It’s summer blockbuster movie season and there have been a lot of new releases from many of the biggest studios and directors. Some of the biggest titles include “Supergirl”, “Disclosure Day”, and “Toy Story 5.”

GBH’s Morning Edition guest host Tori Bedford spoke with GBH correspondent and film critic Sarah G. Vincent, along with GBH’s Callie Crossley, an avid cinephile and host of Under the Radar with Callie Crossley, for their take on some of the season’s biggest releases. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

SUPERGIRL

Tori Bedford: So one of the biggest movies to hit theaters lately has been the next installment in James Gunn’s new DC Universe, “Supergirl”, starring Millie Alcock. Sarah, let’s start with you. What did you think?

Sarah G. Vincent: I actually loved it. It’s the first summer movie where I didn’t have any disclaimers of “I liked it but…” I was very invested in the storyline because if someone hurt my fluffy baby, I would run around the universe and try to save him. Also, I like that it was like a superhero movie with a woman where she didn’t become a surrogate mother, where she wasn’t sexualized, where she was dealing with real emotion. The real emotion really hit me. I love the backstory. It was gorgeous. I understand that it’s a lot of jokey jokes.

Bedford: What do you mean jokey jokes?

Vincent: On the present day storyline where she’s helping Ruthye, they do try to keep it light because they’re dealing with a lot of heavy issues, and so there are a lot of like flippant jokes and one-liners and everything. And I didn’t mind that because this is still a blockbuster and I think that a blockbuster does need to have some like mass appeal. I’m not going for a Bergman film, right?

Bedford: Yeah, it’s summer. Like, chill out.

Vincent: Right.

Bedford: What’d you think, Callie?

Callie Crossley: I am the “but” — I liked it except some of the themes were so heavy, even though presented in an entertaining way. So, don’t take me wrong. You should see it. It’s a popcorn movie. But I was like, “OK…”

Bedford: You wanted more jokey jokes.

Crossley: Well, it was just to me, I looked at it and I thought, “Epstein Files” because we have a plot of young girls being trafficked to an island of crazy men. So that’s what came to me. But then I thought, I guess I’m just— I live in news, so this is what I would think of. But I can understand in the moment why it was there, but I’m not sure it resolved itself for me in the best way possible that sort of made it maybe not so uncomfortable about it. Now, she is great, Millie Alcock as Supergirl, and I loved her backstory. I really enjoyed that part. And there are some cameos from Superman. So you really get to see the difference between the two of them and why there is a difference, because now you know the backstory.

Bedford: I love their relationship, where he’s like, “This is why Krypto is not well-behaved” and she’s all disorganized.

DISCLOSURE DAY

Bedford: All right, next up — I can’t wait to talk about this. Steven Spielberg is back with an alien mystery thriller, “Disclosure Day.” This man is obsessed with aliens.

Callie, let’s start with you. What’d you think?

Crossley: I went because it’s Steven Spielberg, and I wanted everything. So again, this is a popcorn movie, and out of the gate, you are really on a ride, and you’re like, “What’s happening?” So, I would say the first part of the movie, you’re just caught up in trying to understand where he’s going with it, and it’s a lot of action, and it’s Spielberg-esque in that way. And that John Williams score is fabulous. What I had a problem with was the end of it. I’m going to use the word unimaginative because I am not giving away the plot, so no spoilers here, It’s unimaginative in how he resolves it because I think it’s old-fashioned in both how he presents some of the folk, and also in the methodology of how he wants to get the word out. So that sort of threw me off and I’m thinking, “That’s not a word I use with Steven Spielberg. I should not be using unimaginative.” I still say you should see it, but those are my thoughts.

Vincent: At 2.5 hours, I would say, I warned you. So as an action movie where people are being chased, like the bad guys are chasing the good guys, it’s a great movie. As a movie where it takes an alternate sort of sci-fi approach to the idea of possession and what it would look like, terrific. Actually, a really provocative, wonderful idea. Emily Blunt does a wonderful job.

Crossley: Fabulous.

Bedford: She’s great in the movie.

Vincent: I think she owns the movie, and if the movie was just about her character, I would probably give it like closer to a 90 than where I landed, which was probably in the 70s.

Bedford: I was just going to say … I got out of this, and I thought, “Am I stupid? Or was this really dumb?” It was fun though.

Crossley: This is not a Spielberg movie you’re going to remember, I say.

Vincent: No, yeah, you’re not.

Crossley: And there’s a lot of reviewers saying it’s fabulous. And I’m like, were we at the same place?

Bedford: Am I dumb?

Crossley: But still, it’s a popcorn movie. Got some really good stuff in there you could enjoy.

TOY STORY 5

Bedford: All right, finally: Woody, Buzz, and all their friends are back again for “Toy Story 5,” and this one is taking on big tech as a teaching tablet enters the toy box. Sarah, what’d you think?

Vincent: I loved it. It’s my favorite Toy Story. And I would say that what I loved about this movie is when you go to movies, usually technology is the bad guy, period. And this movie is much more nuanced. And no one is really the bad guy. It presents the pros and cons of everything. And it’s about authentic relationships and it shows how in the past, a relationship without technology was fraught, in retrospect, with problems for Jesse, with the trauma she endured by losing her person. Now in the present with their new human basically having this crisis of “how do I make friends?” So I think it shows the universal problem of how you make authentic relationships, and the technology is only showing how that problem persists. It embodies now, but it’s always been a problem.

Crossley: I think it’s brilliantly done in this way. It doesn’t demonize all the folks that usually get demonized. The tech gets demonized. Sometimes the parents get demonized. That did not happen at all. But for me, any story about friendship that’s told authentically is going to get me. And they know how to get you. It’s a really, really important story about finding your tribe, as Sarah said. Now, having said that, it’s still not my favorite. Toy Story 3 is my favorite. And I went back just to say, “Okay, let me just go look at the end of 3 again to see if I had the same response.”

Bedford: Oh, masochist, my God.

Crossley: Well, because I just wanted to see. I looked at my computer, watched only the end, and sobbed yet again.

Bedford: I know, that’s all I’ve got to say about this franchise. How much more crying do you want me to do?

Crossley: I misted up at the end of this. I did not sob, as I scared the children in 3 before in the theater. But this time I did mist up because really, they know how to get you. It’s so worth seeing.

The Fetus, 2025.

Directed by Joe Lam.
Starring Bill Moseley, Lauren LaVera, Julian Curtis, Evan Towell, and Ariel Yasmine.

SYNOPSIS:

A couple become pregnant with a half-human, half-demonic fetus with a thirst for blood-and must uncover its terrifying origins before it’s too late.

In The Fetus, Alessa (Lauren LaVera) discovers she has accidentally gotten pregnant by her boyfriend Chris (Julian Curtis), but instead of this being a cause for celebration Alessa tells Chris that they must visit her father Maddox (Bill Moseley) instead of going to a hospital as Maddox insisted she do that if she ever got pregnant. Chris has his own reasons for not wanting a baby and goes along with her, but Maddox is not an easy man to get to know as he is blind and suffering from PTSD as a result of being in Vietnam.

However, there are bigger stakes here than just trying to impress your girlfriend’s father as it is revealed that Alessa’s baby is the result of a pact Maddox made with a demon decades before, and that his blindness was due to him not sacrificing Alessa to that demon. Now he has a second chance to appease the demon with the vampiric tentacle monster that keeps appearing to suck the blood of anyone who isn’t kin, and Chris has to step up and decide whether he wants to be a father or not.

Or something like that, as The Fetus is a little confused by its own mythology. Taking its cue from Larry Cohen’s It’s Alive!, The Fetus is a low-budget indie affair that has its star names to thank for lifting it up and out of the bin marked ‘utter nonsense’ and into the realms of watchable nonsense. What’s the difference? Well, there is no way to try and sell it as a serious horror movie as the premise is totally daft, the visuals give it the look of a Megadeth music video from the 1990s and it ties itself up in knots trying to tell us who needs to be sacrificed and why (although neither become very clear by the end of it), but Bill Moseley has made enough of these types of schlocky horror movies to know exactly what he’s doing and how to pitch it, plus Lauren LaVera has enough clout with modern horror audiences to give it some appeal and she proves once again why she is one of the best scream queens of recent times (although she is better than this movie), and so the combination of these two actors gives The Fetus more weight than it would have had if two lesser-known actors were in the roles.

Julian Curtis as Chris also lends an air of comic relief, although when the plot is as silly as it is you cannot help but deliver your lines with that sort of sarcastic smirk on your face (”You can’t get pregnant overnight” – well, she did and no one questions it). He plays off against Bill Moseley very well and, if nothing else, his character is the one that has the biggest arc, and if you wanted to dig deeper and salvage some sort of message about nature versus nurture, what it means to be a father, telling your girlfriend when the condom splits and that type of thing then it is there, but don’t stress too much if you just want to watch vampiric tentacles coming out from between Lauren LaVera’s legs because that is really what everyone is here for rather than social commentary.

The Fetus works because everyone involved knows exactly what kind of movie they are making, and that movie is a low-budget black comedy about a demonic baby with naff-but-passable effects and three lead performers who bounce off each other very well. Going into it expecting The Exorcist or The Omen levels of filmmaking quality is only going to lead to anger and disappointment, and you can’t really be angry at a movie that has a man sticking his you-know-what into a fiery hole in the floor to conceive a baby. Temper your expectations and go into The Fetus prepared to enjoy 84 minutes of diabolical baby B-movie hilarity and you’ll have a good time… maybe.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Chris Ward

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

In New York, the Brooklyn Bridge went up in flames briefly during a fireworks display. In Washington D.C., stormy weather delayed a grievance-filled speech by President Trump.

And here in Los Angeles? On Saturday night, tens of thousands of Angelenos joined voices peacefully at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum to sing along with Chris Stapleton as the country star compared a lover to Tennessee whiskey.

A unifying cultural figure beloved by both liberals and conservatives, Stapleton was the headlining act at a Fourth of July benefit concert that also featured Smashing Pumpkins, Chaka Khan, Maren Morris and Queen Latifah. (I’d be surprised if those five names had previously appeared together in the same sentence.) The show, with tickets priced at $17.76, was presented by America250, a bipartisan commission that Congress created in 2016 to plan celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday; proceeds went to Feeding America, which calls itself the largest domestic hunger-relief organization in the United States.

“No politics — just purpose” is how America250 Chair Rosie Rios described the night in remarks from the stage, and it wasn’t hard to interpret the distinction she was seeking to draw between her group and Freedom 250, Trump’s rival semiquincentennial initiative that organized Saturday’s windblown event on the National Mall (not to mention an earlier concert by Vanilla Ice that was called off due to the threat of rain).

But here’s the thing: Compared with the president’s celebration, where he complained about his treatment by the justice system and suggested we should refer to his current term as his third, the show at the Coliseum really did feel like a politics-free zone — the somewhat rare occasion these days when folks from different walks of life come together just to listen to music and drink overpriced micheladas.

Said Stapleton not long into his set: “I won’t waste time talking.”

America250’s success was hardly a sure thing. Despite the relatively low price, tickets moved slowly in the weeks before the concert; one guy I talked to Saturday told me he’d paid six bucks for a discounted pass. Yet to my eyes the Coliseum was close to full by the time Stapleton came on.

The country singer was as solid and soulful as always, snarling gently through “Bad as I Used to Be,” then trading loving harmonies with his wife, Morgane, in “Millionaire.” He closed with “Tennessee Whiskey,” of course — a trusty yet somehow un-shopworn piece of Americana that’s earned a place on the shelf next to Ray Charles’ “Georgia on My Mind” and Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.”

Smashing Pumpkins was perhaps a stranger fit for an explicitly patriotic event — “The world is a vampire,” frontman Billy Corgan sneered in “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” — yet the band sounded sharp and punchy in the ’90s alt-rock hits that have brought zoomers and even Gen Alpha kids into its audience.

Billed not inaccurately on the concert’s poster as “the legendary Chaka Khan,” the 73-year-old funk doyenne flexed her vocal chops in jammy renditions of “Ain’t Nobody” and “Tell Me Something Good” and got people hoisting their drinks for “I’m Every Woman.” Morris, who’d flown in from New York after attending her pal Taylor Swift’s wedding on Friday night, made an improbably smooth segue between her and Zedd’s synthed-up “The Middle” and the rustic “My Church.”

As the show’s host, Queen Latifah dispensed uplifting thoughts about American idealism throughout the evening but also got a slot of her own to do her classic “U.N.I.T.Y.” with help from a rambunctious drum line. It’s an unapologetic message song about demanding respect, and what was moving about hearing it here is that nobody seemed put off by that idea.

I’ll wave a flag for that.

Here are more photos from Saturday’s concert:

Chaka Khan performs.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Queen Latifah hosted the show.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

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A couple in patriotic garb share a kiss.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

Smashing Pumpkins performs.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

A concertgoer enjoys confetti.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

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Maren Morris performs.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)