Movie Reviews

Movie Review: “FORBIDDEN FRUITS” – On Wednesdays We Cast Spells – Rue Morgue

Published

2 months ago

March 21, 2026

Movie Review: “FORBIDDEN FRUITS” – On Wednesdays We Cast Spells – Rue Morgue

By PAYTON McCARTY-SIMAS

Starring Lili Reinhart, Lola Tung and Victoria Pedretti
Directed by Meredith Alloway
Written by Lily Houghton Meredith Alloway
IFC/Shudder

When we’re first introduced to Pumpkin (Lola Tung), the new-girl lead of Meredith Alloway’s pop-witchy debut feature, FORBIDDEN FRUITS, she’s holding a sample tray of knockoff Auntie Anne’s pretzel bites. Anyone who’s ever been to a mall can practically smell them through the screen: a blast of pure sugar, thick dough and hot grease. This suburban staple is overwhelmingly sweet and full of delicious, comfortingly familiar empty calories. As you get older, it’s likely you can’t eat this kind of high-calorie food court snack anymore; those yummy bombs of gluten and fat sit heavy in your stomach, and their one-note flavor no longer satisfies. But as a tween, they’re heavenly. Arguing about the merits of Auntie Anne’s, then, is a little beside the point. I doubt you could find someone who hates a cinnamon sugar pretzel. Really, you either like ‘em or you don’t. But at one point, I bet you probably did.

FORBIDDEN FRUITS is like that, too. This movie is, in essence, a Y2K mall-stalgic rerun of The Craft and Mean Girls, pure and simple, with dashes of catty confections like Jawbreakers and The Devil Wears Prada thrown in. It’s produced by Jennifer’s Body scribe Diablo Cody, and Alloway has cloned her signature style of wittily ratatat, long-acrylic-nails-on-a-keyboard dialogue with eerie, devotional precision. For younger viewers looking for more of this kind of film (fans of Scream Queens, for example), FORBIDDEN FRUITS will likely be a light, gossipy sugar rush. Older viewers nostalgic for this particular flavor of Teavana tea will almost certainly feel the same way.

On a technical level, this movie is admittedly in need of, like, a major makeover. Unlike the glittery Claire ’s-a-like charm bracelets its protagonists take as their talismans, FORBIDDEN FRUITS certainly isn’t pretty to look at, even on the unabashedly kitschy terms it openly embraces. While the props and costumes shine like the rhinestones the characters drop like acid, the shooting style is bizarrely perfunctory for such a surface-loving genre. The color grading is the same grey sludge that’s vexed audiences for years, a fact made more actively infuriating by the lovingly pastel teen-girl source material being drawn upon here.

Its plotting is similarly paper-thin, its twists as obviously, blaringly signposted as the path from Sephora to Forever 21 on a mall directory. YOU ARE HERE: A Free People clone at a mall in Texas. Three young, fabulously dressed women, all named after fruits, run it like a private kingdom, using witchcraft to keep their (fr)enemies in line and their hair looking fabulous. Pumpkin, their latest She’s All That-style project, ingratiates herself with the resident queen bee, Apple (a note-perfectly bitchy Lili Reinhart), only to sew drama in the coven. Spells are cast, Olive Gardens are visited, butterfly clips are traded, gossip and one-liners are hurled – and blood is eventually spilled. On Wednesdays, we secretly fuck guys in sporting goods changing rooms. You get it.

If this stock plot appeals, you’ll have a lot of fun with FORBIDDEN FRUITS. If it doesn’t, skip it. Highlights include Victoria Pedretti as Cherry, the Bubbles to Apple’s Blossom, who brings more soul to her sweet, simple Southern belle with a troubled past than she has to. Alexandra Shipp is game as Fig, the ambitious one who just wants to go to grad school and maybe even text her love interest in words instead of the emojis Apple mandates for all boy-related interaction. The soundtrack is appropriately bitchin’. Most of the jokes land with a pleasantly chummy wink. As a witch movie (a subject I’ve personally spent years investigating), there’s not a lot going on here. “Our magic isn’t some WitchTok ripoff fluffy bunny bullshit,” Cherry tells Pumpkin during her initiation ceremony. It is. But it’s still a pleasure to see women playing in this particular teen-girl-black-comedy garden. As Apple puts it, “Women who don’t have a garden won’t grow. What did that one bitch say? ‘A room of one’s own’?”

See FORBIDDEN FRUITS in limited theaters beginning March 27.

Click to comment

Movie Reviews

1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy

Published

3 hours ago

May 9, 2026

Press Room

1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy

by Sean P. Aune | May 9, 2026

Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.

We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.

Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.

The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.

This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.

Dangerously Close

I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.

An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?

The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.

Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.

Fire with Fire

Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.

Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.

This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’

Last Resort

Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.

George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.

There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.

Short Circuit

Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?

NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.

Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.

His whole character is mystifying.

Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.

1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: AFFECTION – Assignment X

Published

15 hours ago

May 9, 2026

Press Room

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026

AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.

There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.

Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.

But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.

The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.

Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.

Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.

The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?

AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.

Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.

We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.

As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.

Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.

Related: Movie Review: ITCH!
Related: Movie Review: HOKUM
Related: Movie Review: ANIMAL FARM
Related: Movie Review: OVER YOUR DEAD BODY
Related: Movie Review: THE WOLF AND THE LAMB
Related: Movie Review: BASIC PYSCH
Related: Movie Review: SCREAMS FROM THE TOWER
Related: Movie Review: FUZE
Related: Movie Review: LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY
Related: Movie Review: HAPPY HALLOWEEN
Related: Movie Review: NORMAL
Related: Movie Review: MOTHER MARY
Related: Movie Review: FACES OF DEATH
Related: Movie Review: EXIT 8
Related: Movie Review: HAMLET
Related: Movie Review: THE YETI
Related: Movie Review: OUR HERO, BALTHAZAR
Related: Movie Review: THE SERPENT”S SKIN
Related: Movie Review: PRETTY LETHAL
Related: Movie Review: READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME

Follow us on Twitter at ASSIGNMENT X
Like us on Facebook at ASSIGNMENT X

Article Source: Assignment X
Article: Movie Review: AFFECTION

Movie Reviews

8News Reel Talk: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ movie review

Published

1 day ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

8News Reel Talk: ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ movie review

RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”

The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:

Deanna: ★★★★.5

Allison: ★★★.25

Julia: ★★

To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.