Mason Thames and Ethan Hawke in Black Phone 2
BLACK PHONE 2
Because the presentation is so confident and the film's look so distinctive, it might take a while to realize just how bad Black Phone 2 actually is. This is hardly something to get in a snit about. Although decent enough, 2022's The Black Phone, which was also by writer/director Scott Derrickson and co-scribe C. Robert Cargill, is by no means top-drawer supernatural horror, so no sacred cows have been slaughtered here. (In truth, there's barely any slaughter at all.) But the original is admittedly unsettling and inventive, as well as fairly straightforward for its genre – adjectives that don't apply to this repetitive, derivative, confusing followup.
I suppose Derrickson's part deux isn't wholly void of imagination, because unless he's Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees, it can't be easy to resurrect your fright flick's antagonist – at least in a way that won't inspire eye rolls – after he's been killed. And with The Black Phone's child murderer the Grabber indeed offed at the end, and the movie based on a standalone short story (written by Stephen King's son Joseph Hillström under the pen name Joe Hill), it's initially unclear how Ethan Hawke's stringy-haired psycho is going to make a return. Derrickson and Cargill, however, have come up with a way: They've turned him into Freddy Krueger. (With the film's climax finding The Grabber on ice skates wielding a hockey stick, Jason might've been the more logical choice – you know, given the mask and all.) Despite nothing about the human loon suggesting a supernatural entity in '22, the Grabber is now back to literally haunt his victims' dreams, making the movie not only an inferior sequel to The Black Phone, but one of the many inferior sequels to A Nightmare on Elm Street.
It's 1982 in suburban Denver, and four years have passed since 13-year-old Finney Blake (Mason Thames) was abducted by the Hawke's Grabber, who lured his victims to their deaths by dressing as a clown. (His black helium balloons were a sign to never hire the guy for your kid's birthday party.) Finney managed to escape his basement holding cell through otherworldly assistance: the inherited psychic powers of his younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who guided the police to her brother's whereabouts, and the inexplicable phone calls from the Grabber's deceased victims, who made contact with Finney via a broken black rotary. The Grabber eventually got his neck snapped. But as Black Phone 2 reveals, the moment he did, strange things began happening at a neighboring Christian-youth camp where the Grabber, in the 1950s, served as a counselor. Strange things are now also happening with Finney and Gwen, as the former is a a full-time pot smoker who's again getting mysterious black-phone calls, and the latter is being terrorized by dreams – some leaving visible scars – involving icy locales, dead children, and the Grabber vowing revenge.
For a while, for quite a while, I went with this. I even went with the idea, demonstrated in the 1957 prelude, that the youth camp in the woods – which, we learn, Finney's and Gwen's late mom attended – was open for business in the winter. (Wasn't Papa King's Overlook Hotel shut down during ski season expressly because the Colorado snowfall made travel impossible?) Derrickson's film, after all, has a lot going for it from the start. Thames and McGraw, who were already plenty good in the original, have grown into polished, forceful young actors, and it was nice to see Jeremy Davies back as the sibs' formerly alcoholic father, now many months into a sobriety you sense him struggling to maintain. The film also has an excellent visual hook, with all of Gwen's disturbing dreams shot on the grainy 16mm that gave significant edge to Derrickson's 2012 Sinister. Underscored to what sounds like the scratchiness of a rotating LP after its last song has played, these sequences during Black Phone 2's opening third are genuinely creepy, and the makeup on the youths playing the Grabber's 1950s victims boasts a sickly realism, making you grateful that the violence against them is largely only implied.
It's when Finney and Gwen, traveling with their pal Ernesto (Miguel Mora), trek out to Alpine Lake Youth Camp to face and potentially eradicate their respective traumas that Derrickson's sequel irrevocably loses its grip, mostly because it starts cribbing from the wrong movie. Given the Colorado setting, secluded locale, wintry exteriors, psychological threat, visions of bloodshed, and conversations with the deceased, this thing is almost more The Shining than The Shining, and the cast size is fittingly minimalist, its non-ghostly population never exceeding eight. (I would've been happy with five if it meant keeping Demián Bichir and ditching the extraneous, clichéd figures played by Arianna Rivas, Graham Abbey, and Maev Beaty.) But a King/Kubrick pastiche is not in the cards. Instead, in the manner of any number of Elm Streets, the whole movie becomes devoted to the retrograde ideas that (a) the Grabber can only do physical damage when Gwen is asleep; (b) Gwen must consequently stay awake at all times; (c) if the girl does nod off, she has to actively confront her nemesis in her dreams; and (d) finding and destroying the bodily remains of the Grabber's past victims will ensure that their executioner vanishes for good. I'd say the Blake kids figured that last part out by watching 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, but considering Black Phone 2 takes place in '82, they obviously hadn't even seen the '84 original yet.
On occasion, the sight of the invisible Grabber causing havoc in the real world is queasily entertaining, as when he twirls and tosses Gwen around the room or drags one of the camp employees along a frozen lake with his equally invisible hockey stick. Just as often, these onslaughts are unintentionally hilarious, resembling a misguided solo exercise in an intermediate-acting class: “You're being strangled by an unseen demon and writhing on the floor and trying to pull his hands off your neck – go!” And sadly, nearly everything about Ethan Hawke's portrayal is similarly not-funny funny. Whether goading Finney and Gwen in his mellifluous sing-song rhythms or exploding with a gravelly bellow, Hawke's readings have “generic serial killer” stamped all over them, and Derrickson and Cargill don't give the Grabber the sorts of juicy one-liners that would make their delivery superfluous. At the height of his wrath, our shouting villain reveals to Finney his ultimate endgame: “To cause you as much pain as you caused me!!!” Yeah, I think that was evident from the violent attacks on Finney's baby sister, but thanks for clarifying.
Yet there's reason for future hope, Black Phone fans, because you just know this series ain't over yet – not with the sequel's canny addition of 1957 lore. Who were those three kids that unwittingly set the Grabber off on his apparent 20-years-plus murder spree? Was the guy a psychopath before he joined the camp staff, or were his homicidal tendencies born at Alpine Lake? Where did his horned, multi-piece mask come from? What did Finney's and Gwen's mom initially know about all this and when did she know it? How much of any of this is purely supernatural? While Black Phone 2 may be seriously wanting as a horror excursion, it certainly opens the door to other followups down the pike, to say nothing of other homages. A remote woodland retreat, a nearby lake, presumably horny camp counselors … . Now that Freddy's been cosplayed, maybe a Grabber-as-Jason is still to come.
GOOD FORTUNE
Scott Derrickson effectively traveled back to the '80s for his unofficial Freddy Krueger reboot, and Aziz Ansari returned to that decade's nostalgia well for Good Fortune, the writer/director/star's gig-economy comedy that liberally borrows from 1983's Trading Places (with a few dollops of Warren Beatty's 1978 Heaven Can Wait added to the mix). As in that John Landis farce that memorably co-starred Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy, the concept here finds a down-on-his-luck soul swapping societal and financial positions with a multi-millionaire. But unlike with the Aykroyd v. Murphy battle, in which an on-fire, 22-year-old Murphy was the clear champion, there's no question as to whether Ansari or his co-star Seth Rogen is the funniest one on-screen. The victor is clearly third option Keanu Reeves, who floats in as a guardian angel and flies off with the whole movie in his pocket.
Reeves plays an angel named Gabriel (natch), a lesser celestial being whose entire purpose on Earth is to prevent Los Angelenos from texting while driving. Understandably, this keeps him plenty busy. But not too busy to notice Ansari's Arj, a college graduate whose career as a documentary filmmaker is faltering, whose current residence is his car, and whose existence doing odd jobs for a Taskrabbit-esque app has him questioning the point of it all. Enter Gabriel, who plans to prove to Arj that money won't bring happiness by giving the desperate, overworked man the life he dreams of – specifically, the life of Rogen's über-rich tech bro Jeff, who will consequently be forced to walk in Arj's shoes for a while. “For a while,” however, proves longer than Gabriel expected, because it turns out – surprise! – that insane wealth does bring Arj happiness, and even though Jeff desperately wants his old life back, Arj ain't giving it up willingly.
I never would've imagined saying this back when a new one seemed to get released every weekend, but lord how I miss high-concept comedies. When and why did these things go so decidedly out of style? I just did a scan of the 100-plus cineplex releases I've thus-far reviewed in 2025, and the only one that seemed to specifically qualify as “high-concept comedy” – an upbeat outing with a simple, clever premise that merely wants you to laugh at its jokes and smile at its geniality – was One of Them Days, which debuted in January. If, as a people, we've gotten so used to not finding things funny that we'd rather not take the chance, it's a true shame for artists such as Ansari, at least if he hopes to keep making comedic feature films. (This is his long-form writing/directing debut.) Good Fortune may not be an unconditional riot, but it is funny, sometimes really funny, as well as occasionally inspired and awfully sweet-natured – exactly the sort of thing audiences flocked to when Hollywood was still in the business of making us laugh on the regular. This weekend, Ansari's movie will have made just over $6 million domestic, one week after the similarly endearing Channing Tatum comedy Roofman failed to land $10 million during a four-day holiday weekend. Do audiences not know that these charming offerings are out there, or, given that they don't boast any recognizable IP, do people simply not care?
Regardless, Good Fortune exists, and I, for one, am glad it does. True, Ansari will probably never be accused of being a sensational actor, or even much of an actor period. He can certainly land a punchline, though. Rogen, meanwhile, has never had a problem in that department, and Keke Palmer, despite her role as Arj's semi-girlfriend not giving her the breathing room she enjoyed in One of Them Days – a high-concept comedy that deserved to make money and did! – is unfailingly welcome. Yet this is Keanu Reeves' show through and through, the star's reliably loopy, half-baked cadences bringing a delicate spin to Gabriel's every utterance, and his inherent likability evidently lightening the spirits of everyone he's in contact with, including his audience. In the scene that finds the dispossessed angel, trapped in human form, tasting cheeseburgers and shakes and “chicken nuggies” for the first time, I'm convinced that Reeves' dazed euphoria made Rogen crack up for real, and the infectious joy of that sequence would be enough for the entire movie if there weren't another dozen-and-change sequences to match it. Keanu might wind up John Wick-ing for as long as his body and our appetites for bloody mayhem can stand it. Bless him, though – he also stays invested in the simple, invaluable task of making us smile. That's our good fortune.
AFTER THE HUNT
“Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable.” This is said, late in director Luca Guadagnino's After the Hunt, by Julia Roberts' Gen X university professor to Ayo Edeberi's Gen Z student. It's also the tagline for the movie's poster, so I suppose that makes it the Yale-set drama's official thesis. I'd like to go on-record by saying I agree with the statement, and add that Guadagnino's latest is clearly designed to make audiences uncomfortable. Mission accomplished. I was uncomfortable with Roberts giving a performance of such sour, grim-faced repression. I was uncomfortable with the astounding pushiness and falseness of Edebiri, Andrew Garfield, and Michael Stuhlbarg. I was uncomfortable with the pretension of the almost satirically high-minded conversation and incessantly ticking clock. I was uncomfortable with the nonsensical time-lapse idiocies and the film's apparent disinterest in legitimately tackling its hot-button topics. And I was deeply uncomfortable with Guadagnino, only one year after the stellar two-fer of Challengers and Queer, helming what is easily the worst of his eight features I've seen. And I saw the cannibal romance Bones & All.
Although Guadagnino has played coy about the subject in interviews, it'll be clear to many viewers – and probably every After the Hunt viewer – that the director is aiming for provocation even in his opening credits. Following an introductory “It happened at Yale ...” title card and about three solid minutes of Roberts' character Alma Imhoff going through her daily home-and-work ritual – a silent montage except for the very loud, very annoying, very Ingmar Bergman sound of an off-screen ticking clock – the credits begin to roll. They're in black-and-black, in the Windsor Light Condensed font, and smooth jazz plays in the background. As all cinephiles know, these are Woody Allen opening credits; the actors' names are even listed in alphabetical order. I don't know about you, but I'm aware of precisely zero humans, myself among their nonexistent number, who have any interest in seeing a new Woody Allen movie. (An old one is a different story, and in the wake of Diane Keaton's recent passing, the first of her films I felt compelled to re-watch was Love & Death.) Nowadays, “Woody Allen” is a name, practically a phrase, synonymous with discomfort, its associations with #MeToo, cancel culture, art-v.-artist, and other polemical issues sure to ignite or end cocktail-party chit-chat nationwide. Obviously, Guadagnino knows this, and is telling us right off the bat what kind of entertainment he and screenwriter Nora Garrett have in store.
But if these two were determined to invoke Woody, couldn't it have been the early, funny one – the guy who made Love & Death? Because replicating one of his beige-and-tweed morality plays à la September and Another Woman and Irrational Man doesn't appear to be their forte. The movie's crux lies in a sadly familiar situation, with Edeberi's doctoral candidate Maggie Rensick accusing Garfield's philosophy professor Hank Gibson of sexual assault. Both tell their sides of the story to Alma, who, like Hank, is in Yale's philosophy department, and is in consideration for tenure. Alma wants to believe Maggie, whose accusations appear sincere, if somewhat vague. She also wants to believe Hank, a longtime friend who may have been a former lover, and who says Maggie's account is a lie cooked up after he accused the student of plagiarizing her doctoral thesis. This is a situation rife with dramatic possibility, augmented by a hidden secret from Alma's past that might have echoes in the Maggie/Hank situation.
Guadagnino and Garrett, however, seem less interested in exploring After the Hunt's thorny moral and ethical dilemmas than engaging in 135 minutes of window shopping in the guise of provocation. With the film set in 2019 and followed by a “five years later” coda, just about every new scene hints at or outright addresses some current lightning rod: cancel culture; #MeToo; affirmative action; woke sensibility; toxic masculinity; generational feminist divides; gender pronouns; the Ivy League; the “denigration” of the straight white male. None of them, however, are given more than a few minutes of direct (or even sidelong) analysis, and almost none of these issues have direct impact on the main storyline, which, again, is: Was Maggie raped by her teacher or not? It's kind of nauseating how thoroughly the movie lets that matter slide in lieu of its consistent prodding at academia, truckload of highfalutin references, and ceaseless theoretical philosophizing. After the opening credits, the first scene takes place during a faculty/student gathering at the home of Alma and her husband Frederik (Stuhlbarg), and Michel Foucault, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Freud are name-dropped before the movie is five minutes old. I immediately wanted to drop-kick every last soul in that room, and contrary to the film's design, it wasn't from discomfort. It from utter loathing for these obnoxiously self-satisfied characters I'd have to spend more than two hours with.
As for After the Hunt itself, I wanted to drop-kick it for lots of different reasons, many of them connected to the film's abject stupidity. Why, at that party, would Maggie be sent down an unlit hallway to use a guest bathroom she'd never entered before – the main one being out of commission – and why would the directive be whispered to her? Were none of the other guests ever going to need that info? Why would the bathroom not have toilet paper on the roll, causing Maggie to stumble upon something she was clearly not meant to find? Why the constant closeups of Frederik laying out two brown pellets for his wife to consume every morning when we never learn what they're for? (The mysterious malady Alma suffers from is well-hidden from her husband.) What's with Frederik constantly waving his arms like conductor batons? Why, when asserting his innocence to Alma, does Hank act like the guiltiest man alive? How, when Hank orders “my usual” at his favorite eatery, does it take the waitress roughly 30 seconds to return with a half-dozen plates of bespoke food? How does it take Alma's friend Kim Sayers, a psychotherapist played by Chloë Sevigny, a mere 30 seconds of her own to find and use the restroom in a crowded bar? Why is the depressingly de-glammed Sevigny, in the same scene, being made to wear what appears to be David Byrne's big suit from Stop Making Sense?
The laws of logic, as well as time and space, don't appear to exist in Guadagnino's latest, and even the tech and craft elements feel off: Cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed's camera seems forever focused on the wrong body parts; Trent Reznor's and Atticus Ross' atypically weak score is occasionally punctuated by unintentionally (I think?) hilarious cacophonies that sound like explosions in a bicycle-horn factory. And Jesus are the performances awful. There's so much capitalized Acting going on, even among the minor and bit players, that I didn't buy anyone's characterization for a moment, and while I sort of applaud Stuhlbarg for not delivering one remotely predictable reading or gesture, is his self-amusement at the expense of plausibility preferable? Because his is such a ghastly portrayal, Garfield and Edebiri seem “merely” overscaled and fraudulent in comparison, and Roberts only comes to life in scenes that make almost no sense, such as Alma's dressing down of three grad students who don't kowtow to her personal opinion. The sequence is like Cate Blanchett's famed anti-woke tirade in TÁR, but without the psychological nuance, fiercely debated points, and genuine power. And that's the listlessly directed, prosaically written After the Hunt in a nutshell: It's TÁR without genuine threat. Without a point of view. Without end.
