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.  

Reagan (2024) * *

 

Directed by:  Sean McNamara

Starring:  Dennis Quaid, Penelope Ann Miller, Robert Davi, Jon Voight, Mena Suvari

Surely Ronald Reagan had faults.  Not that you would know it from watching Reagan, which portrays the late 40th president as something just short of saintly.  The narrative of Reagan is that Ronald Reagan despised communists from the get-go and worked his entire life to bringing down the Soviet Union.  That dream was eventually realized two years following Reagan's exit from office in 1989.  Reagan is a story of the Reagan presidency which had to be more complex than the movie shows here.  Reagan doesn't inspire us to love, hate, or want to learn more about its subject.  Even its narrator, a Soviet spy named Viktor (Voight) can't help but admire the man the movie believes brought down his beloved country.

We can surmise the collapse of the Soviet Union was brought on by economic and other factors besides just the Cold War with the United States.   Reagan stars Dennis Quaid as the president and begins back in the 1940's when Reagan was an actor who soon became President of the Screen Actors Guild as his acting career faded.  He was married to actress Jane Wyman (Suvari), but if you blink you may miss that.  Instead, the movie focuses on Nancy Davis (Miller), who became his second wife and eventual First Lady.  

Reagan begins with the 1981 assassination attempt in which Reagan survived and then reverts to the 1940's when Reagan was a well-known actor, but whose career was on a downswing.  The movie runs nearly 2 1/2 hours and feels every bit of it, even though it whooshes past certain periods of Reagan's life without much insight or depth.  Reagan is mostly superficial.  The Quaid performance gets the speech cadence and the mannerisms of Reagan right, and he does what he can, but the movie simply doesn't give us more than a glimpse of the former president. 

Scary Movie (2026) * 1/2

 

Directed by:  Michael Tiddes

Starring:  Anna Faris, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Regina Hall, Olivia Rose Keegan. Cheri Oteri

Scary Movie, or Scary Movie 6, plays like a mish mosh of recycled gags and quotation masquerading as satire.  Pointing out that something exists isn't the same providing a humorous point of view.  Scary Movie thinks being meta should be funny enough, but it draws nary a laugh.  I think I smiled once at one line, "You're like John Wick.  I was going to say Ballerina, but nobody saw that," There.  I saved you the price of admission. 

The plot doesn't much matter except that Ghostface, also of the Scream movies, is back terrorizing a small town and popping up everywhere to kill people.  This draws the characters from the original Scary Movie (2000) back into the fold and we have a long discussion about "requels" which is eerily similar to the one from Scream 5 (or Scream).  We also think of 2018's Halloween, which had the same title as the original 1978 film and asked you to wipe away memories of any sequels that occurred between the original and 2018.  No worries.  I beat you to it a long time ago.

Movies like Scary Movie aren't made to judge the plot.  It is to be judged on how often you laugh, and I confess I didn't laugh at all.  The movie hurls sight gags and verbal humor at the screen at a dizzying rate in the hope that something sticks.  Nothing does this time.  The method worked in the original Scary Movie and Airplane! but here, it doesn't.  When reviewing a movie like this one, not many criteria other than laugh quotient matters. 

Tuner (2026) * * *

 

Directed by:  Daniel Roher

Starring:  Leo Woodall, Dustin Hoffman, Tovah Feldshuh, Havana Rose Liu, Lior Raz, Jean Reno

Niki (Woodall) is a piano tuner working with Harry Horowitz (Hoffman) traveling around New York City tuning the pianos of rich folks who use their pianos as part of the interior design.  Niki was once a piano prodigy whose performing career was cut short due to hyperacusis, which he describes as being allergic to loud noises.  He wears ear buds all the time, and noise-cancelling headphones while walking the streets.  Even with the afflictions, his pitch is perfect and he knows if a key is even slightly out of tune.

Niki falls for classical composer Ruthie (Liu), who wants to write a piece which will win her an internship with a legendary composer (Reno).  She falls for Niki too but resents his genius while at the same time admiring it.  However, Niki's story will turn to a life of crime once Harry suffers a heart attack and his medical bills skyrocket.  One night, Niki hears loud banging at a home where he's working and discovers thieves upstairs trying to break into a safe.  Niki soon becomes part of the crew and expertly cracks safes while securing enough money to pay Harry's bills.  Niki's criminal life doesn't go smoothly and causes rifts between he and Ruthie due to unintended consequences of one of his thefts.

It's always great to see Dustin Hoffman even in the small role of Harry and every screen appearance at his age is a treasure.  Woodall exudes quiet agony of someone who tries to make the best of his situation but would rather be playing pianos at concert halls than tuning them.  Tuning is a way to keep him close to music, and he knows the life of crime won't last and will only end one of two ways.  Tuner isn't fast-paced mindless action, but a quieter and more thoughtful story of a young man dealt a bad hand who tries to make the most use of his gifts.  In the end, he sees deafness not as a curse, but as liberation.  You'll see what I mean.