Worldbreaker (2025): I was actually pleasantly surprised by this okay little movie by Brad Anderson, and thus can still carry some hope for the return of the filmmaker who brought us Session 9 and The Machinist to his initial form. This masquerades as a cheap Milla Jovovich starring post-apocalyptic actioner, but at its core is actually a slow, quiet film about a father (Luke Evans) and daughter (Billie Boullet) bonding in a terrible situation, with a line about consciously building hope in future generations when all of it should be lost. I also found myself enjoying the film’s mythological approach to its monsters, as well as Anderson’s willingness to be slow and patient.
Sure, the effects aren’t great, and the ending is somewhat frustrating, yet this is still a much better film than the one its – limited - marketing threatens.
Big Baby (2025): Apparently, featuring one’s spouse in one’s movies is a thing in the family, so Rob Zombie’s brother Spider One (yeah, I dunno about these names) features his wife Krsy (come on) Fox in all of his films. I have more time for One and Fox than for Zombie: Fox could clearly carry a movie on her own, and One at least doesn’t think ass-ugly is an aesthetic.
Big Baby, however, is not a great film. There’s enough material for a thirty minute short film in here, but dragged out to ninety minutes, this reality-bending meta horror tale of a whiny scriptwriter whose new slasher idea gets more than a little out of control never is quite as clever as it appears to want to be, and adds little to the already bloated canon of films about how terribly difficult it is to make movies. Those poor filmmakers!
Humint (2026): South Korean filmmaker Ryoo Seung-wan is a hell of a director of big-ish budget action and thriller cinema. Humint is one of his weaker films until it explodes into a fantastic final thirty minutes of intense, tear-jerking action whose tone, though not style, reminded me of John Woo’s imperial period in the very best way.
The set-up and middle part, though, feel uncommonly slow for Ryoo, and one can’t help but feel that he simply doesn’t feel quite at home with material that’s grounded in the quieter tropes of non-James Bond spy movies and melodrama.
It’s not a bad movie, mind you, and the climax is a good as this kind of cinema gets – as a whole, the film is just not as great as the director’s movies can get.
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