Movie Reviews
Mufasa: The Lion King Review: Visually Stunning, Not Timeless
BOTTOM LINE
Visually Stunning, Not Timeless
CENSOR
U/ 1hr 58m
What Is the Film About?
Mufasa: The Lion King traces the origin story of two lions, Mufasa and Taka (who later becomes Scar), focusing on their childhood and the events that led to their eventual rivalry. Mufasa is an orphaned cub, befriended by Taka, a young lion prince, near a waterbody. Over time, as Mufasa’s true origins are revealed, it affects his friendship with a resentful Taka.
Performances
It’s absolutely delightful that a leading star like Mahesh Babu chose to dub for Mufasa. He complements the character with his trademark wit and dialogue delivery, excelling both at humour and intense situations. Satyadev, as the voice artiste for Taka, is equally impressive and gets adequate scope to showcase his vocal modulation as per the transformation of the character.
The artistes who truly bring the roof down with their delightful comic timing are the legendary duo Brahmanandam and Ali as Pumbaa and Timon. Their improvisation, while staying within the boundaries of their scenes, is impeccable and yet again reiterates the value they could bring to a film, even if it’s through their voices. Ayyappa P Sharma brings a new dimension to villainy as Kiros.
Analysis
It’s interesting how franchises are ruling the roost in world cinema – helping studios ensure a minimum guarantee sum at the box office in unpredictable times through glitzy technological upgrades. One also can’t deny the prospect that franchise-driven cinema limits the avenues to tell newer stories. Is there a middle ground though, where the producers and film connoisseurs are equally satisfied?
The iconic ‘The Lion King’ got a new lease of life with its 2019 reboot, which may have lacked the soul of the original but was successful in capturing the imagination of a new generation of filmgoers. The idea for a spinoff in this universe is by all means redundant and exploitative, though you give it a chance because of Mufasa – and the desire to know him beyond the obvious.
Mufasa: The Lion King transports you back to Mufasa’s childhood, where he’s separated from his parents during a flood and eventually bumps into a young lion Taka. Much to the disappointment of Obasi (Taka’s father), Taka and an orphaned Mufasa are raised by Eshe (Taka’s mother). While Mufasa wins over their family, his rise eventually threatens his friendship with Taka.
The film is constantly on the move, taking the viewers through many critical junctures in Mufasa and Taka’s journey towards Milele, how they forge an unlikely friendship with a lioness Sarabi, a hornbill Zazu and a mandrill Rafiki. The visual world-building is meticulous and jaw-dropping, alternating from a musical to an action-adventure, integrating drama with humour.
The heart of the tale lies in Mufasa’s childhood portions, which simply sweep you off your feet. From exploring Mufasa’s vulnerabilities as a child to his playful friendship with Taka and the action sequences that establish his leadership skills- you truly get a sense of his genius and instincts in crises. However, the film takes a turn for the worse as the stakes are raised.
The subplot portraying the supposed animosity between the white lion Kiros and Obasi is hurried and doesn’t grow on the viewer. The screenwriting choices are particularly absurd – in how Taka is reduced to a staple antagonist (due to Mufasa and Sarabi’s growing affinity). It’s baffling why a film that tries so hard to create a visual extravaganza fails to liberate the plot from its obvious problems.
As films chase photorealistic remakes of iconic films with posterity and attempt to give them a believable visual exterior, they sacrifice the idea of ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ (while chasing something realistic). If The Lion King aims to be more relevant with times, writers must relook at the franchise’s storytelling tropes, altering gender equations and reanalysing animal behaviour.
Mufasa: The Lion King has the story of an Indian potboiler that takes its audiences for granted. Many a time, you end up feeling if the creators simply replaced humans with animals in a typically massy story. How else can you explain the adopted son-true son conflict, betrayal between friends and a love triangle among lions? This spinoff has the scale but is devoid of magic and soul.
Music and Other Departments?
If there’s anything that keeps the film together in its direst situations, it is Nicholas Britell’s emphatic music score and the terrific imagery – constructed photo-realistically using CGI, under the expertise of James Laxton. However, the same can’t be said about the ‘musical’ aspects of the film.
Neither are the songs catchy nor do they add much value to the proceedings. The Telugu dialogues for the film are inconsistent at best, the slangs keep changing conveniently and the wordage is hardly appealing to its target audience.
Highlights?
Dubbing of Mahesh Babu, Satyadev, Ali and Brahmanandam
The visual imagery and music score
The first hour focusing on Mufasa’s younger years
Drawbacks?
Too many illogical, cinematic liberties
The humanistic behaviour of lions
Musical portions
Did I Enjoy It?
Yes, in parts
Will You Recommend It?
Yes, if you’re a hard core fan of The Lion King universe
Mufasa: The Lion King Movie Review by M9
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Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
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.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
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.
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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.
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