A mainstream genre film that attempts to stay relevant while reinventing conventional storytelling techniques and tropes has the potential to become a popular, memorable sculpture of its period. This doesn’t come from a complete disregard for these techniques but from understanding why they exist in the first place. Now, what does it really take for a mainstream filmmaker to acquire the deftness to play with the frameworks within its rules, and to know how to break them? I found myself asking this while watching William Goldenberg’s new sports drama.

This is a linear, against-all-odds biopic that proves, to both its merit and otherwise, why a continuous understanding of popular genre tropes is necessary for films to become edifices of their period. On the one hand, the film refuses to reinvent its tropes, and on the other, demonstrates what made great sports dramas like Rocky stand the test of time.

Let’s talk about how screenwriters Eric Champnella, Alex Harris and John Hindman take us into the world of Anthony Robles (Jharrel Jerome), a wrestling prodigy from Mesa, Philadelphia, born with one leg. Taking brevity into account, they waste no space but make a point about how this wrestler views Tom Brand, the head wrestling coach of Robles’ dream institution Iowa, and the school’s wrestling pride, Matt McDonough. This is ideal for what follows, but playing the devil’s advocate, the manner in which the opening is executed shows just about everything wrong with the film.

A still from ‘Unstoppable’
| Photo Credit:
ANACARBALLOSA

For 30-odd minutes, Unstoppable carries the spirit of some old-world YouTube motivational video with some heavy-handed, flowery quote in the background. A straightforward shot, panning from toes to torso, is how we are introduced to Robles. Working push-ups on the floor, he watches a television interview featuring Brand and McDonough, showboating the secrets to success. The camera then pans to his medals, an assembly of his single-paired shoes, and a poster of Rocky to top it.

Of course, this is the story of a spirited, disciplined sporting youth, born with one leg, living with his struggling mother, a wife-beating terror of a step-father, and their four younger children. It is expected to carry a certain uplifting, aspirational quality. But the tone Unstoppable takes is corny and sheepishly theatric. It’s more WWE (Robles once goes, “it’s [WWE] not even real”) than the real deal. Details are spoon-fed, and the condition only gets worse from here on.

How do we know of the equation he shares with his stepfather, Rich Robles (Bobby Cannavale)? Macho face-offs around the dinner table, often triggered by the dead-beat calling Anthony out on a pissing contest to declare “the real man.” How do we know how Anthony feels about his high school coach Bobby Williams (Michael Peña)? He tells us in a rudimentary, “I wouldn’t be here without him.” So is the case with Judy Robles’ (Jennifer Lopez) struggles with her toxic marriage, shown with a pedestrian dual scene on her tendency to forgive the unforgivable.

Sure, the scope to play around facts is nill when it comes to adaptations (the film is adapted from Robles’ autobiography of the same name), but the concern here is the straightforward screenplay — a stale treatment, and uninspiring staging of scenes. In two of the scenes, Robles climbs the iconic staircase of the Museum of Art, and perhaps, it was important for Philadephia homeboy Robles to pay homage to Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky, but save for the poster in his room, it is entirely irrelevant to the larger story.

On more than one occasion, the film appears short-sighted in its narrative efficacy. The film wishes to put us in Robles’ shoes when he struggles to make a life-changing decision — whether to go for Drexel University’s fully-sponsored wrestling programme or opt for another expensive college with highly competitive selection criteria. Even those unfamiliar with the real story may raise an eyebrow over how this pans out, but then the film undoes any tension with an elaborate scene with a coach who persuades Robles to take the safer options. Perhaps, a scene or two more featuring similar coaches from other colleges could have played up the anticipation.

Unstoppable claws back once Robles chooses his path, and Don Cheadle’s Shawn Charles, a new coach, comes into the scene. How the young wrestler tackles domestic issues while attempting to turn the odds against him throughout the college wrestling season shows the real potential of the story. A scene involving a hike at the Phoenix Mountains, or ones set inside Charles’ office, is just brilliant, and so are the competitively choreographed wrestling scenes, but what ends up affecting you the most are the peripheral arcs and the familial drama (a major reason is Lopez, who is excellent as a woman struggling to juggle her multiple roles).

Most sports dramas these days suffer from a lack of inspiration to reinvent the genre’s archetypes. In a biopic, the scope is less, but is it inexistent? The overall structure may be a no-go for remodelling (no points to guess which matches Robles loses or wins) but the moments in between could have brought it whole. To sum up, a really aspiring film would attempt to invent a language to tell a story millions are already familiar with. Take dialogue writing, for instance — most of the pep talks Robles gets from Williams are like pick-me-up quotes you might find on a Google search. Except for a “Your greatest opponent? Never gonna be somebody standing across from you on a mat” from Charles, nothing else sticks.

In one of the better scenes, punctuated with compelling performances, Judy shows Anthony a box of fan letters. It’s a tear-jerker. It’s organic, relevant, and wonderfully sets up what to follow. These are the moments that make you wonder how it could have been had the screenplay go through a few more drafts.

Unstoppable is currently streaming on Prime Video

Wolf Man, 2025.

Directed by Leigh Whannell.
Starring Christopher Abbott, Julia Garner, Matilda Firth, Sam Jaeger, Ben Prendergast, Benedict Hardie, Zac Chandler, Beatriz Romilly, and Milo Cawthorne.

SYNOPSIS:

A family at a remote farmhouse is attacked by an unseen animal, but as the night stretches on, the father begins to transform into something unrecognizable.

While father Grady (Sam Jaeger) and young son Blake (played by Christopher Abbott as an adult following the prologue) are hunting in the Oregon woods, his wisdom is that “dying is the easiest thing to do,” seemingly toughening his boy up mentally and physically to be prepared for anything life throws at him. That’s also a piece of philosophy from the toxic masculinity playbook, with Grady also obsessed with hunting down a man rumored to have contracted a disease resulting in animalistic characteristics, which perhaps isn’t surprising for a film titled Wolf Man.

Roughly 30 years later, Blake is a writer estranged from his father but is now a husband to journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner) and a dad to young daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth), who catches himself falling into the same easily irritable traits of his father, often flying into brief instances of yelling and mild verbal abuse whenever he feels that the latter might be putting herself in danger as a result of not listening to him.

A “spirited exchange” also shows that the love might be burning out in this marriage as Blake grumpily urges Charlotte to take an important call with her editor to another room, conflicted on how to feel upon receiving paperwork informing him that his father is officially deceased. One thing is clear: he loves his family (Ginger also reciprocates that) and wants to make the family dynamic work, perhaps out of fear that he will become estranged from them, too. There is also a question of how much of his father has bled into him and if that can be removed or corrected.

This also might sound like an excessive amount of setup for a creature feature adaptation of a classic monster but worry not, co-writer/director Leigh Whannell (penning the screenplay alongside Corbett Tuck) is efficient in establishing these characterizations and dynamics, quick to funnel the family off to a summer vacation in the Oregon woods Blake grew up in, where a wolf man attacks before they even reach his childhood home. In this suspenseful sequence that amounts to a somewhat inspired take on the otherwise clichéd set piece of a vehicle swerving off the roads and into the woods, the moving truck is left suspended in midair, held together by various tree branches and Blake desperately tries to get his wife and daughter to safety, but not before unknowingly contracting the same aforementioned animalistic disease.

Admittedly, it is undeniably apparent where this is all going, especially with a bluntly delivered central metaphor. Wolf Man is also lacking in the ferocious bite, timeliness, and general wow factor of his universally acclaimed but criminally overlooked during awards season, The Invisible Man, but is well-crafted (complete with firsthand perspectives into what Blake is seeing and hearing throughout the transformation, something that comes with exceptional animalistic and heightened sound design distorting dialogue and audio from household appliances, bugs crawling along the walls, and more.)

The transformation aspect, yielding strong work from Christopher Abbott regarding both physicality and emoting, also boasts some truly impressive practical effects and makeup, playing into a humanized concept. Matilda Firth is also a newcomer highlight, terrified of what’s happening to her father but holding onto that love. There are tender moments here that are naturally cut short for more body horror, effectively working in tandem. It’s a film taking its premise seriously and dramatically but with enough sincerity and visual skill to pull that off. There are also gnarly one-and-one wolf-man battles, so the film delivers what’s to be expected.

103 minutes is a standard running time, but Wolf Man moves fast, functioning as tense theme park horror with solid thematic storytelling and such relentless pacing that it only feels like an hour long. The one downside to that is that, early on, some of that characterization comes to a halt and isn’t developed any further. Some of that nuts and bolts minimalism is appreciated; the film is simultaneously restrained yet embraces its genre roots to gnarly effect with heart at its core.

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

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd 



Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds (trailer) is a 2D children’s animated fantasy film, a Franco-Belgian production released in 2023, directed by Benoît Chieux who co-wrote it with Alain Gagnol. Imdb rates it 7/10.

Carmen and Juliette are sisters, whose mother drops them off with her friend Agnes to babysit for a day. Agnes has forgotten they’d be coming, and asks if they can be quiet for a half-hour while she takes a much-needed nap. She’s the author of a long-running book series called Sirocco, and had been staying up all night writing.

Unable to sit still, Juliette rifles through one of Agnes’ books, weird stuff happens, and the sisters end up in the world of the book, transformed into cats. After Juliette gets them in trouble with the local mayor, they embark on a quest with an avian opera singer named Selma to find the elusive Sirocco, a mysterious, reclusive, and mercurial sorceror.

Story-wise, it’s very light on details; the relationship between the real world and the book isn’t made clear. Agnes is unaware of it, and people in the book appear to have a degree of self-determination. Character-wise, Carmen and Juliette end the film pretty much how they began it. They haven’t grown or learned much.

Even so, they’re good siblings who honestly love each other. Carmen is the older sister by a few years, and is used to having to be the responsible one who tries to keep the other in check. Juliette is the younger sister, impatient, impulsive, and because it’s her 5th birthday, she’s feeling a bit more entitled than usual. Personally I found her mildly annoying, yet written very realistically for her age. Two of her more impulsive moments in the film are pretty funny, too!

For me, the real star of the show was Selma, the opera singer, who’s more than happy to go on a journey to help the kids. I loved her ethereal singing, performed by Aurélie Konaté. Sirocco himself remains largely an enigma. And there’s an additional creature, a cross between the floating polyps from a Jim Woodring comic and those suburban flailing tube guys.

Really, it’s the visual design and the unusual adventure that carry this film. Its subtle uses of shapes and flat colors were really nice to experience! Studio Ghibli was an obvious influence (particularly Spirited Away), and the director has also cited Yellow Submarine and Moebius. Yeah, I can see it in some of the creatures and spires.

Overall I liked Sirocco, but I don’t think it’s a must-watch, except for the curious. It’s extremely light children’s fare with an intriguing artistic style. I had a subtitled version, and there’s an English dub that may be available on Amazon Video, Apple TV, and from Microsoft, distributed by GKids.