“Wicked: For Good”: Revenge of the Shiz

Glinda lays her head on Elphaba's shoulder as they sit smiling in a peaceful meadow.

Down the witches’ road, one last time…until Universal decides this should be a prequel trilogy.

The best thing I can say about Wicked: For Good is how heartening it was to confirm that communal experiences can still happen if we want them. Our showing was the most crowded Tuesday night I’ve witnessed in months, and certainly the most responsive, at two points in particular. One was the film’s funniest scene — a wacky slapfight that garnered loads of laughter and audience backtalk, maybe because it was the only scene with that kind of spark — and the other was, as a Wicked fan would expect, the tender BFF-breakup duet “For Good”. I can’t remember the last time I heard that many people crying and sniffling at the same time.

Its box office grosses certainly reflect a tsunamic response from the public at large. I’m glad so many people have enjoyed quality time out of the house and away from their phones, maybe even the lady with super-sized elbows who sat next to me and only dug her phone out of her purse twice to check the time. I like to think that’s far fewer times than she’d normally check her phone if she were bored. Good on her for showing self-restraint! Anyway, here came headlines trumpeting, “CINEMA IS BACK, BABY!”

If you were among the millions of Americans who super-loved it, gave it an 11/10, and won’t shut up about it for the next month or two, enjoy your convos with other fans in your usual social spaces, you’re free to go and we’ll see you the next time Google brings you to my virtual hobby-shack’s tiny doorstep. Cheers! Have a nice day! Yay Elphaba!

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“The Running Man”: A Fistful of New Dollars

Glen powell disguised with glasses, mustache, and boring hair, very tense in a science fiction hallway filled with red WANTED posters for his character Ben Richards.

Hit Man is back! And this time, it’s personal!

Imagine you’re in a harsh alt-reality episode of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and the next question — for, I dunno, a cash prize of six bucks — is “How does this entry about Edgar Wright’s The Running Man begin?” The possible answers are:

  • A. “In the wake of The Long Walk and The Life of Chuck, the best-ever year for Stephen King film adaptations maintains its batting record with yet another home run…”
  • B. “As with his last feature film, the glam-noir psycho-thriller Last Night in Soho, Edgar Wright once again spins nostalgic flax into a new generation’s gold…”
  • C. “After his charismatic turns in Top Gun: Maverick, Devotion, Hit Man, Twisters, and more, Glen Powell keeps flying high toward A-list cloud-nine…”
  • D. “I read the book in high school and watched the Schwarzenegger adaptation on late-night cable around the same time, so I wrote 2000 words on all the differences I noticed…”

If you picked an answer, you’re wrong! They’re all lies. And in this harsh alt-reality the producers could drop your loser self into a boiling vat of Crystal Pepsi, film your embarrassing demise, have an A.I. Regis Philbin hologram deliver a mocking eulogy, and sell action figures of you covered in third-degree burns and sticky soda. But if you’re an average sci-fi citizen, of course the part that’d make you maddest in your final seconds of life on Earth is how you’re out the six bucks.

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“Predator: Badlands”: Yautja, Yutani! Yutani, Yautja!

Elle Fanning and guy in Predator costume standing back to back, sternly.

She’s a happy-go-lucky corporate android! He’s a space hunter with a grudge! THEY FIGHT CRIME!

The Predalienator Cinematic Universe is in full effect, or whatever we’re calling it! Fans of the formerly standalone IPs never expected 20th Century Studios would use the two Alien vs. Predator crossover films — one a mediocre slog with a decent Final Boss Battle; the other, amateurish drek — as the foundation of a unified transmedia empire a la Marvel and DC. After both lay fallow for years except in licensed comics, they’ve been called back to active duty and merged into a single science fiction canon through the magical power of Easter eggs.

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“Bugonia”: What If Rod Serling Made a Lifetime Movie

In a basement, Jesse Plemons and Aiden Delbis in rumpled suits standing over a seated and angry Emma Stone, whose head is shaven.

Reservoir Dogs x V for Vendetta.

Two-Time Academy Award Winner Emma Stone has earned the clout to do only whatever she feels like after La La Land and Poor Things cemented her in the Hollywood history books, not to mention her nominations for Birdman and The Favourite. She could easily coast for the rest of her career playing unstoppable world-changing women with the best fashions, hairstyles, and male costars equal or lesser to her in power rankings. She’s more than earned the right to just sit back, relax, and coast along as the headliner in a network or streaming legal drama for the next ten years.

Instead with her latest she’s doubled down on her current outré mood. Anyone who hasn’t seen her previous black comedies she made with the idiosyncratic director Yorgos Lanthimos — not just The Favourite and Poor Things, but also Kinds of Kindness, which I have yet to endure — may be unprepared for their latest collaboration Bugonia. Technically it could be reduced to a too-basic streaming-menu logline: “Resourceful businesswoman must escape the madmen who kidnapped her.” Sounds like it could be slotted snugly in between 20-year-old basic-cable remainders and Netflix’s increasingly middlebrow offerings, right? Like a prime candidate for an inaugural Investigation Discovery TV-Movie of the Week? You could maybe even con subscribers into thinking it’s a vanguard in that burgeoning new pop culture market, “Based on a True Crime Podcast”. Eventually — and it does take a while — the viewer realizes with growing horror that it’s none of those things as Lanthimos gets down with his outlandish Lanthimosian self.

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Del Toro’s “Frankenstein”: 9 Reasons Why You’ll Need a Bigger Screen

Frankenstein Movie Poster 2025 displayed outside a theater at night. The monster is a gangly tatterdemalion behind the logo and the logline "Only Monsters Play God".

Now showing at a theater near few!

Midlife Crisis Crossover Calls Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein One of the Year’s Best Filmsâ„¢!

Once again the Academy Award Winner has collaborated with Netflix after the previous successes of his animated version of Pinocchio, his Cabinet of Curiosities anthology miniseries, and the Trollhunters stuff I never looked into. Frankenstein was clearly one of the highest ranking dream projects on his wish list, fulfilled at last with a noticeably enormous budget, a stellar cast, his most lavish production design ever, and a too-brief theatrical exhibition before the November 7th relegation to its forever-home in the app’s small-screen back-catalog cellar.

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The Heartland International Film Festival 2025 Season Finale

balcony view of a movie screen down below. Onscreen is a pic of Emily Deschanel and two producers, encouraging viewers to become a Heartland member. Walls around screen are glowing green and have large icons of film reels.

Our Sunday night view from the balcony of the Tobias Theater at Newfields. The slideshow still is from last year’s world premiere of ReEntry.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Once again I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for eight consecutive days about the six films I saw at three theaters in nine days, one virtual screening we’ll get to in a moment, plus a few other entries that included still another movie, albeit more of an anti-Heartland studio product that opened the same weekend. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet!

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Nuremberg”

Russell Crowe faces off against Rami Malek while Leo Woodall stands in the background.

Zeus vs. Freddie Mercury! TWO GODS ENTER! ONE GOD LEAVES!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Our final theatrical screening of the festival, and their official Closing Night selection, was also the very first entrant I bought tickets for, based on a single selling point: Academy Award Winner Russell Crowe IS Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring IN Nuremberg! And that must be announced or imagined in the deepest possible Epic Voice Guy voice or else why bother.

Same as with the Academy Awards, World War II and the Holocaust are common subjects in Heartland selections, for reasons tragically obvious to anyone who’s seen enough of them and nevertheless supports the important, evergreen “Never Forget” message behind them. Nuremberg wasn’t the only such film on the docket, but it was certainly the highest-profile one. Its writer/director James Vanderbilt has worked on numerous big-budget crowd-pleasers (the last three Screams and both Amazing Spider-Mans, among others) and recruited a strong ensemble to tell this particular story, of which the indisputable highlight is — for those just joining us — Maximus himself as Göring, the bombastic narcissist and highest-ranking Nazi still alive after the war, the sort of boo-able real-life Kingpin in more ways than one, whose every move and every haughty gaze was like a steamroller through every room he entered.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Blue Moon”

Andrew Scott in a tuxedo, one foot taller than Ethan Hawke in a 1940s suit. Both stand in a bar, staring through us at an offscreen woman.

Super-Villain Team-Up presents Moriarty and The Grabber!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Next up is Blue Moon, the twelfth film I’ve seen by prolific director Richard Linklater. His last joint, the true-story dramedy Hit Man, was among my favorites last year. Though his subjects vary wildly from one to the next, his films and their ensembles always have their laid-back charms, so invitingly that you don’t feel time passing because you’re enjoying the conversations so much…even when the loudest guy in the room is blissfully unaware that everyone else is aware of his problems.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “It Was Just an Accident”

An Iranian auto mechanic sits in his van in the middle of the desert, smoking and thinking. Not far away are a body-sized hole he's dug and a discarded shovel.

CAUTION: Rated NC-45 for scenes of smoking.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Our next film is Heartland’s sold-out “International Centerpiece Screening” of It Was Just an Accident, which has been building buzz online among pro critics in the days leading up to its limited release in the largest U.S. markets this week. It’s rare for a small foreign film to open in Indy the same weekend as it does in NYC and L.A., so it’s nice that Heartland provides such occasions for us to feel like we count as a Major City by Hollywood distribution definitions.

The latest from writer/director/producer Jafar Panahi isn’t the first time he’s shot a film in his native Iran entirely without the government’s permission. The same held true for previous films such as This Is Not a Film and No Bears, not to mention some of his earlier ones that were made “legally” only to be banned later. A suspended prison already hangs over his head, but he still has plenty more to say through his art.

Full disclosure: after seeing Accident but before sitting down to collect my own thoughts, I read Vulture.com’s new interview with him, which contained a wealth of fascinating information. Anything in this entry that resembles Fun Trivia comes from their article.

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Happy Birthday”

A middle-aged woman and a tiny girl at the counter of a brightly lit bakery, where the chef is icing a cake.

Last-minute birthday cake shopping: kind of a headache in every country.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

As someone who watches every Marvel Cinematic Universe installment for better or worse, I’ve found it interesting to see what filmmakers do next after they’ve done their time in the machine. Sometimes they move on to equally gargantuan pop-culture universes (The Mandalorian, Superman). Sometimes they have a ball in their own sandboxes (Sinners, Wolfs). Sometimes they give the impression Marvel broke their brains (The Gray Man, Fast X). Sometimes they step back from Hollywood excess and find fulfillment in smaller works (Next Goal Wins, the upcoming Hamnet).

Case in point: our next film, Happy Birthday — Egypt’s official submission for Best International Feature at the next Academy Awards — comes to us from the talents of writer/director Sarah Goher, who was on the writing staff of Moon Knight, and her co-writer and longtime creative partner Mohamed Diab, who directed four of the show’s six episodes. (Two other writers receive a “Story By” credit, but as of today I can’t verify their names online for some reason.) Its total budget was probably less than what they paid the VFX team in charge of rendering Khonshu’s skull, but sometimes an indie film is just as capable, if not more so, of slipping through your jaded defenses with its sincerity right before it breaks your heart.

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