Movie Reviews
‘The Life of Chuck’ Review: Mike Flanagan Lifts Audiences Up (for Once!) in Sentimental Drama
“The Life of Chuck” is a departure for Mike Flanagan, in the sense that it’s not technically a horror movie. But it is a Stephen King adaptation, which is very much in the “Doctor Sleep” director’s wheelhouse. And it is haunted: By regret, by memories, and by the snuffing out of an entire internal universe when someone dies. (Adding another layer of sorrowful real-life resonance, film journalist Scott Wampler, who died suddenly in May, appears as a background actor in the film, which is dedicated to him.) If anything, “The Life of Chuck” just peels back the layer of metaphor and gets straight to the wistfulness that underpins all ghost stories.
Structured around a verse from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” — “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes” — “The Life of Chuck” is told in reverse order from the end of a man’s life to the beginning. It does so in a way that’s surprising enough that it’s best not to discuss it in too much detail; suffice to say that it takes a cosmic approach to the idea of inner worlds. (“Every man and every woman is a star,” to quote Whitman’s fellow literary eccentric Aleister Crowley.) The entire movie isn’t sad, although it does land on a note of genuine pathos. But sentimentality suits Flanagan, whose florid writing style is well matched by the high-concept ideas explored here.
Nick Offerman narrates the opening of each of the film’s three chapters, each of which related in some way to, well, the life of accountant (and surprisingly good dancer) Charles “Chuck” Krantz, played by Tom Hiddleston as an adult and Jacob Tremblay as a boy. Flanagan regulars Rahul Kohli and Kate Siegel show up in minor parts, part of a who’s who of familiar genre faces like David Dastmalchian, Matthew Lillard, and Harvey Guillén that rounds out the ensemble cast. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan play slightly bigger roles as a divorced couple who turn to each other for comfort in the imminent apocalypse — to explain more would, again, undermine the film’s most poetic theme — as does Mark Hamill as Albie, Chuck’s New York-accented Jewish accountant grandfather.
It’s Zeyde Albie who convinces young Chuck that numbers are just as exciting as moonwalking across the school gym, setting him on a stable, but unexciting life path. “The Life of Chuck” uses dancing as a shorthand for whimsy, creativity, playfulness, joy — name an unselfconscious emotion that we’re supposed to put aside in the name of adult responsibility, and it’s expressed through dancing in this movie. Bubbe Sarah (Mia Sara) shows young Chuck musicals to cheer him up after his parents die in a car accident — this dark turn comes on that quickly and brutally in the movie, too — and his fondest memories are of dancing with her in her kitchen as diffuse white light streams in through the window.
It’s a nice scene, but also a mawkish one. To be fair, Flanagan makes no effort to disguise or apologize for the clichés in “The Life of Chuck,” whose centerpiece scene depicts Chuck rediscovering the magic in his otherwise routine life by dancing with a stranger in the center of a suburban mall promenade as a crowd gathers around them. From there, the movie takes a turn into sadder territory, but the tone remains sunny and sweet and pleasantly generic. The lighting is bright, the locations are quaint, and the quips all come with a pre-packaged air of warmth and wisdom.
Again, many of the points being made here are of a generic “enjoy every sandwich” type of bent. But there is something touching about “Chuck’s” core premise, which is that even the smallest and most ordinary of lives is animated by a divine spark. A human being is the culmination of every place they’ve ever been, every thing they’ve ever done, and every person they’ve ever met, and each of us carries a galaxy of experiences around with us everywhere we go. And when we die, those worlds die with us.
Despite his reputation as a master of horror, this side of Mike Flanagan has always been there. (Same for King — he did write “The Green Mile,” after all.) As a filmmaker, Flanagan deals in raw, go-for-broke emotion; it’s just that this time around, he’s using that passion to affirm the audience, not disturb them. Whether one finds this uplifting or eye-rolling is a matter of taste, and cynics will likely find Flanagan’s latest far too saccharine for theirs. Viewers with a sweet tooth, meanwhile, may find themselves thoroughly charmed by “Chuck’s” dorky earnestness.
Grade: B-
“The Life of Chuck” premiered at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
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Movie Reviews
Hollywood Pariah Kevin Spacey Opens in a Straight to Video Movie with 25 Producers, 1 Review, No Theaters, No Press – Showbiz411
As we know, Kevin Spacey is a pariah in Hollywood.
He’s in a rare club with Mel Gibson, Armie Hammer, Nate Parker, Jonathan Majors, and James Franco.
Spacey has managed to avoid jail time by reaching settlements with various accusers of sexual malfeasance, all men.
His film career — which included two Oscars and a Tony Award — has been destroyed.
Spacey has been reduced to appearing in straight to video films, made for whatever reason the various producers involved know only to themselves.
On Friday, a new Spacey movie surfaced against its will, but not in theaters. It also went straight to video. “1780” is a period piece set during the Revolutionary War. Spacey plays a toothless Pennsylvania country trapper.
There is no rating on Rotten Tomatoes, largely because there is only one review. The review by Alan Ng of Film Threat is positive. Ng recently reviewed “World War Bigfoot,” which he also liked. He seems to specialize in reviewing films no one has heard of.
“1780” does boast 25 producers who will probably not see a return on their investment. But they can say they made a movie with Kevin Spacey.
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Movie Reviews
‘House of Criticism’ Review: A Pensive and Touching Portrait of Married Art Critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith (It Is Only, at Moments, a True-Life Christopher Guest Movie)
If you wanted to be funny about it, you could say that Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith, who occupy the center of the documentary “House of Criticism,” are like characters out of a Christopher Guest movie. Both are venerable New York art critics — but the thing is, they’re married New York art critics, whose lives revolve entirely around art and art criticism and talking about art and art criticism. They eat, breathe, sleep and dream it. In the Guest mockumentary of my imagination, the two would be played by Bob Balaban and Parker Posey, and they would be blissfully cracked egghead eccentrics who think that art is the most important thing in the world because it’s the most important thing in the world to them.
At moments, “House of Criticism” does throw off unintentional comic sparks of art-world insularity. But I’m kidding, ultimately, since underneath that it’s a pensive and touching documentary, and it happens to be about two writers I greatly admire. Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic of the New York Times, and Jerry Saltz, the art critic of New York magazine, are writers of sway, elegance, legend. They’re two of the last powerful legacy critics in America, and both are fantastic writers. For them, the love of art is a mission, at once sophisticated and childlike. Roberta calls art “the most advanced operating system that our species has devised to explore consciousness, the seen and the unseeable.” The way art connects (and saves) these two on a daily basis is its own rarefied story, and it speaks to a certain vanishing culture of passionate New York literary brainiacs that used to be thought of as almost the essence of the city.
Early on, Jerry stands before Picasso’s epochal Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Museum of Modern Art and does a head-spinning riff on it, describing how 500 years of art history collapsed in the late 19th century (through Manet, the Impressionists, Van Gogh, Cezanne), leaving the blank slate for Picasso to fill. He compares the way the painting remade the world to the cataclysm of 9/11 (“When we believed in one course of history, and obviously there was another course of history, and they shattered”). Now that’s criticism.
As “House of Criticism” shows us, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith are luminaries and survivors who enjoy an idealized life together. Roberta is something of a contradiction, both the haughtier and more vulnerable of the two. She can be imperious in that Timesian way, but there’s a tremulous insecurity about her. Beneath a certain Midwestern patrician rigor, she’s full of self-doubt about her writing and is in constant need of encouragement, which Jerry is more than happy to provide. He’s blustery and big picture-oriented, while her insights are more delicate and intimate, blooming out of her holy communion with the work.
Jerry is a contradiction as well, a man who writes like a demon and looks like a dentist. But don’t let his fubsy aura fool you — he’s the social butterfly and loose cannon, plugged into social media (which he plays like a violin), and the audacious thoughts pour out of him. The most telling aspect of their relationship is that as writers they should be competitors, but instead they’re spiritual collaborators; they turn what could be a competition into a romance. They help each other on word choices, and even when they’re reviewing the same show, they’re really competing with themselves, with their own cultivated and highly different ideas of perfectionism.
Their relationship is built, to a large degree, around Jerry’s belief that Roberta is the superior critic — but this, for Jerry, is a form of chivalry, the flower of their love story. “Your writing is so condensed, right on the object, focused,” he says. He’s intensely supportive, but Jerry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2018, is arguably the greater writer (his poetic showmanship flies higher), and it’s my reading that deep down he knows it. It’s his perpetual self-deprecation and devotion that keeps the marriage balanced.
The two have no children and no apparent hobbies outside of their unrelenting obsession with art. They slip in and out of gallery openings, where they’re treated like royalty, and they attend 20 to 30 shows a week. By all rights, they should have a social calendar that rivals Andy Warhol’s in the ’70s. But here’s the joke: They adore their life together but are so devoted to their work, so monastic about it, that they never go out. Jerry calls them “happy losers” and describes their spacious apartment off Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village as “the house that criticism built.”
In the morning, he pours deli coffee over ice into a 7-11 Big Gulp cup, and he’ll consume three of those a day. It’s fuel, as is the food he eats. When his friend Adam Platt, the New York magazine restaurant critic, asks Jerry what his favorite food is, Jerry replies: the grilled chicken at Gristede’s (a slightly downscale New York supermarket). “That’s the life of the mind!” says Platt. “You’re as happy with prison food.” He’s not kidding. I live in the same neighborhood and use Gristede’s as a convenience store, and I would never consider buying the grilled chicken there. But as Jerry explains, popping a bag of spinach into the microwave, he and Roberta are so consumed with work that they subsist on this drone food. The two barely go to restaurants (though we see them having breakfast at their favorite diner). Do they drink? If I was them, I’d need a cocktail by the end of the day, but the movie never says.
“House of Criticism,” directed by Alison Chernick, has a sketchy but rather controlled vantage. There’s a lot you don’t learn (I would have liked to see more about the politics of the New York art world), and plenty you do — like the fact that Lena Dunham is their goddaughter. Late in the movie, she comes over to visit them and provokes a penetrating exchange on the subject of why they never had kids.
People don’t often think of critics in humanistic terms, but these two invest criticism with soul, and there’s something disarming about how they were both damaged people who came together by seeing, in each other, a mirror image. She was born in New York and raised in Kansas, moving back to Manhattan in her early twenties to be part of the art scene (her mentor was the artist and critic Donald Judd). She found her way to criticism as a role in life, yet there was something metaphysically lonely about her.
It’s Jerry who comes from trauma. His mother, who committed suicide when he was 10, was erased out of his life (she was never spoken of again). He tells a haunting story about how she dropped him off for a solo visit to the Art Institute of Chicago just two weeks before her death, and it was there, on that visit, that the art lightbulb went off: He realized that every painting is a story. He wanted to be a painter, and tried (he had some talent), but thought that he lacked the proper schooling. What he really lacked was confidence. In photographs from the time, Jerry looks like he could be Richard Dreyfuss’s sad-sack brother. He wound up becoming a long-distance trucker, driving 10-wheelers full of paintings (he did this for 10 years), and he confesses that at moments he would go back into the truck and stomp on paintings and damage them. That is seriously sick behavior (his self-hatred was off the charts), and it’s amazing that he became the menschy person he did.
These two have thrived as critics by evolving. Jerry says of critics, “We have to adapt to the times, or we’re bullies and geezers.” He’s right. The film culminates in Roberta’s ultimate evolution — her decision to retire from the New York Times. The time feels right, but the question hovers: Without that job, what will her identity be? In a moving moment, she tells Jerry, “You’re my infrastructure.” “You’re mine,” he says. (That’s the critic version of “You complete me.”) And seeing each other through the prism of art is both of their infrastructure. These two are standard-bearers for the glory of a culture that once was. It’s a culture where criticism is about judging things, but more than that it’s about exploring things — experiencing things, bringing you closer to life.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: June 26th, 2026 / 08:03 PM
SUPERGIRL movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros./DC Studios
Rating: PG-13
Stars: Milly Adcock, David Corenswet, Eve Ridley, Matthias Schoenaerts, Diarmaid Murtagh, Jason Momoa, David Krumholtz, Emily Beecham
Writer: Ana Nogueira, based on characters created by Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster
Director: Craig Gillespie
Distributor: Warner Bros./DC Studios
Release Date: June 26, 2026
The new SUPERGIRL doesn’t have that “Eureka! This is how you do this now” spark that galvanized its immediate franchise predecessor, last year’s SUPERMAN. Director Craig Gillespie and screenwriter Ana Nogueira, basing the film on characters created by DC Comics’ Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, probably wisely, aren’t going for that.
Instead, the SUPERGIRL makers are intent on providing a lively adventure, getting to the point quickly and letting the action unspool with unquestionably strong motivation, abetted by plenty of punch-ups, kicking and frequent explosions.
Supergirl, aka Kara Zor-El (Milly Adcock), is from the now-dead planet Krypton, just like her cousin Clark/Kal-El/Superman (David Corenswet). However, where Clark has chosen to remain on Earth, where the yellow sun gives him superpowers that allow to help Earth’s residents, Kara likes to party on planets that have a red sun, where she has no unusual abilities.
This is because Kara seems to have taken to heart a dictum from a different comic book universe – with great power comes great responsibility – and decided the inverse is true: with no power comes no responsibility.
We get insight into exactly why Kara is so duty-averse over the course of SUPERGIRL, and it’s probably not a spoiler to say that she re-examines some attitudes as events unfold.
Kara plans to celebrate her twenty-third birthday on a backwater red sun planet. The bar where Kara chooses to drink is entered by preteen Ruthye Knoll (Eve Ridley), whose family has been murdered by brigands, led by the horrendous Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts). Ruthye is out for revenge. Kara thinks Ruthye is a bit young and pure-hearted to be on a murderous quest.
Even on a planet with a red sun, though, Kara is still handy with fists and feet. Ruthye sees what Kara can do and concludes she is the ideal ally. Kara absolutely refuses to help. Then something occurs that credibly rouses Kara to do whatever it takes to achieve her aims, which sort of line up with Ruthye’s.
No explanation is needed for why Kara feels such urgency, which we easily share. Her concern for Ruthye is understandable and her connecting to larger purpose is shown rather than spoken.
Intriguingly, the aesthetics of SUPERGIRL are largely those of STAR WARS, with some MAD MAX and BLADE RUNNER thrown in. The filmmakers have a good time with all sorts of utterly nonhuman alien people and figuring out how to make interplanetary versions of familiar items like vending machines.
The pace is pleasingly brisk and the structure doesn’t require much exposition. When they hit a hard-to-answer question like why Kara is Supergirl while Clark is Superman, they acknowledge it and then get out from under without irritating anybody.
For anyone wondering about the veracity of the recording from Superman’s parents that appeared in SUPERMAN, a quick line of dialogue here confirms it (sorry, Jor-El supporters).
There is the expected amount of CGI involved, including a great motion-capture performance by Kara’s dog Krypto (modeled upon executive producer/SUPERMAN director James Gunn’s dog), but a lot of the stunts and makeup appear gratifyingly practical.
Adcock is fine in all of Kara’s moods, from wasted to resistant to determined, with a delightful reaction to feeling her body’s response to the yellow sun. Ridley is an appealing young hero, and Corenswet offers wholesome support. Schoenaerts lets Krem revel in his own soft-spoken vileness, and Jason Momoa enthusiastically portrays an intergalactic bounty hunter. David Krumholtz is affecting as Kara’s scientist father.
SUPERGIRL isn’t going to redefine superhero movies, but it’s a perfectly enjoyable example of the form.
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