Reviews
ONE HOT TAKE: Cape Fear w/ Sean Burns & Roxana Hadadi
Nobody in this house locks anything. There's a pool, there are children, there's a killer renting across the road, and the gate swings free for 10 hours of television. The Bowdens are obsessed with their own security and incapable of practising any.
ONE HOT TAKE: In the Grey w/ Stu Coote
There are bigger movies, deeper movies and certainly more consequential movies. In the Grey doesn't seem particularly bothered. It arrives. It looks terrific. It moves.
ONE HOT TAKE: Spider-Man: Brand New Day w/ Drew Taylor
Brand New Day remembers that sometimes the greatest superhero stories are the smallest ones, a kid swinging across a city because someone needs help. The movies finally remembered who Spider-Man is.
ONE HOT TAKE: The Odyssey w/ Sean Burns & Drew Taylor
Christopher Nolan turns one of the oldest stories ever told into something tactile again. You don't just watch The Odyssey. You feel the weight of timber, salt and exhausted bodies.
ONE HOT TAKE: Minions & Monsters w/ Stu Coote
Someone has accidentally made Babylon for nine-year-olds.
ONE HOT TAKE: Toy Story 5 w/ Stu Coote
Sometimes a film's greatest achievement isn't what happens on the screen. It's what happens in your living room the next morning.
ONE HOT TAKE: Jackass: Best and Last w/ Katie WalsH
These idiots love each other. That's the stunt that's always been hardest to fake.
ONE HOT TAKE: Supergirl w/ Sean Burns
About forty percent of Supergirl absolutely rips. It imagines a space western with two compelling young women at its centre and briefly convinces you that's exactly where superhero cinema should be heading. Then it remembers it's a superhero blockbuster.
ONE HOT TAKE: Disclosure Day w/ Katie Walsh
In Disclosure Day, the details arrive before the explanations, and that turns out to be part of the pleasure.
ONE HOT TAKE: Hoppers w/ Drew Taylor
In an era where even very good Pixar films can feel overlooked, Hoppers deserves better. It's funny, warm, inventive and packed with heart.
ONE HOT TAKE: Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu w/ Drew Taylor
A helmet, a child, and a galaxy that used to feel infinite now shrunk to the size of a corridor.
ONE HOT TAKE: MORTAL KOMBAT II w/ Garth Franklin
Josh Lawson’s Kano cuts through the confusion like a live wire. He mocks the film from within, turning every line into a pressure-release valve, and, in doing so, becomes the only consistent source of energy.
ONE HOT TAKE: APEX w/ Garth Franklin
In its strongest passages, APEX becomes spatial. Crevasses, cliff faces, narrow passages — the geography tightens, and with it the tension.
ONE HOT TAKE: KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR w/ Brendan Hodges
So the film exists in two states. As a complete object, it is monumental, fluid, overwhelming in its design. As a memory, it remains something fractured, two meals served separately, each with its own aftertaste.
ONE HOT TAKE: SEND HELP w/ Isaac Feldberg
Raimi leans into the tactile. Bodies are constantly under assault. Fluids, impact, proximity. It is gleeful in a way that borders on deranged, but always controlled. The disgust is not incidental. It is the joke.
ONE HOT TAKE: NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE w/ Conor O'Donnell
The point was never the gig or the success. It is the continuity. The same faces, the same jokes, the same refusal to move on.
BRYAN FULLER CRASHES ONE HOT TAKE: Dust Bunny w/ Drew Taylor
What lingers is not the question of what the monster is. It is the feeling that the film has constructed a world where danger is both external and internal. The thing under the bed is no more or less real than the lives these characters have built.
28 YEARS LATER: BONE TEMPLE w/ Stu Coote
What DaCosta understands is that this middle chapter does not need to climax. It needs to deepen. There is less propulsion than 28 Years Later, less of Boyle’s kinetic charge, but in its place is conceptual drift.
BENDAVID GRABINSKI CRASHES ONE HOT TAKE: Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice w/ Drew Taylor
The film understands that time travel isn’t about fixing things. It’s about living with the knowledge that you probably won’t.
ONE HOT TAKE: THE PLAGUE w/ Jen Johans
What Polinger gets most right is the emotional texture of that age. Every difference feels dangerous. The film understands that for kids like these, survival often means invisibility until, one day, it doesn’t.