect for me.

It’s still an absolute feat and everyone should see it and enjoy it and etc., but yeah… add one of these to the above emoji list: 🙁 

Girls Like Girls (Hayley Kiyoko, 2026)
I know that I was never a teenage lesbian because it was news to me that Hayley Kiyoko wrote a Certified-Gold song called “Girls Like Girls” which she then co-directed a music video for that went viral on Tumblr and subsequently turned it into an “Instant #1 New York Times Bestselling” novel before being adapted yet again into a feature film. Where does it go next? Probably like a traveling show that performs in auditoriums in high schools around the country.

Maybe-jokes aside, I really liked this movie! Someday I’ll figure out why this sorta story resonates with me as hard as it does (I was not even a straight teenage girl!), but today wasn’t that day. And while you could make a compelling argument that the music video does a better job telling the exact same story in a fraction of the time (and with an objectively more fun ending), I actually liked the kinda meandering feeling of it. Like, should they have played almost the entirety of Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek”? Of course not! And it’s such a bummer that that scene didn’t end with a Dear Sister style shootout!

Especially considering how little development there is for basically everything that is not how Coley and Sonya look at each other. Like, I would have watched an entire movie that focused much more on the relationship between Coley and her father (Zach Braff?!), which is not precisely a dynamic I’ve seen before and made me feel some real feelings (which is weird because much like not being a lesbian I had a very normal family situation growing up (thought I did watch it on Father’s Day!)!). I expect the novel goes into all of that and the various conflicts that we only see at the edges, and maybe that would be interesting but I’m never going to find out cuz I’m not gonna read it and I don’t feel like I need to. For whatever it lacks, the vibe just locked me the heck in and didn’t let me go until after the post-credits. 

Happy pride. 

Leviticus (Adrian Chiarella, 2026)
Uhhh… unhappy pride?

It’s maybe unfair to reduce Leviticus to “It Follows with messier rules but a clearer metaphor,” but I genuinely mean it as a compliment: this is easily the best It Follows-like to date and in some key ways I think improves upon its obvious influence. A gay kid named Naim moves to a hyper-religious community where he meets a guy, and upon being found out they are both cursed by a “Deliverance Healer” to be followed by a phantasm shaped like the other. It looks and sounds and (sorta) acts like them, and it wants to fuck right here (wherever here is) right now. But succumbing to those inhibitions means suffering immediate violence, eventually, death.

It's the most horrific version of conversion therapy possible: acting on your desires – even being alone with them – will prove fatal. The more I think about it the more terrifying the basic concept is. Movies like It Follows and Smile mostly make strangers look spooky even if the monster is able to present as a loved one… but Leviticus’s monster only ever looks like the one person: the one you most desire. And so you can’t trust that person because you don't and can't know whether they're even real. And the moments where you don’t know what and who is real is really when the film is at its best. (The tension in the theater was palpable.)

Where it’s at its worst is when it decides that the depiction is too subtle and it has to tell you what’s happening. There is this conversation late in the film when Naim talks to his mother about what's happening, and the conversation doesn't really make sense unless it’s viewed through the lens of what it represents, and that’s super frustrating because it pulled me way the heck out of the movie. And I was briefly worried that it was going to be another one of these movies that just collapses at the 11th hour, but fortunately the movie seems to almost realize its mistake and save itself from itself. Phew!

A great feature debut for Adrian Chiarella, and another feather in the cap for this genuinely great year in horror!

Widow's Bay (Katie Dippold, 2026)
Speaking of which, I think we can say that Apple TV has officially supplanted HBO as the brand for quality television. While the third season of a star-making drama that was one of the most watched shows in HBO’s history came and went as basically a footnote, Euphoria Season 3 died in relative obscurity, Widow's Bay rightly got folks talking around the water cooler.

Pitched by someone on Bluesky as “The mayor from jaws runs a Stephen King town,” Widow's Bay is as pure a blend of horror and comedy as you'll find… which is great, because they are two great tastes that taste great together. Like they’re peanut butter and chocolate level good together, so it makes sense that someone would publish a paper like First They Scream, Then They Laugh: The Cognitive Intersections of Humor and Fear. 

Film Crit Hulk rightly points that what makes Widows Bay so effective is its confidence. Too often, comedy is used to undercut some serious or impactful moment because the creators are too scared to let a moment be real… and that simply is not the case with Widow’s Bay. It is not a joke-a-minute romp (like the next item on this list) and can actually go quite a while in spooky mode before putting in a joke, and the joke isn’t there to diminish that horror. Like, it’s very funny when a terrifying slasher-type monster jumps out of a second story window instead of taking the stairs… until it gets up and immediately goes back to stalking. It’s genuinely clever and cool and creepy, and it exemplifies what makes this show so fucking good! And I’m hecka glad that they have greenlit a second season… partly because the season one finale doesn’t resolve as many threads as I would have liked and opens up a whole lot more I very much want to see explored… but mostly because I just want a whole lot more of this show.  

Peter Pan Goes Wrong (Mischief Theatre, 2016)
A key piece of theatre’s thrill is that at any moment something could go catastrophically wrong. A book isn’t going to catch fire in your hands. A movie will reach the credits. I guess the only equivalent would be e.g. a Bethesda game where at any moment a bug threatens to derail the whole experience… but that's not thrilling.

The Goes Wrong series, whether really on stage or in filmed form, is built on that thrill. The members of the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society never get more than a minute of respite before something, ya know, goes wrong. In every way you can imagine and plenty you can't.

I saw the off-broadway show twice and enjoyed the two-season TV series, but I didn’t make it to the Broadway run of Peter Pan… so pretty cool to learn that a filmed special version played on the BBC is available for free on YouTube. And yeah: it's more Goes Wrong! I laughed a lot and I laughed really freaking hard. Just watch it. You'll have a great time. 

The Great Passage (Shion Miura via Juliet Winters Carpenter, 2011)
I’m going to be really vulnerable right now and admit that it wasn’t until literally this moment, halfway through my 35th year of life, that I internalized the power of a dictionary. I’ve read 1984 multiple times! I've talked at length about the danger of misusing words. But I've never really considered the mechanics of dictionary creation, of the process of determining the “correct” use I railed against abusing. 

That's what The Great Passage is about, or really who it's about. But even that doesn't feel quite right because The Great Passage is not the book Shion Miura wrote: 舟を編む is. Juliet Winters Carpenter translated the book and holy cow what a feat of translation it is: choosing when to translate a word vs transliterate it and then translate the definitions and the subtle or not-so-subtle distinctions between them such that we can understand even the slightest bit the brain of a guy who devotes his entire life to the creation of this book of words. 

(I actually know a guy like Majime. I think he'd be much happier editing a dictionary.)

The story has also clearly resonated in its home country, since after the novel was finished it became a live action film, then a manga and anime, and most recently a live-action series. Of these, only the original film and anime have translations of their own, which is a shame because it would have kind of fun to fully immerse myself in all of the forms this story has taken and write something fuller about The Great Passage project. I dunno. I will probably watch the movie, and maybe also the anime at some point. 

And if I do, you'll be able to read all about it here.