Film Review Archives - Vanyaland

‘Marty Supreme’ Review: Josh Safdie serves up a masterpiece

Nick Johnston — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:13:18 +0000

If folks were disappointed that The Smashing Machine wasn’t just Uncut Gems 2: Howie Ratner Learns How to Lift, they’ll be absolutely delighted by Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. It’s a continuation of the storytelling throughline that Safdie established with his brother Bennie in their last few films — white-knuckle insanity on the streets of New York taken to absurdist extremes, grounded in a thoroughly-brilliant performance by a uniquely-talented lead — but placed in a more-distant time period, with more textures […]

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‘Eternity’ Review: A good take on the great beyond

Nick Johnston — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 09:01:12 +0000

David Freyne’s Eternity breaks one of the cardinal rules of first-date cinema — for the love of God, unless you’re absolutely certain the person is sufficiently cool with talking about death, do not bring that subject up in your multiplex selection and, in fact, you should at all times pretend that it doesn’t exist and that you both are immortals unless you’re hot enough to get away with it — but still winds up being what I’d think of (aside […]

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‘Wake Up Dead Man’ Review: Knives out, crucifixes in

Nick Johnston — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 10:09:07 +0000

Props to Rian Johnson for turning lemons into lemonade: the man hears that Glass Onion was too preachy, then sets the next feature in the Knives Out series in a parish. It shouldn’t be surprising that he’s wound up here — his movies are puzzle boxes that JJ Abrams wishes he was talented enough to pen — but, as fun as these movies can be, it is somewhat frustrating to find us contractually back here again, when there once seemed […]

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‘Wicked: For Good’ Review: It isn’t easy being green

Nick Johnston — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 15:08:18 +0000

A year and a few hundred million dollars later, John M. Chu’s adaptation of the Broadway musical Wicked, itself an adaptation of the Gregory Maguire novel of the same name, which in turn was a revisionist reinterpretation of characters from The Wizard of Oz (both L. Frank Baum’s children’s fable and the 1939 movie), has come to its curtain call. Somehow, it’s even more culturally omnipresent than it was last time around — brand collabs, tie-in merchandise, (apparently decent-tasting) Skittles […]

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‘Keeper’ Review: A legit scary Osgood Perkins movie

Nick Johnston — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:14:56 +0000

Color me stunned: Osgood Perkins has made something that’s not just “vibes-based” horror. His latest, Keeper, has been released with an interesting gimmick in that there hasn’t been much in the way of William Castle-style theatrics from NEON’s marketing team (cryptic teases coupled with heaps of praise from modern masters of the genre like Guillermo del Toro isn’t akin to, says strapping a heart monitor to Maika Monroe) and wasn’t screened for press* ironically enough, this is probably because the […]

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‘The Running Man’ Review: The Wright stuff

Nick Johnston — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 18:07:38 +0000

Thanks to Baby Driver breaking people’s brains (and that Anthony Bourdain tweet didn’t help matters), Edgar Wright is now caught in a miserable catch-22. If he were to continue making the types of films he always has — deliciously self-critical and deeply personal tributes to genre cinema — he runs the risk of the work being misunderstood at best and uncharitably savaged at worst (see Last Night in Soho and the baffling vitriol that was hurled its way). If he […]

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‘Predator: Badlands’ Review: A good-enough hunt

Nick Johnston — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 17:31:52 +0000

It was always going to be a tall order following up a movie like Prey with anything other than a direct sequel or, perhaps, another human-oriented story set in a different era. Then again, I don’t think anyone expected Dan Trachtenberg to make what might be the first universally-liked installment of the Predator franchise since the days of Arnie, Carl and Jesse “The Body,” so if there were anyone capable of pulling off a hard pivot, it would be the […]

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‘Bugonia’ Review: The feel-bad delight of the fall

Nick Johnston — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 19:04:51 +0000

You have to love Yorgos Lanthimos’ commitment to one-upping himself when it comes to alienating crowds. He sees that Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness weren’t enough to scare off the audience he acquired following The Favourite — he just couldn’t stop winning Oscars for his actors! — so he goes out and makes his Only God Forgives with his latest feature, Bugonia, which is as nightmarishly fucked-up as the carnival barkers at the boutique studios wish their summer horror […]

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‘Black Phone 2’ Review: Let this call go to voicemail

Nick Johnston — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:14:31 +0000

I’ll give Scott Derrickson this: It takes a lot of guts to decide that what audiences want from a Black Phone sequel is to see the masked killer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) show off his post-mortem skills as an ice-skating pro. That sequence, which acts as the final setpiece of Black Phone 2, is both a direct tribute to the iconic, hilarious kill in Richard Ciupka and Peter R. Simpson’s Curtains, in which a similarly-guised slasher decides to […]

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IFFBoston Fall Focus ’25 Review: Josh O’Connor is ‘The Mastermind’

Nick Johnston — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:12:03 +0000

When you think “Massachusetts art museum heist,” it’s understandable that you’d default to the one that took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum some 35 years ago. You know the one: The subject of a million “whodunit” documentaries and endless speculation (as well as one solid crime novel, Charlesgate Confidential, which transplanted the heist to the ’40s and heavily involved the mythos of the Charlesgate Hotel), where the paintings were cut from their frames and potentially lifted by a […]

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