Goldbeak (trailer) is a 90-minute 3D animated kids film. Although it came out in China in 2021 (original title: 老鹰抓小鸡), it’s taken an unusually long time to get distributed, sometimes pretending that its year of release is more recent. It was produced by Liang Zi Film and Nigel W. Tierney, directed by Tierney and Dong Long, and written by Robert N. Skir, Jeff Sloniker, and Vivian Yoon.

In a world of mildly anthropomorphized birds, Goldbeak is an orphaned eagle who’s raised by chickens in a rural village. He wants to fly, but most of the villagers don’t help. They treat him as an outsider and eventually kick him out. Accompanied by his adoptive sister Ratchet (a gadgeteer genius), he makes the journey to the capital, the creatively-named Avian City.

Along the way he finds a mentor hermit who teaches him to fly. It turns out that Goldbeak is the long-lost nephew of the city’s mayor. Then he wants to join the Eagle Scouts, an elite flying squad, but their leading member hates his guts. The mayor turns out to have sinister plans…

Uughhh. This film has set a new low for me. It’s not boring, it’s not bad, it’s just so… horribly average. Nothing’s unpredictable. You can see most of the plot points coming from miles away. Even if you’re a fan of birds of prey, the story simply isn’t rewarding. It’s like it was designed by committee.

Still, the animation is fine, as are the many bird designs. There’s a weird irony that birds are operating large, technologically advanced aircraft. And I couldn’t help but notice that they built their capital city in a location devoid of convenient natural resources.

The reason behind the final conflict has all the subtlety of a Captain Planet episode. The ending battle takes place at night, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on. The antagonist gets two solid minutes to blubber about how he didn’t have a choice. (Screw you, you were willfully evil!) Don’t bother with this film. I have no idea what the quality of the English dub is; the copy I watched was in Turkish with English subtitles.

So on to our next feature!

Dalia and the Red Book (trailer) is a 3D animated kids film that came out in Argentina in 2024 (Dalia y el libro rojo). It was written and directed by David Bisbano, and produced by Vista Sur Films and Mi Perro Producciones. It’s done in a combination of animation styles, the most obvious ones being computer animation and stop-motion.

Dalia is a girl who wants to become a popular author like her father, who passed away some time ago. Unfortunately she suffers from writer’s block. On her 12th birthday, she finds her father’s last unfinished novel, a manuscript written in a red book. Cloaked supernatural creatures also want it, and Dalia finds herself captured and taken into the world of the book, while carrying the actual book with her.

Inside, the world is a sparsely populated, multi-tiered city. There’s some kind of time limit before things cease to exist. The characters either want to escape the book, or want Dalia to finish it so that the story won’t be stuck anymore. Most of the few characters we meet have their own agendas. Dalia has a guardian there, a cloaked, goggled anthropomorphic goat. Her father had written him into the book as a gift on Dalia’s 5th birthday. It was this character who first caught my attention, and was why I tracked down this film. Alas, he’s one-dimensional, if very cool-looking!

Other anthro characters include a portly owl, several harpies, and a daring she-wolf antagonist with two swords. Her design is extremely tall and thin – I wasn’t sure what species of canine she was, until the subtitles mentioned it. (Apparently she was based on Dalia’s mother, so maybe Dalia’s father was a closet furry?)

The film is a little over 90 minutes long, and like the she-wolf, it feels thin and stretched. There’s not enough story to fill it, so the pace is slow, and many things are left unexplained. Like… the rules of the universe, the she-wolf’s motivations, things like that. It’s too bad, because unlike Goldbeak, this really feels like the creators put their artistic hearts into it. But it needed more.

Ultimately, it’s a story about Dalia finding her self-confidence to write, overcoming her creative block. My favorite scene was a short one about an hour into it. Dalia and the goat briefly meet a creature whose author never fully developed it, so it keeps changing forms. Artistically it was neat to watch, if fleeting. The best part of this film to me was its atmosphere. The city really feels other-worldly, they nailed that! Otherwise I’m not sure I can recommend it, except to the curious. The copy I watched was in Spanish with English subtitles, but there may be an English dub? In the U.S. it may be available through Amazon or Apple TV.

Story: Babloo returns from jail to find that Dabloo and Rinki are in love and planning to marry. He tries to turn his life around, but Ambika Prasad pulls him back in with a dangerous demand—to kill the party president.Review: In ‘Nishaanchi 2,’ Anurag Kashyap takes a small detour from his usual grit and turns his attention to the push-and-pull between relationships and power. The film still circles around redemption and revenge, but the tone is gentler for a Kashyap outing. It checks most of the boxes of an engaging watch and holds your attention, yet it never quite lifts off. The climax, especially, lands with a thud—it starts with promise and then loses steam, almost as if it could have been placed anywhere in the film without changing much. At nearly two and a half hours, the story spends a long stretch building toward this moment, only for it to feel oddly muted.The narrative picks up with Rinki (Vedika Pinto) trying to push her dancing talent forward, hopping from one audition to the next, while Dabloo (Aaishvary Thackeray) hunts for steady work to keep the household afloat after Babloo’s imprisonment. Rinki eventually grabs a shot at featuring in a music video. Around the same time, Babloo steps out of jail after a decade and immediately begins asking questions about Rinki. Dabloo stalls, unsure how to tell him about her relationship and her knowledge of the man behind their father’s death. Meanwhile, Ambika Prasad (Kumud Mishra) has climbed his way up the political ladder and now sits comfortably as a minister. When a notorious gangster is killed in a Noida encounter linked to Prasad, his party prepares to offer him up as the fall guy. Cornered, Prasad decides to track down Babloo for his sharpshooting skills—unaware that this move will completely shift the ground beneath him.‘Nishaanchi 2’ neatly ties up most of the loose threads from the first film and moves the action from Kanpur to Lucknow. The dialogue, the beat of the language, and the overall rhythm feel rooted in both cities, lending the film a grounded texture. This time, the story leans harder into the emotional knots between the brothers and their bond with Rinki. At heart, it’s still a commercial entertainer, and Kashyap clearly nods to the Bollywood revenge sagas of the ’70s and ’80s in his own peculiar way. Some of it clicks; some of it doesn’t. But there’s no denying that the eccentric characters keep the film alive. The second half also digs deeper into Babloo’s arc, which plays out well on screen. Yet the climax—Babloo discovering the truth about his father’s death and Manjari poisoning Ambika’s security team—feels strangely abrupt and slightly off-key.Aaishvary Thackeray is easily the revelation here. It’s hard to believe this is his debut—the control in his performance and his ability to switch between Dabloo and Babloo, two completely opposite personalities, is genuinely impressive. His body language, his dialect, his small mannerisms—he owns all of it. Vedika Pinto also finds stronger footing this time, benefiting from more screen time and delivering with ease. Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, as the shady cop Kamal Ajeeb, steals every scene he walks into, while Kumud Mishra’s Ambika Prasad is surprisingly underused. Monica Panwar brings a sharp confidence to Manjari. And yes, by the end, the film finally answers the lingering question—who exactly is Nishaanchi?In the end, ‘Nishaanchi 2’ leaves you with a nagging thought—did this story really need a second chapter? Viewed in hindsight, the two films could easily have been trimmed, tightened, and shaped into one sharper, more impactful narrative. There’s a good film buried in here, but it often feels stretched when it should have been sprinting. Hardcore Kashyap fans will still find plenty to chew on—the familiar flavours, the rough edges, the bursts of energy—but for the rest, this will settle somewhere in the middle of his filmography, neither a misfire nor a standout, just a film that passes by without leaving a mark.

Part body horror, science fiction, and a fractured mirror reflecting our troubled times, Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, is a big-screen, kick-in-the-pants kind of movie.

House of Bugonia
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

Starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, the film plays out like a chamber piece after Plemons’s character, the unstable Teddy, kidnaps Stone’s character, the “pure corporate evil” (his words), Michelle Fuller, with the reluctant help of Teddy’s cousin Donnie, played by newcomer Aidan Delois.

The reason for the kidnapping is best described as idiosyncratic.

After being subjected to a brutal ordeal—she’s shown in the opening minutes undergoing extensive martial arts training—Michelle is confined to a basement, where she and Teddy engage in a tense game of cat-and-mouse. The direction these exchanges take was not what I expected.

The cast is excellent. Of Emma Stone, I can only quote Celluloid Heroes by The Kinks: “If you cover him with garbage, George Sanders would still have style.” Well, Stone’s Michelle Fuller isn’t covered in garbage, but she is drenched in blood, some of it her own, shot with electricity, beaten, tackled, shorn, and chained. And yet, there’s that voice, those green eyes, and the way she’s photographed in corporate power attire at the start: from the bottom of the frame, she looks ten feet tall, every bit the star.

I first saw Jesse Plemons shooting a kid in cold blood on Breaking Bad, and with his recessed eyes and jutting chin, he retains that ruthlessness with a hint of madness. He’s like an auto wreck you can’t look away from. Aidan Delois, though his lines grow sparser as the movie progresses, does a remarkable job of acting with his eyes. They seem to know what his confused mind doesn’t.

There’s cruelty in Bugonia, to be sure, but it’s nothing like the impaling of a black cat I recall from Lanthimos’s otherwise-excellent Dogtooth. In fact, given the film’s underlying themes of allegiances, the shocking scenes are stomach-turning but motivated.

I liked Poor Things, Lanthimos’s last film, but Bugonia is even better.

> Playing at Regency Academy Cinemas, Regal Paseo, IPIC Theaters, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, AMC Santa Anita 16, Regal UA La Canada, AMC Laemmle Glendale, and LOOK Dine-In Cinemas Monrovia.