The Dictator (2012) * * *

 

Directed by:  Larry Charles

Starring:  Sacha Baron Cohen, Anna Faris, Ben Kingsley, John C. Reilly, Jason Mantzoukas

General Admiral Aladeen (Cohen) is the dictator of a North African nation named Wadiya.  He rules with an iron fist, and orders executions on a whim for even minor infractions.  There's a funny payoff with this. Aladeen addresses the United Nations over human rights violations and through a series of failed assassination attempts and a coup attempt by Aladeen's right hand man Tahir (Kingsley), he has his beard shaved off and is wandering the streets of Manhattan while an installed body double poses as him.

Aladeen begins working for a health food store owner named Zoey (Faris), who is ideologically opposed in every day to Aladeen (without knowing he is indeed the despised dictator).  Do they fall in love?  Yes, of course.  Does Aladeen change?  Kind of, sort of.  By the end, he's at least open to the possibility of free elections in Wadiya, you know like the ones in Russia.  In between, Cohen and company go for lowbrow verbal gags that make you laugh and sometimes cringe, but there is a zeal to how Cohen delivers his humor.  Previous outings like Borat (2006) and Bruno (2009) gave us the same style in which not much was off-limits.  

The Dictator actually has something of a plot and isn't just a character wandering the United States and recording his interactions with people in semi-documentary fashion.  Cohen's The Dictator is funny, yes, and we find ourselves laughing despite ourselves.   Aladeen is the hero, and he's a dictator.  

The Invite (2026) * * *

 

Directed by:  Olivia Wilde

Starring:  Seth Rogen, Olivia Wilde, Penelope Cruz, Edward Norton

The Invite is a simple tale that I'm not surprised to learn started as a stage play and has been adapted to the movies on two other occasions.  The Invite has four characters and we spend ninety minutes with them at fragile stages of their lives, although none of them will admit it.  One constantly bickering couple is Joe (Rogen) and Angela (Wilde-who also directed).  Angela invited their upstairs neighbors Hawk (Norton) and Pina (Cruz) over to dinner without informing Joe, likely because he would've said no.  Angela burns the souffle, but otherwise puts on a dog-and-pony show in order to impress their neighbors.  Joe, however, isn't so quick to welcome them, because their late-night sex parties keep Joe up.  

Hawk is an affable retired firefighter who is open to sexual experimentation like his therapist wife Pina.  Their stories of orgies, swinging, and BDSM acts shock Joe and Angela, who rarely have sex as their years of marriage wear on.  Hawk and Pina attempt to entice Joe and Angela into becoming their next partners, but Joe has to say his piece about the all-night banging which keeps him up.  Not that he's not attracted to Pina, while Angela lets Hawk know she may be interested.  We wonder if there is more to Hawk and Pina, and not surprisingly, there is.  Both use sex to mask vulnerabilities and insecurities about growing older.  Both are generally kind people who despite their parties seem lonely.  

Joe and Angela are in a mid-marriage crisis, while neither wants to admit it.  Joe gave up his dream of rock stardom to take on a professorship at a local university that he clearly hates.  They have a daughter who is staying over at a friend's house, but Joe and Angela wrestle with the idea of staying together for her sake.  The Invite is populated by accomplished actors who relish the material.  Seth Rogen is known mostly for comedy, and his affable presence is always welcome, but he's more than capable of handling dramatic turns such as The Fabelmans and Steve Jobs.  The Invite maintains a tone straddling the line between what's comic and what's pathetic.  It ends predictably, and under the circumstances, rather touchingly. 

Nebraska (2013) * * *

 

Directed by:  Alexander Payne

Starring:  Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Bob Odenkirk, Stacy Keach

Alexander Payne's Nebraska is a quiet comedy about a retire, senile alchoholic named Woody (Dern), who believes he won a million-dollar sweepstakes prize and is willing to walk from his home in Montana to Lincoln, Nebraska to claim it.  His son David (Forte) sees him walking along the highway and decides to drive him to Lincoln, with stops along the way.  David knows this is a fool's errand, but goes along with his dad's journey and finds he knows more about him at the end of the trek than at the beginning.

Nebraska, filmed in black and white, follows Payne's previous films which display subtle humor and engrossing characters who aren't easy to nail down.  There are no villains, just very flawed human beings whose motives we can understand even if we don't agree with them.  Woody keeps to himself and words trickle from his lips like there aren't many more where that came from.  His economy of words means that when he says something, he means it.  A funny scene involves a stop at Mount Rushmore and Woody is subsequently unimpressed.  ("Lincoln doesn't even have an ear").

It's fitting that his wife Kate (Squibb) is a firecracker who says what's on her mind, even being ribald, saucy, and oversharing most of the time.  She and Woody are temperamental opposites.  However, with Woody, David, and Kate, we sense their decency and humanity.  A jerk from Woody's past (Keach) is really the only fly in the ointment in Nebraska, because he wants to take advantage after learning Woody may suddenly be rich.  Does Woody even believe it himself that he has won a million dollars?  Or is he just looking for purpose and some kind of legacy for his children?  Nebraska isn't cheerfully folksy nor is it satirizing its Midwestern characters.  Some parts move slowly, unlike Payne's Election which also takes place in Nebraska and moves along with energy and pessimism about the human condition, but after spending two hours with these people, we're glad we had a chance to meet them. 

Cheech & Chong's Last Movie (2024) * * *

 

Directed by:  David L. Bushell

The 2024 documentary Cheech & Chong's Last Movie is a documentary highlighting the comedy duo's start and their rise to movie stardom, while only scratching the surface of their breakup and eventual reunion.  The most frustrating aspect of Last Movie is how projects following Cheech Marin's solo Born in East LA and even Tommy Chong's federal prison stretch for selling bongs on the internet.  Yes, that really happened.  However, it was only covered with a post-credits news blurb.  What's here is worthwhile for any Cheech & Chong fan, but I would've loved to learn how they wound up in Martin Scorsese's After Hours and what led to their eventual reunion.  

We see they are clearly reunited and working together again.  They tell their stories as they are driving down the road together, commenting on the beginning of their stand-up career, their albums which produced top 40 hits and a Grammy, and then the movies beginning with Up in Smoke, which was a huge success and led to Cheech & Chong's Next Movie.  Their manager, legendary producer Lou Adler (who appears in the movie), directed Up in Smoke, but Tommy Chong took over the directorial reins starting with Next Movie, which strained the partnership over the course of several movies to the point that by the late 1980's, the team essentially disbanded.  We know the tensions that caused their demise, but how did they reunite?  

The stand-up and movie footage is classic Cheech & Chong, and it's fascinating to see the inspirations behind something as simple as "Dave", which was borne out of Chong breaking Cheech's balls on a hot day when Cheech knocked on the door to come in and Chong wouldn't let him.  The simplest situations lead to classic humor.  Their movies don't have plots, per se, but are stories of two guys who just want to hang out and smoke some weed while the universe conspires to prevent those two things from happening.  The duo went in a completely opposite direction with The Corsican Brothers, which oddly has more time devoted to it than After Hours...and that's a Martin Scorsese movie.  

Supergirl (2026) * 1/2

 

Directed by: Craig Gillespie

Starring:  Milly Alcock, David Corenswet, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenarts

Supergirl is a dreary, dull superhero movie with a lead actress who in the words of Fortune in Rudy: "You're five foot nothing, weigh one hundred and nothing".  Milly Alcock is listed in Google at 5'5" but that seems like a stretch.  I don't normally like to point out physical characteristics of an actor, but Alcock doesn't scream Supergirl when you see her.  She's just not physically impressive but that's not the main reason why Supergirl doesn't work.  

The bulk of Supergirl takes place on desolate planets you would see in Borderlands, and when a movie reminds you of Borderlands, it's clearly not going in the right direction.  Alcock's Supergirl is a hard-drinking, uninspired superhero still grieving from the loss of her parents and still simply lacking spirit about everything.  She lit out to a faraway planet with a red sun, which saps her of her superpowers and gives us another superhero movie (like last year's James Gunn Superman saga) in which the hero is bullied and beaten up.  

An adventure involving an orphan wanting to avenge her parents brings Supergirl reluctantly into the fray as she learns to care again.  We glimpse her parents' life as they escaped Krypton when it exploded and settled on another planet where she was born.  So, Superman wasn't the only survivor of the doomed planet.  Then, the planet where she grows up goes kaboom also and Supergirl is sent away to Earth to meet up with her cousin Clark Kent (Corenswet).  Very little screen time is spent on Earth and we instead are treated to dusty, deserted planets inhabited by creatures rejected from Star Wars.  Supergirl regains her empathy and the orphan is avenged without us being much moved. 

Alcock tries, but is adrift in a standard action movie which didn't need to even feature Supergirl.  I vaguely recall the 1985 version and while it was silly and campy, it was light and had a sense of fun, everything this version of Supergirl is not. 

Disclosure Day (2026) * *

 

Directed by:  Steven Spielberg

Starring:  Emily Blunt, Josh O'Connor, Colman Domingo, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, Wyatt Russell, Elizabeth Marvel 

Disclosure Day begins with the promise of something wonderful, but it doesn't deliver.  The payoff feels as if the movie ended just when it should be revving up.  If anything, the movie should be called "Pre-Disclosure Day" because all of the action brings us to the Disclosure Day of the title.  Steven Spielberg's tale is a profound disappointment that should have been titled, "Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind"

However, most of Disclosure Day doesn't involve the mere possibility of alien life, but instead the coverup that aliens have been among us for some time.  I don't know.  This doesn't seem like news.  How secret could Roswell be if everyday people and conspiracy theorists alike seem to know of its existence?  Daniel Kellner (O'Connor), formerly of a government agency called Wardex, whose mission is to prevent the information Daniel possesses from seeing the light of day.  Wardex, led by Noah Scanlon (Firth), fears that such information would upset people too much.  A former friend of Noah's named Hugo (Domingo) urges Daniel to reach him so the world will see what Daniel knows.

We also have Margaret Fairchild (Blunt), a Kansas City television meteorologist who suddenly begins speaking in alien tongue during a weather forecast.  Margaret doesn't remember this episode after it happens, and as further incidents occur, it becomes obvious she is somehow connected to the aliens.  However, the big reveal involving Margaret and Daniel is underwhelming.  The actors do their best, with Firth giving us more dimensions as the villain who is able to transport himself into other people's kitchens using a special device that looks like a futuristic mouthpiece. 

With all of the movies we've seen about aliens over the years, Disclosure Day doesn't bring anything new or fresh to the genre.  It feels pedestrian, which is something you can't normally say about a Steven Spielberg film.  Spielberg is nearing eighty years old and we don't know how many movies he has left in him.  Disclosure Day leaves room open for a potential sequel, but when the evidence of the aliens is presented to the world, I kept waiting for some conspiracy theorist to explain how the recordings were fake.  Hey, they're still doing it for the moon landing and it would be realistic considering today's media.  Disclosure Day feels like it was written in 1985 and never updated to reflect the current media era. 

Power Ballad (2026) * * * 1/2

 

Directed by:  John Carney

Starring:  Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Peter McDonald, Marcella Plunkett, Beth Fallon, Jack Reynor

Rick Power (Rudd) is an American living in Ireland who once dreamed of music stardom many moons ago.  He is much in love with his wife Rachel (Plunkett) and adores his daughter Aja (Fallon) while working as a wedding singer.  His band works steadily, and at one wedding in the Irish countryside, Rick learns pop star Danny Wilson (Jonas) is the groom's best friend and will be attending.  Danny is even convinced to join the band for a number.  Afterward, Rick and Danny bond over beers, weed, and a love of music over the course of one night.  They appear to strike a friendship, Ricks plays a song called |"How to Write a Song (Without You)" which he wrote many years ago.  Danny loves it and promptly tells Rick to look him up if he's ever in Los Angeles.  We get the feeling he has made that hollow promise to many people over the years. 

Danny is looking to shed his former boy band image and embark on a lucrative solo career, but he's stuck artistically and his manager is looking to drop him if he doesn't produce a hit.  He plays Rick's song to his girlfriend, who is wowed and convinces him to record.  The song becomes a worldwide smash and makes Danny an adored superstar.  Rick is miffed that his song was stolen, and is unable to convince his wife, daughter, and bandmates that he wrote it years ago.  He has no evidence of having ever recorded it or wrote it, and Danny can easily dismiss Rick's claims.  What makes Danny interesting is that we know he stole Rick's song, but we understand his motives and he is ambivalent about it.  He urges his manager to pay off Rick and give him writing credit, but that may destroy Danny's reputation.  Rick meanwhile travels to LA to confront Danny, which doesn't give Rick a satisfactory resolution.

Power Ballad involves us from the very beginning in Rick's story.  He gave up his dreams of music superstardom once he married and became a father.  He never lost his love for music, but he's content with his life and family.  Meeting Danny doesn't make him pine to become a rock god, he only wants the credit coming to him and the forever link to a hit song (and its royalties).  The only time Rick grows salty is when he bans playing the song during his performances, even though it's heavily requested.  It's understandable.  Power Ballad is an overall moving experience in which Danny isn't really a villain and Rick isn't a hero.  Both are just men trying to get by in the world, and we can identify with them both.  The ending is also a winner.