??? and Katie Douglas in Clown in a Cornfield
CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD
Considering the reveal lands early and doesn't significantly affect the film's plot (it actually is the plot), this isn't really a spoiler. But at roughly the halfway point of director/co-writer Eli Craig's Clown in a Cornfield, you'll realize that its title is inaccurate – not because there isn't a clown in a cornfield, but because there are so very, very many of them. (Clowns, that is, not cornfields.) In this horror comedy, at least a dozen wannabe killers dress as a small town's costumed mascot Frendo, and while it would be nice to report that this circus freak resembles Javier Bardem's Anton Chiguhr, he's really just a low-rent Pennywise. It would be nicer to report that the movie was even the least bit scary, yet given the genre and my personal expectations, I happily settled for funny.
As someone who's generally ignorant about YA lit until popular books are adapted for the screen, I was less surprised by the multiple maniacs angle than by Craig's and Carter Blanchard's script being based on a 2020 Adam Cesare novel that won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Young Adult Fiction. Sadistic clowns and literary pedigree! The setup finds teen heroine Quinn Maybrook (Katie Douglas), following the death of her mother, relocating from Philadelphia to rural Kettle Springs, Missouri, alongside her equally grieving doctor dad Glenn (Aaron Abrams). The Maybrooks quickly glean that this quaint little burg is stuck in the past; Quinn references the vibe as “the '90s,” but to this weathered soul, it felt more like a meaner Mayberry. Aside from new arrival Glenn, every adult we meet appears irrationally hostile, at least in their dealings with the under-18 set that Quinn takes a shine to: a sardonic, recognizably Gen Z coterie whose chief artistic pursuit is the creation of murder-themed videos for YouTube. The antagonist of these shorts is Frendo, who was once the grinning symbol of the corn-syrup brand that put Kettle Springs on the map. Now the production plant is closed, other jobs are scarce, and Frendo only lives on, to the local adults, as a reminder of past glories. To Kettle Springs' younger demographic, however, he's their own little Terrifier loon, though the laughs they have at Frendo's expense – at the town's expense – abruptly end when a bunch of Frendos show up at a rager with axes, pitchforks, and chainsaws in hand.
Let me clarify that the laughs end here for the teens, not for Clown in a Cornfield's audience: The mid-film arrival of Frendos is the point at which our own laughs are just getting started. Beginning with the 1991 prelude that amusingly mimics the opening to Jaws, there's a lot to enjoy in Craig's first 45 minutes – though, unfortunately, the fun doesn't include scenes of genuine fright. One of the relics from Kettle Springs' halcyon corn-syrup days is a Jack-in-the-box from which a miniature Frendo leaps out, and that toy's pop-and-giggle is more startling that any of Craig's contrived “Gotcha!” scares. (His most distinctive early execution is undone by a niggling detail, as Frendo's squeaking clown shoes make too much noise for him to legitimately sneak up on anyone.)
Still, with Quinn as the temperamental opposite of the Laurie Strode-ish “last girl standing” – rude, resistant to authority, sexually aggressive – Douglas fashions a livelier, more distinct protagonist than slasher flicks routinely provide, while the energetic Abrams is utterly winning as Quinn's profoundly uncool, secretly so-cool father. As for Quinn's YouTube-ing allies, they're adroitly represented by Carson MacCormac, Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, and Alexandre Martin Deakin, with Vincent Muller, as the stoic, deer-hunting loner Rust, creating an archetype I don't recall ever seeing before: Boo Radley as teen hottie. The actors drive the first half of Craig's film. The generational and cultural jokes – as well as a heartbreakingly sweet gay romance that absolutely shouldn't be spoiled – drive the second.
Eventually, the Frendo ringleader delivers one of those long, rambling, Bond-villain monologues explaining the logic behind the clowns' rampage, and the sequence is a dud, resulting in the movie's themes landing with slightly heavier force than the gym weight that crushes one teen's skull. But the gist of the argument – and the reason, I'm guessing, that Cesare's novel is so well-regarded – is both ticklish and perversely suited to our times: This is about a community that would rather kill their children than engage in one more conversation about trans rights or global warming. Although Clown in a Cornfield is hardly deep, is does dive into the bone-deep fear and loathing that some from older generations have for newer ones, and blessedly, it does so in funny, clever ways. There's never any question as to whose side we're on in Craig's film. Yet while we're jeering at the adult assailants before and after they don their ridiculous red noses and oversize pajamas, the kids are frequently just as worthy of (friendlier) derision. Quinn's refusal to learn to drive stick shift, for instance, has unintentionally dire consequences, and before a pair of teens entered a ramshackle farmhouse to call 9-1-1, they really should've mastered the art of the rotary phone … or Googled info regarding what a rotary phone was.
Craig's and Blanchard's screenplay is filled with delightfully goofy little pleasures such as this, which range from Glenn's unexpected purpose in the clowns' night of terror to Quinn's argument that her listening to Dad's classic rock would be like him, as a teen, listening to music from the 1940s. (Gotta admit: She had a point, and it hurt.) Clown in a Cornfield may not offer much in terms of thrills, to say nothing of audible shrieks. Watch it with a gang of friends, though, and you may find yourself occasionally shrieking with laughter. I adored it when a victimized teen, with a murderous clown in hot pursuit, raced to a nearby home for safety and, instead of immediately entering, rang the doorbell – out of politeness. I might've giggled harder still when Verity Marks' Ronnie, the last teen of color standing, noted that their whole crazy night resembled a stereotypical cornfield-slasher movie from the '80s, to which one of her friends asked, “What does that mean?” Ronnie clearly knew period cinema. “It means I'm next!”
SHADOW FORCE
Thanks to the May 2 debut of Thunderbolts*, I suppose we're officially in summer-blockbuster season, and for the life of me, I can't remember a single previous weekend in any Hollywood-summer month (COVID-2020 notwithstanding) in which the highest-grossing new release nabbed a mere $3.65 million domestic. Yet that measly sum was indeed what Clown in a Cornfield landed, and nipping on its heels with an equally unceremonious $2.02 million was director Joe Carnahan's Shadow Force, which is like Mr. & Mrs. Smith without the excitement, twisty plotting, and sexual chemistry – though there is, at least, an adorable little boy who's cuter than four photo albums' worth of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie baby pics.
In Carnahan's film, Kerry Washington and Omar Sy play Kyrah and Isaac, assassins-for-hire for the titular special-forces group who went rogue after the two fell in love and Kyrah became pregnant. They've spent the past four years on the lam – Isaac tending to their now-five-year-old son Ky (Jahleel Kamara), and Kyrah off on her own killing Shadow Force operatives before they eliminate her family. Not long into the movie, the estranged lovers are reunited, and this being summer-blockbuster season, they re-meet in the same manner that eventual allies always do this time of year: They spend roughly three minutes beating the hell out of each other. (Beyond the month of their release, this is literally the only way in which Shadow Force and Thunderbolts* are connected.) After that dust settles, it's Spy vs. Spy time again, with all the requisite tracking, chasing, and violent retribution as our heroic parents face off against their nefarious former partners. The sole twist, and it's a depressingly formulaic one, is that Shadow Force mastermind Jack Cinder – a role inevitably played by Mark Strong – is also an old beau of Kyrah's. Apparently, this purportedly smart gal who went two-for-two in dating co-workers was unaware of the age-old professional maxim “Don't shit where you eat.”
Not all of Carnahan's latest is as bad as I'm probably making it sound, mostly because, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, it does have a funny bone. Oscar winner Da'Vine Joy Randolph and rapper Method Man add some zing as our leads' covert eyes and ears, and Marshall Cook and Ed Quinn are unexpectedly endearing as a pair of Cinder's bodyguards – the kind who, in these sorts of movies, generally stand behind the megalomaniac looking intimidating with their hands clasped in front of their crotches. Here, they actually get jokes, and even more shockingly, they get legitimate purpose in the narrative.
But Sy's effortless magnetism and seductive French dialect are in service to bum material, and Washington fares much worse, her shrill, motivationally perplexing portrayal never making the least bit of sense. (Listening to Kyrah coo with maternal concern following an expletive-laden tirade could have been comedic, but Washington's and her editor's timing is off, and the effect is nearly whiplash-inducing.) Sadly, most of the laughter we contribute to Shadow Force is directed at the movie – the speedboat chase that resembled a bumper-car play date was the apex of unintentional hilarity – and only young Kamara emerges from this action wreck unscathed. While the grown-ups around Ky are behaving like brutal morons, this pint-size scene-stealer simply sits back, unleashes a devastating smile, and croons along – beautifully! – to old Lionel Ritchie standards. I desperately wanted to be watching his movie.
FIGHT OR FLIGHT
There's nothing quite like the joy of witnessing certain performers reclaim their places of prominence after years of being effectively disregarded.
You felt it in John Travolta's work in Pulp Fiction and Pam Grier's in Jackie Brown and, scooting away from Tarantino, pretty much everything Matthew McConaughey did between 2011 and pre-Interstellar 2014. That same electricity, that unmistakable vitality, is evident in Josh Hartnett's star turns following his first-rate support in Oppenheimer: as the smiling serial killer and attentive girl-dad in last summer's Trap, and now as a disgraced, loose-cannon secret agent in Fight or Flight. Director James Madigan's comedic thriller – third among the weekend's new releases with $2 million domestic – is nothing more than a mid-air Bullet Train, and of considerably less interest than that 2022 release. Hartnett, however, is clearly having himself a (frequently literal) high ol' time – so alert, inventive, and dazzlingly physical that it's almost inconceivable that this man, 20 years ago, was like the physical embodiment of a nap. Maybe, because the guy is so objectively handsome, Hollywood just wasn't sure what to do with Hartnett except turn him into a generic leading man. My guess is that the town now gets it. These days, the actor isn't generic on-screen. To our collective benefit, he's effing crazy.
All you really need to know about the plot of Hartnett's latest is that it's essentially Snakes on a Plane if the snakes were contract killers, and beyond one assassin who's conceivably minoring in operatic performance and another whose robotic blue eyes bleed from the pupils, this cabal doesn't deliver personality or visual interest even close to the snakes'. For 90-plus minutes, we merely toggle between scenes of exhaustingly staged über-violence involving whatever weapons are handy and energy-draining scenes of Hartnett's Lucas Reyes planning strategy with Charithra Chandran's stewardess and her associates. I was increasingly bored with the former and came close to narcolepsy with the latter – and this despite Fight or Flight's lead spending the first part of his airline travel in a pink, form-fitting strawberry-milk T-shirt and the subsequent part in a sweatsuit with pockets that didn't adequately sustain his gun.
Yet these 37,000-miles-above-Earth sequences were actually preferable to the ones set on solid ground, with Lucas' handler Katherine (Katee Sackhoff) and her lackey Aaron (Julian Kostov) trading snark in between bouts of exposition that none of us needed. (Rude as it may be to say, the news that Katherine and Lucas were former lovers came as a shock, given that the 46-year-old Hartnett could handily pass as the 45-year-old Sackhoff's son.) Still, Hartnett hoots and hollers and kicks serious ass through all of Fight or Flight's inanity – I'm reasonably convinced that he performed many of his own stunts – and while I've seen dozens of preferable movies in 2025, I'm not sure I've yet viewed one in which the lead looked to be having more fun. While that may not make Hartnett's new film worth seeing, it's at least a solid endorsement for whatever he does next.
THE SHROUDS
It's kind of impossible to not like a movie whose first sentence is “Grief is rotting your teeth.” And until it almost inevitably flies off the rails, David Cronenberg's The Shrouds (now in its final days at Davenport venue The Last Picture House) is, I'm happy to say, perhaps the writer/director's most likable – and certainly most accessible – weird-ass entertainment in more than a decade. All of the Canadian auteur's perpetual signposts appear present: bodily decay; meditations on death; technology in service to perversion; doppelgängers. (Had Viggo Mortensen been cast we could've had a winning card in Cronenberg Bingo.) Yet while his latest occasionally feels like a Greatest Hits package, that's not necessarily a detriment, because the hits are pretty great. I might've left scratching my head, but I was with The Shrouds nearly to the end, and even head-scratching was preferable to the ennui I felt after 2012's Cosmopolis, 2014's Maps to the Stars, and 2022's Crimes of the Future.
There's an awful lot of narrative in Cronenberg's mildly futuristic dramatic thriller, all of it stemming from a particular invention of Vincent Cassel's entrepreneur Karsh, who, as the proprietor of a Toronto cemetery, has outfitted the corpses' burial shrouds with live-feed cameras that show the bereaved their loved ones' decomposition in real time. For many of us, the natural response to this technological marvel would be “Ewwwww!” (That's certainly the unsaid response of Jennifer Dale's Myrna, a first date of Karsh's who you just know won't stick around for a second one.) But for Karsh, who lost his beloved wife to aggressive cancer several years prior, this subterranean nanny cam offers comfort, as it evidently does to many others – his cemetery is about to become a worldwide franchise. What, though, are the bizarre polyps that Karsh is now seeing on his decaying wife's bone structure? Are they naturally grown? Are they surveillance implants? Why, in an apparent act of vandalism, do certain graves at his cemetery get ransacked while others are left intact? What are we to make of the idea that Icelandic interests are interested in the shrouds' technology? And what's with the AI assistant Hunny that Karsh uses for his daily scheduling? Could “she” somehow be the key to answering these queries?
During its first hour, and for quite a while after, Cronenberg's film could nearly be mistaken for a conventional thriller – even a Hitchcock thriller. Diane Kruger, who plays Karsh's (blond) late wife Becca in dream and fantasy sequences, also shows up as his (brunette) sister-in-law Terry, and additionally voices Hunny, who's like a remedial-animation version of Scarlett Johansson in Her. The great Guy Pearce, in exceptionally funny/twitchy form, pops in as Terry's ex-husband Maury, a professional hacker whose motives are uncertain. Sandrine Holt arrives as Soon-Min Szabo, the blind wife of a dying CEO in Budapest, and a woman whose behavior is, shall we say, not not-sinister. Cronenberg always provides arresting, precise, gorgeously bleak images. (The cinematography here is by Douglas Koch.) But in The Shrouds, the pristine visuals are impressively off-set by the flaky, jaded humanity of Cassel and the rest of the cast, and the escalation of mysteries initially suggests that this might turn into a juicy puzzle you're eager to solve – a high-tech L.A. Confidential with fewer killings yet similar appreciation for noir.
That's not quite what we get, principally because each new twist seems strangely dropped a few scenes after its introduction – we're barely able to wrap our heads around one set of conspiratorial circumstances before Cronenberg tosses in another two or three. And while more astute viewers might be able to make sense of the climactic scenes, I remained hopelessly in the dark, though I might have better luck on future viewings. It's a pleasure to say, though, that The Shrouds is one of few David Cronenberg offerings this century that I actively want to see another time or two. As much as I appreciate and often revere the 82-year-old's output, it might even be the first one I wasn't for an instant bored by since 1988's Dead Ringers, back when two Jeremy Ironses were making life hell for Geneviève Bujold. Now it's three Diane Krugers waylaying Vincent Cassel. That's inflation I can live with.
