“You Can See Everything”: Holmes & Watcher

glassy-eyed Elizabeth Holmes inside a body scanning device

Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the erstwhile Theranos, which is a portmanteau of “ER” and “Thanos”.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Once in a blue moon I’ll see a documentary in theaters! Usually those blue moons wax during Oscars season, then wane for the other forty-odd weeks of the year. Last month I already met my non-Oscars documentary quota for the decade with Linkin Park’s half-doc/half-concert film, but that one was a special occasion for music fandom. Here we are again with another brand new doc, and for one of the oldest moviegoing reasons of all: it’s The New Movie No One Online Will Shut Up About — not critics, not entertainment sites, not even my local comic shop, which doesn’t sell movies and stands to gain nothing from bringing it up.

Last weekend You Can See Everything was the #2 film at the American box office, right behind the big video-game flick and well ahead of the entire Halloween-season horror parade. It mesmerized critics when it premiered last month at Telluride Film Festival, who were converted into its front-line proselytizers and have now preempted all other programming and trains of thought just so they can keep extolling its surreal nesting-doll structure of eye-popping twists within twists with as few spoilers as possible. I’ll try doing the same here, because it is worth walking into unwittingly, but there is just so much to it.

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The Heartland International Film Festival 2026 Season Finale

Us smiling, nicely dressed and in cramped seats with an old red ceiling and dangling light above us.

Selfie time at Scottish Rite Cathedral for the opening night soiree. We tried to ignore our leg cramps.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Once again I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for about the six films I saw at four venues over eleven days, and two virtual screenings we’ll get to in a moment. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet! For those just joining us, those six films were as follows, ranked:

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Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #6: “The Debut”

Angry theater director glowers at a meek redhead actress.

Paul Giamatti! Julianne Moore! You’ll be surprised which one is the scariest!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Last but not least: the festival’s Closing Night selection The Debut, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival last month. It’s the third film from actor-turned-writer/director Jesse Eisenberg, whose Poland group-tour dramedy A Real Pain played at HIFF 2024 and won an Academy Award for costar Kieran Culkin. Not ready to slow down, Eisenberg nimbly switched gears for this comedy-about-musicals — wrote several all-new songs for its play-within-the-film and prerecorded a short, Heartland-exclusive thank-you that ran in front of our screening.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #5: “Elsinore”

Andrew Scott does Hamlet's graveyard scene, holding Yorick's skull but turning away from it.

“Stop giving me that look, Yorick. Your infinite jest isn’t helping.”

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Next up: the British late-stage biopic Elsinore, which premiered last month at the Telluride Film Festival. Not just the next entry in the Hamlet Cinematic Universe after last year’s Hamnet, it’s a tour de force for actor Andrew Scott, who doesn’t merely breathe new life into the Bard — he pays tribute to another actor who breathed new life into the Bard before he in turn breathed his last.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #4: “Tender Loving Care”

Two thirtysomething women laugh and have tea at a round dinner table.

Alice Bailey Johnson and Kate O’Flynn chat about their love lives with elderly parents, as one does.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Next up: the British indie Tender Loving Care, which premiered last month at the Telluride Film Festival. Writer/director Mike Leigh, age 83, has announced his seventeenth film will likely be his last after a 55-year run. I’d only seen two of his prior: the Thatcher-era slice-of-life Meantime costarring the impossibly young Gary Oldman and Tim Roth (call them Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Babies); and the 1996 Best Picture Oscar-nominated Secrets & Lies, concerning unexpected genealogy results and buried traumas. Leigh’s improvisational filmmaking style set them apart from most of my usual fare, but I regret I haven’t prioritized more of his works. TLC offers a strong incentive to attend his farewell party: Emmy Award Winner Kate O’Flynn, who’s had a banner year as one of the stars of Apple’s horror-comedy series Widow’s Bay. As a fan of that bizarre show, obviously I had to see what she’s done next, this time in an accent from her own homeland.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #3: “Wild Horse Nine”

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as 1970s guys in awful brown suits and old hats, laughing in an airport.

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell remind us of America’s darkest era, when brown suits were “in”.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Next up: Wild Horse Nine, which premiered last month at the Venice Film Festival, the fifth feature from UK writer/director Martin McDonagh. I’ve seen all his previous films to date: In Bruges; Seven Psychopaths; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; and The Banshees of Inisherin (and even his 2004 Oscar-winning short Six Shooter). I would’ve shown up for this even if Heartland hadn’t chosen it as this year’s Centerpiece Screening. It’s another volatile mixture of McDonagh’s key ingredients — razor-sharp black comedy, gunshots, F-bombs, familiar faces from his previous films, and men in tight, non-romantic relationships sharing a life trajectory only to face harsh endurance tests while we watch to see who flinches first with bloodying results.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #2: “Sender”

Redhead woman sits in her house, despairing amid tons of weird packages.

Helly from Severance sprouted a new innie!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

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. Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits…

Next up: the mystery-shopper thriller Sender — the feature-length debut of writer/director Russell Goldman, which premiered last March at South by Southwest with a small yet mighty cast. It’s based on his previous short Return to Sender, which starred Fargo‘s Allison Tolman and isn’t currently available streaming, unless you count a copy I found with some YouTuber talking over all eighteen minutes of it. So I’m unable to watch it for value-added compare-and-contrast fun — all the more annoying because I just started watching Fargo a few months ago and now I’m intrigued.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2026 #1: “Jimmy”

KJ Apa IS Jimmy Stewart!

Jimmy Stewart welcomes you to the Magic of Movies!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: 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 are on a nationwide tour through the Hollywood festival circuit; others are local productions on shoestring budgets. Projects with household names screen alongside indies with big hopes — sometimes with a cast of unknowns, sometimes with a familiar face or three from pop culture’s past and present.

Heartland’s 35th edition runs October 7-18 and will be my fourth time diving in. I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all, maybe more if time permits. Some are highly anticipated and might go on to compete at the next Academy Awards, much like last year’s Blue Moon and It Was Just an Accident. Or they’ll be smaller and criminally overlooked, which sadly is how things can go sometimes. (My favorite Heartland 2025 entrant, Egypt’s heartbreaking Oscar submission Happy Birthday, never found a US distributor and is still unavailable to stream here.) Results and fates will vary. Longtime MCC readers know the rule: every film I see in theaters gets its own entry, no matter how big or little. Given the viewing volume and thereby the subsequent writing volume, I might keep these write-ups shorter than usual. (I said MIGHT. Stop looking relieved.)

First in line: Heartland proudly presented the sold-out Festival World Premiere of Jimmy — a biopic of legendary actor Jimmy Stewart, focusing on his World War II service and the aftermath. It was a natural fit for Heartland — his family has maintained close ties with them since the late 1990s, even allowing them to name one of their annual awards after him. As one of the festival’s two big opening-night galas, the screening was held downtown at Scottish Rite Cathedral and welcomed cast and crew members for an intro and Q&A afterward. Accompanying me was my wife Anne, who read a Stewart biography not too long ago and was curious to see what they covered. We didn’t take notes during the Q&A, but she did her best to catch a few pics from our long-distance uppermost balcony seats.

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Linkin Park: Unshatter” End Credits

Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong in concert, both singing and standing on the same amplifier stack.

Mike Shinoda and Emily Armstrong knocking it out of the Park, with Alex Farrell and Joe Hahn backing them up.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: In 2024 Linkin Park, the very first band that my son and I ever had in common, released From Zero — their first new album in seven years, after lead singer Chester Bennington’s suicide. I wrote in part:

Mike Shinoda finally felt ready to record a revival with his bandmates, along with a new drummer (music-biz veteran Colin Brittain) and new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong, who reaches Bennington’s octave range (cf. her belt-sander’d screams in the needlessly acroynmized “IGYEIH”) and does her part for the legacy…the band dusts off their stacks and recaptures the first two albums’ nü-metal glory days with quiet-loud-quiet showcases like “The Emptiness Machine” and “Heavy is the Crown”, though their two favorite topics remain self-aware primal-scream sessions and tirades toward unnamed offenders who suck. With the band-reset button firmly pressed, the question of where LP goes from here — i.e, venturing into new ideas or rewriting the same single every few years, like Skillet — remains To Be Continued for now.

After recently wrapping up a two-year world tour, their story continues with Linkin Park: Unshatter, a documentary that’s been rolled out as a specialty theatrical release with limited showtimes and no AMC Premiere savings allowed. It isn’t a Behind the Music episode surveying their entire history for the uninitiated — more of a From Zero making-of, charting their gradual emergence from the throes of grief and rage to figure out what comes next. (Quoth the familiar lyric on the movie’s poster: “The hardest part of ending is starting again.”) At 54 it was my first time ever seeing a concert film in theaters, or anything like one because my favorite bands never make them.

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Zach Cregger Presents Literally the Greatest “Resident Evil” Film in World History

Scared young white guy on a wintry city street vaguely points an assault rifle.

A terrible fright / We’re scrounging tonight / for weapons in a winter wonderland!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Horror won big at the Academy Awards! While Sinners and Frankenstein carted off a combined seven categories on behalf of the 2025 field, Zach Cregger’s child-abduction plot-twister Weapons darted out of its own dark corner and took home Best Supporting Actress for Amy Madigan — best known by Gen-X as Field of Dreams‘ Concerned Wife and Uncle Buck’s annoyed girlfriend — who was completely unrecognizable as the mysterious Aunt Gladys, a fiend who one day might be called “iconic” once enough time has passed that revealing her existence isn’t a major spoiler in itself. (I hated skating around her gloriously creepy performance in my own write-up, but knowing nothing made her entrance all the more unnerving to see.)

Like Cregger’s debut Barbarian, Weapons was a sharply crafted, time-shifting puzzlebox that didn’t even reveal the spooky subgenre at its core till you’re lured halfway inside. Its staggering box office performance was even more surprising, and heralded this year’s high-grossing horror wave that’s seen films like Obsession and Backrooms luring millions back to theaters without the sort of old-fashioned Hollywood star power that once made for reliable audience bait. It’s less surprising that some corporation would take heed and entice Cregger to inject new life and/or financial viability into one of their stagnant IPs.

The lucky winner of his undivided attention is Resident Evil, the long-running game series that scrounged up seven films’ worth of zombie-virus mayhem, some of which I watched on a DVD boxed set I bought at a yard sale for a buck, then paid it forward to Goodwill. (I don’t remember how many of ’em it had — at least the first two.) Of the games, I only played through a few levels’ worth of RE4 on my son’s old PS2 — maybe 15 years ago? — till I found myself wishing there were a Bethesda Studios-style option for Leon to shove the President’s daughter Ashley off a roof, accept the bad karma and keep playing through. So I’m not an authority on the world of Raccoon City or the Umbrella Corporation unless seeing dozens of RE cosplayers in every Dragon Con parade counts.

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My 2026 Reading Stacks #2: The Lost Marvels’ Last Stand?

The first three books reviewed in this entry.

Oversized hardcover omnibuses also make great melee weapons!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read within the past year that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.

Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife Anne or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-eight years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place.

I’ve previously written why I don’t do eBooks. Perhaps someday I’ll also explain why these capsules are exclusive to MCC and not shared on Amazon, Goodreads, or other sites where their authors might prefer I’d share them. In the meantime, here’re some reading results…

…at shorter length this time, covering the physically heaviest books I’ve read so far this year. Two of them took much longer to read than the third, and are the main reasons why my total book count won’t reach 50 this year unless I really step up my speed and/or set other hobbies aside.

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My 2026 Reading Stacks #1

The first six books featured in this entry.

Good things that came in manga-sized packages.

Welcome once again to our recurring MCC feature in which I scribble capsule reviews of everything I’ve read within the past year that was published in a physical format over a certain page count with a squarebound spine on it — novels, original graphic novels, trade paperbacks, infrequent nonfiction dalliances, and so on. Due to the way I structure my media-consumption time blocks, the list will always feature more graphic novels than works of prose and pure text, though I do try to diversify my literary diet as time and acquisitions permit.

Occasionally I’ll sneak in a contemporary review if I’ve gone out of my way to buy and read something brand new. Every so often I’ll borrow from my wife Anne or from our local library. But the majority of our spotlighted works are presented years after the rest of the world already finished and moved on from them because I’m drawing from my vast unread pile that presently occupies four oversize shelves comprising thirty-eight years of uncontrolled book shopping. I’ve occasionally pruned the pile, but as you can imagine, cut out one unread book and three more take its place.

I’ve previously written why I don’t do eBooks. Perhaps someday I’ll also explain why these capsules are exclusive to MCC and not shared on Amazon, Goodreads, or other sites where their authors might prefer I’d share them. In the meantime, here’re some reading results:

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“Tony”: The Secret Origin of Why He Went by ‘Anthony’

Tony Movie Poster with Dominic Sessa glaring at us, and Bourdain's description of his own younger self: "I was -- to be frank -- a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout and badly in need of a good ass-kicking."

Uhh, this entry is rated PG for the impolite word in its poster.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: The period-piece dramedy The Holdovers was one of my favorite films of 2023 for numerous reasons, including but not limited to Dominic Sessa in his charismatic feature-film debut as a cocky boarding-school senior whose family abandons him for Christmas and who learns humility and maybe a few manners as he eventually realizes smart-mouthing everyone around him can only get him so far in life.

Ever since, I’ve been itching to see what else he can do. I wasn’t compelled to endure the third Now You See Me, mind you, so I’ve had to bide my time. Sessa finally resurfaced on my radar as the star of Tony, a narrowly focused biopic of the late author, chef and TV documentarian Anthony Bourdain. Full disclosure: I didn’t follow him closely enough to be a “fan” — nothing against him personally, but humanity has spawned tens of thousands of creators and celebrities within the past century and I can’t possibly track them all. Years ago I watched one episode of Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, his season-3 trip to Cleveland featuring American Splendor comics creator Harvey Pekar and legendary drummer Marky Ramone — i.e., possibly its most me-targeted episode ever. I was fascinated, but I failed to stick around for more. I’ve also read two of the three graphic novels he co-wrote with novelist Joel Rose. And I was aware of his online presence from a distance, tangentially, until his untimely and horrifying passing at age 61.

By no means did I see Tony with any kind of thorough Bourdain-head foreknowledge or preconceptions beyond awareness of his forceful personality, his radically diverse palate borne of decades of culinary experience, and his passion for international travel that made our family’s annual road trips look like neighborhood errand-running. That’s all I brought with me into the theater.

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The Winning Case of “Coyote vs. Acme”

Wile E. Coyote holds his arms wide at a negotiating table. Seated next to him is a befuddled lawyer.

Wile E, Will. Will, Wile E.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Nearly three years ago I wrote about the plight of Coyote vs. Acme, the latest Looney Tunes feature film that was in post-production when Warner Brothers announced they’d changed their mind and they’d rather throw the whole thing off a cliff, toss a boulder on it, and declare it a loss on their tax forms. And yet it lives! A groundswell of omnipartisan internet wrath erupted in protest of this craven act of corporate greed and/or executive senselessness and/or misunderstanding by inattentive cartoon watchers who thought Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd were the good guys.

The kindly third-party folks at Ketchup Entertainment stepped up and overpaid to save the day and distribute the finished work. WB overlord David Zaslav and his starchy-suited lackeys underestimated how many of us are old enough to remember all those classic shorts in their prime, back when broadcast networks and local syndicated channels could proudly display their innovative slapstick zaniness uncut and uncensored before the devil invented the helicopter-parenting lobbying cults that demanded they be ruined for the sake of undiscerning latchkey kids who might see Bugs Bunny’s antics, get sinister ideas about ordering anvils from Amazon and going on squashing sprees.

The Looney Tunes legacy lives on in the hands of director Dave Green (Earth to Echo) and screenwriter Samy Burch (May December), who shares “Story By” credit with James Gunn (!!) and Jeremy Slater (Moon Knight, Mortal Kombat II), all of whom adapt a 1990 New Yorker article that I’m surprised isn’t paywalled as of this writing. Their efforts weren’t in vain thanks to You, The Viewers at Home, who would’ve looked collectively stupid if this had sucked as much as the Space Jam series did. I’m excited and relieved to report it doesn’t, so rest assured y’all didn’t waste your time. And now you can follow through on your alleged passion and actually go see it in the theater! I mean, you already did and I don’t need to bother writing about it, right?

…right?

…

…oh, internet. *sigh*

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Yes, There’s a Scene After the “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” End Credits

Murderer wearing white jumpsuit and black box on head stands with spear at attention like a soldier

Little Death is watching you watching them!

Hats off to writer/director Jane Schoenbrun for contributing to one of the most convoluted entry titles in MCC history! Not that I’m complaining — tortured syntax is among my numerous writing vices, and I’ll take whatever unwitting aiding and abetting I can get in my syntactical torturing. To clarify: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is the full name of Schoenbrun’s third film, after We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. I’m a big fan of creative film-titling and increasingly unimpressed by one-word titles that tell you absolutely nothing distinctive about the work, especially if six other unrelated films had that name first.

This is also only the second time in our 14-year run that the word “sex” has appeared in an entry title. (The first was, shall we say, not about “sex positivity”.) As a self-admitted prude, I’ve been pretty okay with that particular dearth. But after reading a few reviews of this most unusual film — one part meta-horror satire of slasher-flick revivals, one part slippery-reality self-discovery vision quest — I was curious to experience it for myself. I correctly guessed parts of it would be Not My Thing, but Camp Miasma‘s blood-soaked, mind-bending campground has plenty to unpack.

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Yes, There’s Barely a Scene After the “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” End Credits

Tom Holland as Spidey standing in front of prison bars. Face is battered, eyes have turned totally black.

Are you ready for…DARK SPIDER-MAN? (No, not Venom.)

Previously on Spider-Man: Five years ago as the pandemic trended downward — been a while! — No Way Home capped off Tom Holland’s first trilogy by ruining Peter Parker’s life even more depressingly than usual. The This Is Your Life fan-service parade of Spideys and Spider-villains from Spider-cinema past were a delight despite the Major Character Death casting a pall, though The Battle of the Spider-Stars fizzled out in its showdown letdown, a blurry mishmash of scaffolds and weightless automata typifying the rushed VFX of many a post-Endgame superhero blockbuster. But the deepest problem was the story structure itself, a betrayal of “With great power comes great responsibility”, the very heart of every version of the Spider-mythos: taking “great responsibility” began with Peter asking Dr. Strange to fix all his problems for him, and ended with him asking Strange to fix all his new problems that “fixing” his old problems caused in the first place. As I wrote in irritation afterward: “Having a fairy godfather wish your problems away isn’t taking Great Responsibility. That’s weaseling out.” That goes for both times.

Any subsequent Spider-film had two options to get unstuck from that morass: either pretend it never happened and reboot the franchise again with yet another new cast; or spend the entire next film climbing out of that hole. Praise be, then, to director Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi, Wonder Man) and returning Spider-writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers for committing to option B in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Spidey’s ninth solo film and the 38th film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s still obligated to invite non-Spider guests and set up future Marvel projects, but within those corporate restraints, Cretton and crew bring back the Spider-basics of comics yore: no multiverse, no intergalactic space travel, nothing otherdimensional or mystical or meta, it’s an intensely metropolitan adventure that returns to Homecoming‘s street-level superheroics, invests time and energy in repairing shattered relationships, whips up a flurry of fun along the way, and lets that Major Character Death count for something besides shock value.

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“The Odyssey”: In the Shadow of Troy

Matt Damon leads several Greek soldiers through a forest and panics.

Bourne-Hur.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oppenheimer afforded Academy Award Winner Sir Christopher Nolan a “king of the world” moment that his hardcore fans had been anticipating for years. Few other directors, if any, could’ve reaped a nine-digit box office take and filled a movie-trophy case with a big-budget historical saga about a haunted man who’s hailed as a hero by his peers for having a singular idea that took a team to execute and ended a lengthy war at the cost of countless innocent lives in the process, only to end the film with a monologue about his hubris, sins, and regrets, all as an admonishment to a humankind too quick to celebrate his body count and one day repeat his mistakes.

Handed a virtual blank check to make all his creative impulses come true henceforth in perpetuity, yet again Nolan defied today’s moneymaking traditions in favor of a pet project: a lavish adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Sixty years ago it might’ve been reimagined as a bloated three-hour musical with far less blood and lots of female backup dancers, but 20th-century filmmakers generally limited themselves mostly to shorter, less sprawling Greco-Roman fantasies augmented by Ray Harryhausen wizardry, almost as if the Directors Guild unanimously decided to leave it alone until that magical day when a Chosen One might rise up and make it happen.

The usual Nolan superfan excitement was muddled by detractors decrying its Hamilton-style casting process that tampered with the strict historical record, not to mention the fact that this is possibly the first Greek epic ever performed entirely in plain American accents — nary an imperious British lilt from the entire cast, not even among its UK-born costars. So far they’ve been pretty mum about the unrealistic portrayals of the Cyclops, the ten-foot-tall super-soldiers, and the conversations with ghosts. I look forward to their three-hour YouTube rants about the Indian-descended Sir Ben Kingsley and the half-Iraqi Andy Serkis each playing real-life, milky-white Englishmen in Young Washington.

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“Supergirl”: Fill Your Hand, You Son of a Bastich!

A dour Supergirl warming up her heat vision.

If you think you get red-eyed when you’re drunk…

Previously on the all-new DC Universe: With last year’s Superman, James Gunn admirably rebooted Warner Bros’ big-screen superhero canon that kept putting the “League” in “beleaguered” with every new misfire. Rather than fully suppress the bad-boy edginess of his Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy — which worked for that particular motley crew, don’t get me wrong — Gunn shrewdly tapped humankind’s self-inflicted age of cynicism as a chief antagonist to the Big Blue Boy Scout’s superpowered optimism. He wasn’t necessarily renouncing “attitude” as a marketing mood, so much as he was conceding there are other ways to approach conflicts in modern life. In his own way, he celebrated Supes’ innate idealism more than any other feature filmmaker so far this millennium.

As is the procedure for every rebooted superhero timeline, Superman was a bit overstuffed with other faces from the original comics, because every comics-to-screen writer cannot resist grabbing every toy out of the IP toybox for as long as they’re allowed to reach under the lid, and studio execs do love offering lots of character options to their action-figure designers and other merch collaborators. Among the most logical inclusions was his cousin Kara Zor-El, but as played by Milly Alcock (House of the Dragon), her graceless debut had her drunkenly slouching into Supes’ Fortress of Solitude to fetch her furry pal Krypto and make the audience aware she’s no Helen Slater or Melissa Benoist. She’s young, she parties, she’s in-your-face, she’s super coooool just like You, The Viewers at Home! If the Guardians of the Galaxy threw a space kegger, she’d totally be invited and drink everyone under the table!

It’s no surprise that first up for a Superman Spinoff Showcase is Supergirl, which I understand is based on or at least inspired by Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow miniseries/trade. I’ve been meaning to read it for years but keep forgetting to buy it, so I have little basis for adaptation comparison and no predisposition toward giving it straight A’s just because I’m a fan of King’s. I bet I’ll like the book a lot better.

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Yes, There Are Scenes During and After the “Toy Story 5” End Credits

An angry Sheriff Jessie and a shocked Bullseye face the green nemesis Lilypad, who's mostly out of frame.

How Green Was My Varmint.

Previously on Toy Story: After Toy Story 3 proved the perfect finale for Pixar’s flagship series, the formerly impeccable animation studio held the IP upside-down and shook really hard to see if any more coins might fall out of Hamm’s back-hole. I later summed up the fourth one…

The series was OVER. The trilogy was COMPLETE. The finale with Bonnie was PERFECT. But no, Pixar had to yank out the stitches on that beautiful closure and march Bonnie’s toys through the motions of yet another toys-on-the-run escapade that benches half its all-stars, loses track of its own rules, manufactures one needless chase too many, and drops one of its decent, nonwhite human characters into a disturbingly harrowing police encounter — blithely pretending such a scene evokes absolutely no alarming real-world relevance — all so Sheriff Woody can ride off into the sunset AGAIN, but this time literally instead of metaphorically. We were FINE with “metaphorically”.

Our family crossed Pixar films off our automatic-theater-trip shortlist years ago. Among the next nine films since TS3, I’ve only seen three on the big screen and have yet to fire up Hoppers or The Good Dinosaur. I refused in advance to let the inevitable Toy Story 5 be an easy sell. The presence of director Andrew Stanton — overseer of the classics Finding Nemo and WALL-E — brought slight hope till I remembered his last time at a Pixar helm was Finding Dory, ten years ago and just-okay. But a few tidbits among the pro critics’ advance reviews caught my attention, chiefly that Stanton and co-writer Kenna Harris (a Pixar staffer responsible for Luca‘s epilogue short Ciao Alberto) found new conflicts to explore for a few of the toys and for li’l Bonnie herself, their current caretaker.

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“The Furious”: Won’t Somebody From “The Raid” Please Think About the Children

Two Asian men stand side-by-side on a grungy nighttime street, not happy.

Our heroes, Xie Miao and Joe Taslim.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Once every decade some indie studio will scrounge up enough money to afford a brief wide release for a brutal foreign-language martial-arts flick to remind Americans the John Wick series isn’t the be-all-end-all of the genre. The last one I saw on the big screen was 2014’s The Raid 2, so I’m pretending to be an authority here. Such works rarely hit the big screen near us, or if they do, nobody tells me. Not that I watch a lot of them anyway, but at last, another one has broken through that isn’t a Raid sequel!

Judging by US box office tallies, nobody noticed last weekend’s premiere of The Furious, the third work from Kenji Tanigaki as a primary director. He’s a longtime stunt coordinator with a hand in numerous Western movies from Blade II to Snake Eyes: GI Joe Origins, who also collaborated with four writers on the six or seven minutes’ worth of scenes that are not fights. For anyone who hoped Mortal Kombat II‘s tournament would be more a visceral thrill-ride but found its sci-fi artificiality a cartoonish letdown, The Furious is here for you.

The Gist: THEY FIGHT! AND FIGHT! AND FIGHT AND FIGHT AND FIGHT! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT! FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!

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