Catching Up: March
In lion a Jovovich, out like a... woman in the yard?
Less preamble this time because there is a lot to get to. Happy Black Friday! Maybe you’re looking for something from last spring to watch?! Anyway, I don’t particularly remember being slammed with work with March, so some of the fact that I averaged more than one publication per day (well over 30 this month; I left off some of my shorter Decider pieces) is probably down to release dates and/or drops for long-gestating projects. But this is definitely one of those months where I go… hmm, too much? Then, in a DiCaprio voice: I do like that money, though.
New Releases for March 2025
In the Lost Lands. This is actually a Together Again column about all of Jovovich and Anderson’s movies together.
The Electric State: Not technically a review, but close enough as I consider whether to send the Russos to jail. I saw this movie in a theater! It was hard to stay awake!
Novocaine (not the one with Steve Martin)
Opus and Death of a Unicorn: I didn’t cover these at the time but when they hit streaming I paired them for a Decider piece.
Snow White. Honestly thought this was kind of fine as far as the Disney remake hell goes. I also wrote about Disney engineering Rachel Zegler taking the fall for its failure. Decider commenters loved it! Loved!!! And then I did a Version Control on various live-action Snows.
The Woman in the Yard: This will sound enormously petty but this is the exact kind of movie where I (or any number of critics) can write a pretty positive review as soon as it comes out to crickets, and then some Twitter Personality with 50k followers will see it two weeks later, tweet about it, and vastly more people will seek the movie out because of that. No wonder the studios wish we were all just influencers instead!
A Working Man (plus a separate taxonomy of how to tell the good Staths from the bad ones)
Plankton: Does a Netflix thing about SpongeBob’s frenemy count as a movie? Honestly ehhh but I guess!
Stuff I saw but didn’t write about: The Day the Earth Blew Up; The Ballad of Wallis Island; Bob Trevino Likes It; Locked; Hood Witch. (Mostly on screeners but I did take the family to see the Looney Tunes movie and we had a great time. I also saw Wallis Island in a theater and thought it was cute.) Oh and Eephus! I loved it so much and I didn’t actually write about it. I didn’t even see it in a theater! I really wish I’d caught it at NYFF the previous fall. I missed Magazine Dreams (but also… did I?), The Rule of Jenny Pen (my pal Becca tells me I should catch up), and something called F Marry Kill that if I’m being honest I will probably catch up with because it has Lucy Hale.
Retrospectives
My Year 2000 retro continued with Final Destination, the first and still best.
Tommy Boy turned 30!
Gene Hackman died and I wrote about one of his best late-period roles.
And I did a lot of ranking for GQ: teen movies, David Fincher, and perhaps my greatest challenge, the best of Ryan Reynolds.
TV
Did you know Kevin Hart had an animated vanity project? Me either until I had to review it. But it was surprisingly OK!
I continued my SNL recaps with a look at Shane Gillis (awful!), Lady Gaga (delightful!), and Mikey Madison (disappointing!).
I also forgot to mention last time that I ranked every SNL season for the 50th!
Stage!
Marisa kinda makes fun of me for being a pretend theater critic but I do enjoy it! The Guardian had me review Purpose and The Buena Vista Social Club and Glengarry Glen Ross. It was going-up-for-Tonys season.