Beloved Dog Influencer Raffie
Dead from Heart Attack …

Published
December 25, 2025
7:08 AM PST

A ping pong hustler for the ages, a Neil Diamond interpreter for the ’80s, choral music both comic and spiritual, plus tormented teens, twisted families, and a giant snake on the loose. It’s quite the jolly holiday at your local cineplex.

They join a new Avatar sequel, a Bradley Cooper-directed drama, and more in theaters.

Marty Supreme

In theaters Thursday

I feel as if I should tell you to speed-read this review, preferably with Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man” blaring in your ear. Josh Safdie’s adrenaline-fueled, screwball comedy about a table tennis hustler who dreams of world domination — in a sport that hasn’t registered yet with the American public — is a mesmerizing cinematic tour de force. Timothée Chalamet plays Marty Mauser (loosely based on real-life 1940s and ’50s U.S. ping pong champ and petty criminal Marty Reisman), graduating from determined kid-with-a-passion to aggrieved also-ran-in-full-melt-down mode, attracting and then alienating everyone he comes across. We meet him as a New York shoe salesman having storeroom trysts with his married childhood sweetheart (Odessa A’zion) and prepping for a bout in England for which he can’t even afford plane fare.

Marty establishes with a series of heists and scams that he’s got no problem cheating or stealing to get there, then regales the press with a pugnacious racist routine that lands him on front pages before his first serve. Chalamet’s live-wire approach is neatly countered by a serenely sensual turn by Gwyneth Paltrow as an aging movie star who finds Marty amusing and alarming in about equal measure. And the film’s just getting started at that point, careening towards a championship in Japan with the propulsive, harrowing, rush-to-judgment feel of Safdie’s Uncut Gems mixed up with dizzying comedy. It’s a thrill ride, pure and simple. — Bob Mondello

Song Sung Blue

In theaters Thursday

Mike and Claire Sardina, the real-life, blue-collar Milwaukee couple who formed a Neil Diamond tribute act in the 1980s, get the sequin-and-spangle treatment in this Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson love-fest. Writer and director Craig Brewer keeps the music central and the sentiment tolerable as the couple meets cute, bonds quick, and forms a musical act known professionally as Lightning and Thunder. The stars are well-matched and appealing — Hudson does a winning Patsy Cline impersonation, and Jackman completely nails Neil Diamond’s sound and bearing. The couple’s story, which has more downs than ups, doesn’t quite match the mood of a movie determined to be ever-and-always-up. Still, the stars are engaging, the supporting cast great fun, and the music rousing. — Bob Mondello

Anaconda

In theaters Thursday

The original Anaconda movie came out almost 30 years ago, sending an assortment of ’90s movie stars down the Amazon, where they were menaced and occasionally crushed and/or devoured by giant deadly snakes. That film, starring Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube, was a hit that spawned a handful of lightly regarded sequels.

Heavy on meta references to the original film, the new Anaconda is not quite a reboot, it’s not quite a sequel, and it’s played for laughs. Jack Black and Paul Rudd star as lifelong friends who grew up wanting to be filmmakers. But they’ve followed different career paths — Paul Rudd’s character is a struggling actor whose biggest role was a bit part on the TV show S.W.A.T., while Jack Black’s character makes wedding videos while yearning to shoot something more creative. They gather their old friends and collaborators — played by Thandiwe Newton and Steve Zahn — and head to the Amazon to shoot a meta reimagining of Anaconda. As you can imagine, this proves harder than it sounds. — Stephen Thompson

The Plague

In limited theaters Wednesday

The first image is an eerie, underwater shot — sun-dappled blues, greens, and greys — its peace suddenly exploded as bodies plunge into the pool. Middle school boys, limbs all akimbo, almost literally at sea, as they struggle for equilibrium. It’s an apt beginning for the story of a youngster trying to figure out where he fits in among the cliques at a summer water polo camp. Ben (Everett Blunck) is the camp newbie, Jake (Kayo Martin) its smirking cool kid who picks up on his fellow campers’ idiosyncrasies and exploits them.

He tells Ben that Eli (Kenny Rasmussen), a withdrawn boy with a rash, has the “plague” and must be avoided. Ben, seeing the obvious pain the outcast is in, can’t square that with his own sense of decency, but also doesn’t want to be ostracized, and his attempt to split the difference leads the film into Lord of the Flies territory. Charlie Polinger’s directorial debut looks breathtaking, feels unnerving, and traffics cleverly in body-horror tropes as it basically establishes that 12-year-old boys are savages who should never be without adult supervision. — Bob Mondello

Father Mother Sister Brother

In limited theaters Wednesday

You might expect Jim Jarmusch to look at family relationships with a certain eccentricity, but not necessarily in the elegantly framed way he does in this triptych about adult children and the parents they don’t begin to understand. The Father segment casts Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik as siblings who are stiff with each other, and even less comfortable with their garrulous con man of a dad (Tom Waits). Driver’s come with provisions and cash, Bialik’s come armed with an arched eyebrow, and Waits is ready for them both.

The second part, Mother, finds a sublimely chilly Charlotte Rampling hosting an awkward once-a-year tea for her daughters, one primly nervous (Cate Blanchett), the other pink-haired and boisterous (Vicky Krieps). And the final third, Sister Brother, finds Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat bonding in their recently deceased parents’ now-empty Paris apartment. This segment seems less about estrangement, until you realize how little they actually know about their dear departed folks. There are running jokes about Rolexes, the expression “Bob’s your uncle,” and toasts to tie things together, along with a sweet, reflective tone that makes this one of the year’s most compassionate films. — Bob Mondello

The Choral

In limited theaters Thursday

Director Nicholas Hytner and screenwriter Alan Bennett, who previously teamed up on The Madness of King George, The History Boys, and The Lady in the Van, are plumbing shallower depths in this gentle dramedy about an amateur chorus in 1916. When their choirmaster leaves to fight in World War I, grieving mill owner Roger Allam, who funds the chorus, reluctantly hires Dr. Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), a gifted choirmaster but a divisive choice in this intensely nationalistic moment — because he’s spent the last few years in Germany. He also exhibits “peculiarities” (code for being gay) but this seems less important to the locals.

Fiennes is briskly dismissive of local traditions, snippy about English appreciation for the arts, and celebrated enough in music circles to persuade composer Edward Elgar (Simon Russell Beale) to let them perform his oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius.” Elgar is less thrilled when he discovers the chorus is turning the oratorio into a story about the war, casting its elderly hero as a young soldier and generally making it what later generations would call “relevant.” It’s all sweet and sentimental, and though it’s being released during awards seasons, feels as if it really wants to be considered for best picture of 1933. — Bob Mondello

No Other Choice

In select theaters Thursday

“I’ve got it all,” says paper factory supervisor Man-su as he hugs his family at a barbecue in the backyard of his elegant Korean home. He’s grilling some eels given to him by the paper company’s new American owners, secure in the knowledge that this must mean they value him. This being a social satire by director Park Chan-wook, it’s reasonable to expect he will shortly be dealt a blow, and one day later, he’s been axed. (The film is based on Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 horror-thriller novel The Ax). He’s distraught but can’t express, or even really understand, that he feels he has lost his manhood, his mojo, and his reason for being.

On top of that, his industry is consolidating, so finding another job before his severance pay runs out and he loses his house (his childhood home) will be tricky. Asked if he’d consider a job outside the paper industry, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) says that for him there is “no other choice,” echoing the words his American bosses uttered about bringing down costs as they did layoffs. But with the end of severance payments looming, he hatches a plan to knock off his job market competition one by one. Isn’t this mass murder? Well, he has “no other choice.”

At first it seems as if we’re in serial-killer comedy territory, but the filmmaker widens the frame to include narrative side trips — a stepson who’s stealing cellphones, a daughter who’s a cello prodigy, a wife who’s working for a dentist that Man-su suspects has designs on her. Oh, and pig-farm trauma from his youth, and a passion for greenhouse gardening. Director Park has a lot going on, and a final paper-plant-mechanization sequence suggests that all these stabs at human agency may just have been humanity’s last gasp. — Bob Mondello

The Testament of Ann Lee

In limited theaters Thursday

Ambitious, stylized, intense, and thoroughly unorthodox, Mona Fastvold’s religious biopic tells the story of Shakers founder Ann Lee (a wild-eyed, fiercely committed Amanda Seyfried) as a full-scale musical drama. That’s not to say there are finger-snapping tunes. The score adapts 18th century Shaker spirituals, and the choreography involves the thrusting limbs and clawing fingers of the seizure-like dancing that earned this puritan sect of “Shaking” Quakers their nickname.

We meet Ann as a pious youngster more interested in spiritual matters than matters of the flesh. Marriage to a man who enjoys inflicting pain during sex, and the deaths of her four children in infancy lead Ann to the conclusion that lifelong celibacy is among the keys to salvation. With the help of her younger brother (Lewis Pullman), she finds adherents to a religious philosophy that also emphasizes gender equality and simple living, and leads them to found a utopian, crafts-based community in America. Director Fastvold and her co-writer Brady Corbet (the couple flipped roles from last year’s The Brutalist) serve up Ann’s spiritual journey in ecstatically musical terms, which is at once distancing and … well, ecstatic, though it pales a bit over the course of two-and-a-quarter hours. — Bob Mondello 

Stuffed animals that talk back. Chessboards with pieces that move on their own. And a chatty holographic fairy in a crystal ball.

Your next toy purchase might be powered by artificial intelligence and able to converse with your kids.

Chatbots and AI-powered assistants that can quickly answer questions and generate texts have become more common after the rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. As AI becomes more intertwined in our work and personal lives, it’s also shaking up playtime.

Startups have already unleashed AI toys in time for the holidays. More are set to hit the shelves for both kids and adults in the new year.

Some parents are excited to test the toys, hoping that the chatty bot interactions will educate and entertain their children. Others don’t want the seemingly sentient tech near their loved ones until it has more guardrails and undergoes further testing.

Researchers at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund say they have already found problems with some of the toys they tested. Among the issues: an AI teddy bear that could be prompted into discussing sexual fetishes and kink, according to the group.

Toy makers say AI can make play more interactive, and they take safety and privacy seriously. Some have placed more limits around how chatty some of these products can be. They say they are taking their time figuring out how to use AI safely with children.

El Segundo-based Mattel, the maker of Barbie and Hot Wheels, announced earlier this year that it had teamed up with OpenAI to create more AI-powered toys. The initial plan was to unveil their first joint product this year, but that announcement has been pushed into 2026.

Here’s what you need to know about AI toys:

What’s an AI toy?

Toys have featured the latest technology for decades.

Introduced in the 1980s, Teddy Ruxpin told stories aloud when a tape cassette was inserted into the animatronic bear’s back. Furbys — fuzzy creatures that blinked their large eyes and talked — came along in the ’90s, when digital pets, Tamagotchi, also were all the rage.

Mattel released a Barbie in 2015 that could talk and tell jokes. The toy maker also marketed a dream house in 2016 that responded to voice commands.

As technology has advanced, toys have also gotten smarter. Now, toy makers are using large language models trained to understand and generate language that powers products such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Mattel sells a game called Pictionary vs. AI, in which players draw pictures and AI guesses what they are.

Equipped with microphones and connected to WiFi, AI toys are pricier than traditional ones, are marketed as companions or educational products and can cost $100 or even double that.

Why are people worried about them?

From inappropriate content to privacy concerns, worries about AI toys grew this holiday season.

U.S. PIRG Education Fund researchers tested several toys. One that failed was Kumma, an AI-powered talking teddy bear that told researchers where to find dangerous objects such as knives and pills and conversed about sexually explicit content. The bear was running on OpenAI’s software.

Some toys also use tactics to keep kids engaged, which makes parents concerned that the interactions could become addictive. There are also privacy concerns about data collected from children. Some worry about how these toys will impact kids’ developing brains.

“What does it mean for young kids to have AI companions? We just really don’t know how that will impact their development,” said Rory Erlich, one of the toy testers and authors of PIRG’s AI toys report.

Child advocacy group Fairplay has warned parents not to buy AI toys for children, calling them “unsafe.”

The group outlined several reasons, including that AI toys are powered by the same technology that’s already harmed children. Parents who have lost their children to suicide have sued companies such as OpenAI and Character.AI, alleging they didn’t put in enough guardrails to protect the mental health of young people.

Rachel Franz, director of Fairplay’s Young Children Thrive Offline program, said these toys are marketed as a way to educate and entertain kids — online to millions of people.

“Young children don’t actually have the brain or social-emotional capacity to ward against the potential harms of these AI toys,” she said. “But the marketing is really powerful.”

How have toy makers and AI companies responded to these concerns?

Larry Wang, founder and chief executive of FoloToy, the Singapore startup behind Kumma, said in an email the company is aware of the issues researchers found with the toy.

“The behaviors referenced were identified and addressed through updates to our model selection and child-safety systems, along with additional testing and monitoring,” he said. “From the outset, our approach has been guided by the principle that AI systems should be designed with age-appropriate protections by default.”

The company welcomes scrutiny and ongoing dialogue about safety, transparency and appropriate design, he said, noting it’s “an opportunity for the entire industry to mature.”

OpenAI said it suspended FoloToy for violating its policies.

“Minors deserve strong protections and we have strict policies that developers are required to uphold. We take enforcement action against developers when we determine that they have violated our policies, which prohibit any use of our services to exploit, endanger, or sexualize anyone under 18 years old,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

What AI toys have California startups created?

Curio, a Redwood City startup, sells stuffed animals, including a talking rocket plushie called Grok that’s voiced by artist Grimes, who has children with billionaire Elon Musk. Bondu, a San Francisco AI toy maker, made a talking stuffed dinosaur that can converse with kids, answering questions and role-playing.

Skyrocket, a Los Angeles-based toy maker, sells Poe, the AI story bear. The bear, powered by OpenAI’s LLM, comes with an app where users pick characters like a princess or a robot for a story. The bright-eyed bear, named after writer Edgar Allan Poe, generates stories based on that selection and recites them aloud.

But kids can’t have a back-and-forth conversation with the teddy bear like with other AI toys.

“It just comes with a lot of responsibility, because it greatly increases the sophistication and level of safeguards you have to have and how you have to control the content because the possibilities are so much greater,” said Nelo Lucich, co-founder and chief executive of Skyrocket.

Some companies, such as Olli in Huntington Beach, have created a platform used by AI toy makers, including the creators of the Imagix Crystal Ball. The toy projects an AI hologram companion that resembles a dragon or fairy.

Hai Ta, the founder and chief executive of Olli, said he views AI toys as different from screen time and talking to virtual assistants because the product is structured around a certain focus such as storytelling.

“There’s an element of gameplay there,” he said. “It’s not just infinite, open-ended chatting.”

What is Mattel developing with OpenAI?

Mattel hasn’t revealed what products it is releasing with OpenAI, but a company spokesperson said that they will be focused on families and older customers, not children.

The company also said it views AI as a way to complement rather than replace traditional play and is emphasizing safety, privacy, creativity and responsible innovation when building new products.