The Beast of Mossy Bottom

THE BEAST OF MOSSY BOTTOM   ***

Steve Cox and Matthew Walker

2026

IDEA:  When Shaun's invention to quickly regrow his pumpkin patch inadvertently creates a beast in Mossy Bottom, he must use his wits to set things right.

BLURB:  Shaun and his flock are up to more escapades in The Beast of Mossy Bottom, another smart, warm, zippy installment in Aardman’s most cheerfully laconic franchise. Where the previous Farmaggedon used the template of a friendly alien-visitation story, The Beast of Mossy Bottom takes a page from the Wallace & Gromit features to riff on the monster movie. The characters are introduced as if rising from the dead — the sheep even perform some quick “Thriller” moves — and before long, a mad-scientist Shaun is in a shadowy castle lab devising the first of many hilariously convoluted solutions to a very mundane problem. As ever, the gags come at a steady clip, and their cleverness often lies in their elegant simplicity. While there are expected references to horror classics (including a Psycho shower scene with a surprising sound source), the film doesn’t depend on them. The best jokes are unrelated to the genre, such as a frightened hamster trying to run away by spinning in the other direction on its wheel, or a weather vane that’s transformed into a roasted chicken after it’s struck by lightning. The timelessness of the visual comedy is spiked with some sharp jabs at contemporary culture, most evident in a townsperson who never looks up from his phone and another who sees the beast as yet another opportunity for a live-streamed performance. The Beast of Mossy Bottom has real things to say about ignorance and mob mentality, about the monsters we only imagine, and it does so with the hand-crafted Aardman invention that itself looks like a kind of mad science.

La Bola Negra

LA BOLA NEGRA   ***

Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi

2026

IDEA:  Across multiple timelines spanning from the years just before the Spanish Civil War to contemporary Spain, the lives of a handful of gay men connect in fortuitous ways.

BLURB:  La Bola Negra names both an unfinished novel from the 1930s and a film from the 2020s that attempts to, if not finish the novel, continue its legacy and redeem it from the erasures of history. In doing so, the film symbolically enacts the very story it tells: the rescue of a lost work through the transhistorical fraternity, tenacity, and collaboration of queer creators across nearly a century. There is a hereditary inheritance here, but La Bola Negra’s braided timelines and character journeys reveal a less linear kind of inheritance, in which experience, memory, and knowledge are transferred between a constellation of gay men, both fictional and real. From Guitarricadelafuente’s gangly, perpetually sad-eyed trumpeter Sebastián, alienated amid the machismo of his Nationalist army brothers (however flagrantly homoerotic their rituals are), to the legendary Federico García Lorca, these men spiritually transcend their fractured times and places. Los Javis and co-screenwriter Alberto Conejero are the other, implicit figures in this intergenerational group of artists, and they take great care to make La Bola Negra an earnest tribute to voices stifled and lives destroyed by unjust regimes. That earnestness sometimes results in stilted, on-the-nose exposition, like when Lorca urges his lover to get his manuscript out into the world so gay people in the future can learn from it. The film is more convincing, and engaging, when it trusts its visuals and music to speak loudest, whether it’s as simple as an overhead shot of a truck crammed with maimed bodies, as ecstatic as a barroom dance captured in a single, pirouetting take, or as operatic (and lightly surreal, à la Lorca) as Carlos climbing out of a bombed-out casino onto majestic snowy slopes. There’s enough of these sequences to make La Bola Negra richer than the didactic project it sometimes feels like, and enough heart to land its idea that if trauma can be passed down through generations, so too can the tools for endurance.

Hope

HOPE   ***

Na Hong-jin

2026

IDEA:  Near the DMZ in South Korea, a destructive alien invasion prompts police and other residents to take up arms.

BLURB:  For the first hour or so of Na Hong-jin’s Hope, the threat facing a small South Korean village is entirely unseen. Police chief Ko Bum-seok wanders trepidatiously through abandoned streets and hollowed-out buildings, rifle always at the ready, while a civilian militia unloads ammunition into the horizon, to no effect. More than a classical withholding of the monster reveal, Na’s strategy of delay and visual obfuscation begins working as a metaphor for the way society turns the unknown into the enemy. When we do get a full look at the aliens, rendered in CGI that ranges from fiercely uncanny to plasticky-silly, Na emphasizes just how much they’re like us, and how little that matters. Risking cliché, it’s humanity that’s the monster, something Hope continually and mordantly underlines as our ragtag group of bellicose protagonists fire a barrage of projectiles at their foe (and sometimes fellow), all while finding ample time to squabble with and insult each other. The action sequences in Hope are exhilarating, brought together through propulsive tracking shots, crisp editing and sound design, and eye-popping stunt work. Na makes up for the sometimes wobbly CGI with an acute sense of the aliens’ physics, their superhuman velocity and strength, the way they sloppily barrel through walls as if sliding through melted butter and fling heavy objects like toothpicks. As indicated by all the signs of abjection (secretions, excretions, foul smells), Hope is concerned with the flimsiness of the symbolic walls we put up to keep out Otherness. If the film is overextended and often repetitive, it jibes pretty well with how unceasingly society keeps fighting that losing battle.

Remake

REMAKE   ***

Ross McElwee

2025

IDEA:  While Hollywood targets his 1986 documentary Sherman's March for a fiction remake, Ross McElwee reflects on the intersection of his filmmaking practice with his relationship with his late son Adrian, who died from an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2016.

BLURB:  The act of recreation, somewhat counterintuitively, typically entails alteration. We can never exactly reproduce the original; something about the way it looked, felt, or meant is unavoidably changed. Ross McElwee’s classic 1986 documentary Sherman’s March is not his only work being remade (however unsuccessfully) in the director’s Remake: so too are his memories, and by extension the decades of footage to which they’re inextricably linked. By meditating on the death of his son Adrian, the famously self-reflexive McElwee simultaneously ruminates on a life organized and revised by moving images, constantly crossing the porous border between reality and representation. The filmmaker’s memories become his filmed scenes (and vice versa), and in piecing them together in non-chronological montage, he considers how they shed their temporal bearings, unfolding completely in the present as the traces of the reality to which they no longer belong. In one of his most poignant musings, he wonders if all that footage of Adrian has retroactively turned his son into a fictional character he now primarily knows through the screen. The ethical implications here, especially related to McElwee’s misgivings about how his constant filming of Adrian might have harmed his son’s mental health, are powerful, if underexplored. But there is never any doubt that Remake is an impassioned, lucid, heartsick elegy from father to son through the medium that structured/s so much of their lives, often mutually. Among other things, it is a testament to how that medium can be a form of therapy, remaking fragmentary, ephemeral, and painful experiences as a narrative we can put our arms around. 

The End of Oak Street

THE END OF OAK STREET   *1/2

David Robert Mitchell

2026

IDEA:  A family of four fights to survive rampaging dinosaurs after their Michigan suburb is transported back to the Mesozoic Era. 

BLURB:  The End of Oak Street has the brainlessness of a bad B movie and the wateriness of something that’s been focus-grouped and re-rewritten into mush. It contains such sterling dialogue as “Maybe it will take us home! To our time!” and “Is that a fucking dinosaur?,” the latter of which has admittedly comedic intent but sits awkwardly in a movie that only fitfully commits to comedy, let alone the drama at its center. That such a warmed-over Syfy story attracted a big Hollywood budget and a pair of A-listers proves to be among its less baffling qualities. This is a movie that begins with the ripe premise of prehistoric creatures besieging a suburb and goes nowhere with it beyond a generic survival scenario. Some perfunctory domestic strife suggests the dinosaur mayhem as a corollary or parallel, but Mitchell rarely does anything interesting with his creatures to enrich subtext; they are merely implacable predators to be evaded and/or shot with the surprising number of shotguns owned by this neighborhood’s old-lady population. The characters are as bare-bones as the world they inhabit and as dimly motivated as the visuals, which contain an amount of split-diopter shots so gratuitous even Brian De Palma would likely protest. Mouth agape, lines spoken in monotone, Ewan McGregor seems to want to be anywhere else, and Anne Hathaway’s versatility is wasted on a role that calls for her to mostly tremble, cry, and scream (ditto the poor kids). Michael Giacchino’s boisterous score emerges as the most heroic thing from a film that, ironically, has many teeth but no bite.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

TEENAGE SEX AND DEATH AT CAMP MIASMA   ***1/2

Jane Schoenbrun

2026

IDEA:  Tasked with rebooting the once-popular "Camp Miasma" horror franchise, a queer filmmaker visits the reclusive former actress who played the final girl in the original film.

“Meaning, and where it is made, does not have a discrete origin in either spectators’ bodies or cinematic representation but emerges in their conjunction.” — Vivian Sobchack

“An unraveling or breaking of the boundaries of the spectator is the fundamental condition of cinematic pleasure.” — Steven Shaviro

“We are not the same viewer before, during or after the horror film event.” — Anna Powell

BLURB:  Do we make movies or do movies make us? A version of this question is posed by Hannah Einbinder’s Kris in a moment of apparent delirium, but any true cinephile knows the answer is an emphatic “Yes.” Engaging deeply with psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories of film spectatorship, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a profound expression of how cinema shapes subjectivity, and how we encounter ourselves through that process. Kris already has some understanding of this when she goes to visit Billy Presley (a breathtakingly seductive, eccentric Gillian Anderson), the actress who helped awaken her to her sexuality as a girl watching “Camp Miasma.” A schlocky, outdated slasher for most, “Camp Miasma” is a primal scene for Kris, and it’s only gradually she learns how intimately she wants to return to it, not to analyze and remake it as an academic but to surrender herself completely to the carnal desires and sensations it activated within her. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma charts this shift of consciousness as both a queer trans-coded narrative and a metaphor for how and why we watch movies. We seek the thrill, especially but not exclusively in horror films, of vicariously transgressing our physical limits, of being voyeur and object, of letting our bodies be captured by images and sounds that reorient our perception. When the cinephilia is particularly intense, as it is for Kris, the desire approaches a death drive: to be devoured by the thing you love. In stark contrast to Jane Schoenbrun’s first two features, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma turns not on a dysphoric frustration with the body in relation to media but with its liberation, via the consummation of an impossible cinematic fantasy of immersion. Reflecting the Kris-Billy dyad, the film potently blends the cerebral and the sensual, irreverent pastiche and emotionally sincere manifesto, speaking the language of High Art while validating the Low. Its final accomplishment might be that it provokes the same nostalgic, intoxicating passion for movies that so palpably powered its own creation.