Carolina Caroline, a Southern Gothic erotic crime thriller that’s emerged into the summer dumping grounds of TIFF ’25 onto a very small number of screens, feels ripped from the Classical Hollywood era and re-equipped with modern tools and modern sensibilities as to what can be depicted onscreen. It’s far from what you’d call original, but its execution is transcendent.
Texas – Caroline Daniels (Samara Weaving), stuck working her father’s small-town gas station, is swept off her feet by professional criminal Oliver Anderson (Kyle Gallner). The pair sets off to South Carolina to confront Daniels’ walkout mother, robbing small-town banks as they go.
Classic ’80s poster art betrays both the love of genre and franchise history, but also a general lack of showstopping visuals. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.
“The Mandalorian” arrived on computer screens in 2019 a smash hit, by far the most anticipated launch series for Disney+ and a beacon of hope for antsy Star Wars fans six years into Disney’s ownership of the property. Disney’s shift to a streaming-first business, as well as its potential to realize the promise of turning a galaxy far, far away into a setting for consistent and varied media, was riding on this, and it was everything anyone could have hoped for – a bare-bones episodic space Western with Jon Favreau, a lifelong Star Wars fan-turned filmmaker, showing everyone what he loves about the property.
One pandemic and double-strike later, The Mandalorian and Grogu arrives on IMAX screens in 2026 the first Star Wars film in seven years – the promise when Disney bought the property was a new Star Wars movie every year until you die, but The Rise of Skywalker would kill all enthusiasm for that a month after “The Mandalorian’s” streaming debut – and it arrives with a bored shrug.
The only sequence in Melania that threatens to expand into a watchable narrative with conflict and stakes appears suddenly through the morass of extended scenes of nothing happening. Former president Jimmy Carter has died, and Melania Trump, credited as star and producer in a documentary named after herself, faces a personal crisis. His funeral, which Trump must upend her schedule to attend, falls on a painful anniversary for her, and she must publicly grieve for this stranger while privately facing her own demons.
The film is referring, of course, to Jan. 9, the anniversary of her mother’s death. What? Did anything else happen in early January in recent history that might be an uncomfortable memory for Trump?
Melania is an expansion on Trump’s October 2024 memoir, also titled “Melania,” which was, reportedly, in line with how the First Lady is often perceived – self-sheltering and selectively empathetic to the extreme that she can guiltlessly coexist with her husband. Caught between the apparent desperation for usable footage and the multiple pairs of blinders the film must keep strapped to its face, Melania raises itself to the level of a new form of cinema – the cinema of omission.
Ironically, the sets that do the most are the ones trying to do the least. Images courtesy Netflix.
⭐⭐
Rating: 2 out of 5.
What’s happened is writer/director/producer Guillermo del Toro has made the same movie he’s been making for 30 years and stitched a heavily altered Sparknotes version of “Frankenstein” overtop of it, just detailed enough that you’ll hear some of the main metaphors talked about, but with attention shifted to the point that they are now themes of a different story altogether. Del Toro’s film is about what all his films are about – cruel male authority figures and the lasting wounds they cause and uncomfortably conflated mother/maiden figures who want to drop everything fuck that monster.
In a painfully on-the-nose way, the patchwork of parts sourced from different narratives doesn’t really fit together.
With $40 million more to blow on Badlands, the film cranks the bass and spends a lot more time with the CGI-rendered fauna of Genna, as well as Dek, who spends most of the movie without a mask, his mandibles drawn on in post. Images courtesy 20th Century Studios.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4.5 out of 5.
Predator: Badlands is a movie, a real one, the kind you grew up hearing about. It’s got everything – constant action, adventure to far-away lands, coming of age, complex relationships between technology and nature, rugged individualism weighed against a communal survival strategy and all the implications that has for the future of the human race, capitalism grinding against human connection and even some romance, if you really want to read that into it.
Genna- Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Yautja viewed as physically inadequate by his clan, has come to the most dangerous planet in the universe to hunt the Kalisk, an apex predator reputed to be unkillable, to prove himself. As he navigates the profoundly hostile environment, he brings along Thia (Elle Fanning), an android from the neighboring Alien franchise who’s had her legs removed by the beast, for advice and guidance.
Disney is trying to structure all of its franchises like they’ve structured the MCU, with a single executive who loves the property overseeing everything – obviously, it’s been hit-or-miss – and seems to have handed the keys to the Predator kingdom to director/producer Dan Trachtenberg. Two live-action films in, it’s been an astonishingly good choice. Predator: Badlands is a direct, big-budget upgrade over Prey, the Trachtenberg-directed Hulu original that quietly resurrected the franchise in 2022. They’re extremely similar films that use Predator lore to wrestle with toxic masculinity, which the creatures were specifically designed to mock. Screenwriter Patrick Aison, cinematographer Jeff Cutter, composer Sarah Schachner and producer John Davis all join Trachtenberg from film to film.
Reel Entropy 