Movie Reviews

Paddington in Peru Bites Off More Than It Can Chew

Published

1 year ago

February 14, 2025

Paddington in Peru Bites Off More Than It Can Chew

From the beginning, the Paddington movies have linked their fictional bear, the creation of children’s book author Michael Bond, to themes of migration and sanctuary. This didn’t come out of nowhere. While Paddington Bear is emblematic of Britishness, from his love of marmalade to his duffel coat to his unfailing politeness, he came from South America — more specifically, “darkest Peru,” an origin story that smacks of a colonial era where whole swaths of the world could be consigned to gloom on a map based on their impenetrability to foreign explorers. For the cynical, and I’m usually one of your number, the turning of this beloved icon into a symbol of a welcoming, multicultural U.K. could be read as a way of lightly outrage-proofing a property that’s half a century old and unavoidably musty in patches. And yet, miraculously, what could have been clunky and self-congratulatory was delicate and moving, helped along by the gentleness with which Ben Whishaw voices the computer-animated ursine. Paddington’s arrival on that train platform as a refugee, and his adoption by the Brown family, is placed in a tradition of the country taking care of those in need going back to World War II and the Kindertransport. The Wes Anderson–inflected London of that 2014 first film was a retort to sentiments that would, two years later, lead to the Brexit referendum, but it was also stubbornly aspirational — a fairy-tale version of the city as it could be, open arms and all.

In Paddington in Peru, Paddington has officially become a Brit, having received his passport in the mail. This frees him up to take a trip home, a prospect as low-key worrisome as the fact that the film, the third in the series, is also the first to not be written or directed by Paul King. The whimsical but wry perspective on Britishness that made the first two Paddingtons so watchable threatens to be intolerable when turned outward, like someone going from in-jokes to insult comedy. Paddington in Peru reckons with this possibility by putting very few Peruvians onscreen, even when the movie ventures into the Amazon, spurred by the mysterious disappearance of Paddington’s beloved Aunt Lucy from the Home for Retired Bears. Instead, it keeps its focus on the Browns, now headed up by Emily Mortimer, who replaces Sally Hawkins as matriarch Mary, as they accompany Paddington on a vacation-cum-rescue-expedition involving the legend of El Dorado, a bunch of nuns, and Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas), a riverboat captain who turns out to be descendant from a long line of rapacious Spanish gold-seekers. Hunter’s obsession, which manifests in comical visions of his taunting conquistador ancestor, isn’t an especially sharp critique of the colonial legacy the whole swashbuckling adventure owes a debt to. But Paddington in Peru doesn’t feel like it’s aiming for a point so much as it’s just trying to steer clear of potential disaster.

And, even if it’s the weakest of the Paddington movies, it succeeds. The innate sweetness of the series carries it past figurative and literal rapids and into shenanigans involving bear carvings, a bear temple in the mountains, and a secret bear community. (Hunter, exasperated, complains at one point about how “beary” the whole situation is.) While Banderas is entertaining playing multiple roles as Hunter and his many ghostly ancestors, Olivia Colman gives the movie’s standout performance as the Reverend Mother of the bear retirement home from which Aunt Lucy vanished. Colman keeps her face frozen in an expression of maniacal cheerfulness, the hilarious effect of which really can’t be overstated. When the Reverend Mother bursts into song at news of Paddington’s imminent arrival, singing to the camera while nuns dance behind her, it’s like The Sound of Music as enacted by a serial killer, up to and including Colman throwing her guitar into the air in defiance of gravity, like Prince at the Super Bowl. These films have featured terrific comic performances from the likes of Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, but Colman brings an unhinged energy to her part that elevates the whole enterprise. (“It’s just a secret room behind an organ,” she chipperly informs Mrs. Bird, played by Julie Walters, insisting to the Browns’ housekeeper there’s nothing at all suspicious about the mysterious hidden space she discovers in the retirement home.)

Obscured by the wilderness and religious-order exploits are Paddington’s own emotions about being back in the place of his birth after adapting to life an ocean away. Mr. Gruber (Jim Broadbent), the antiques store owner, warns the bear that “becoming a citizen of a country, while a wonderful thing, can lead to mixed feelings.” But if Paddington does feel conflicted over where he belongs, or over having lost touch with his family’s beary roots, it’s never explored. The wonderful surprise of the Paddington films is that they’ve been able to deftly touch on some difficult themes by way of adorable children’s stories, all without overplaying their hand. Paddington in Peru suggests that some things are beyond the franchise, no matter how winning its good-hearted animal hero may be, and one of them is considering what it might be like to not whole-heartedly love life in the U.K. after the U.K. has proven itself willing to love you.

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Movie Reviews

Mortal Kombat 2 Movie Review: Simon McQuoid’s Latest Is A Breezy, Bloody, Sometimes Baffling Time

Published

10 hours ago

May 10, 2026

Press Room

Mortal Kombat 2 Movie Review: Simon McQuoid’s Latest Is A Breezy, Bloody, Sometimes Baffling Time

Warner Bros. has a new movie to put in the ring. Mortal Kombat II, the sequel to the action-filled 2021 video game adaptation that at the very least got the gore right, is here. It’s a breezy, bloody entry that leans heavily on video game characters and logic, a move that should satisfy franchise fans, even if the actual narrative is too weak to win over new converts.

We’re in an era of regular, variably solid video game adaptations. Series like The Last of Us and Fallout, and films such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Werewolves Within, are exemplary, with stories that capture much of what works about the games. On the other hand, adaptations like Borderlands show that it’s still possible to get one wrong. The stakes remain high.

When director Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat graced the screens and HBO Max, it was received with a sizable difference between fans (currently 85% on Rotten Tomatoes with over 5,000 verified ratings) and critics (55% with 299 factored in). It was refreshing to have fights that didn’t skimp on the game series’ violence, but some muddled plotting, a failure to fully capture the game’s feel, and centering the film on an original character (rather than a fan-favorite from the games) were ill-received.

Mortal Kombat II is a bigger and more faithful adaptation in many ways. The tournament actually feels deadly, and many of the fight sequences are sufficiently bloody to accurately reflect the games. The actual narrative falls apart somewhat when you think too hard about it, but it largely works, and certain characters (Kano, Johnny Cage) steal every scene they’re in. If you like your movies bloody with a side of silly, you’re in luck.

Mortal Kombat 2 Has Stellar New Additions

Warner Bros.

Mortal Kombat II doesn’t waste time in setting the stakes, with an opening fight between Eternia’s King Jerrod and Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford). The helmeted tyrant Kahn’s violent victory allows him to raise Jerrod’s daughter, Kitana, as he comes to rule Eternia thanks to his tournament victories. That backstory sets up the complex journey of adult Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), who fights for Kahn alongside longtime friend Jade (Tati Gabrielle), but has understandable reservations.

Another major element of this iteration is the addition of washed-up action star Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), who is recruited to fight for Earthrealm despite lacking powers. Cage has to fight under the tutelage of Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), alongside mainstays including Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Cole Young (Lewis Tan), and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin). Our heroes have to defeat Shao Khan’s warriors to save Earth, all the while preventing him from acquiring an amulet that would render him immortal.

Urban is a stellar addition to the series, with a huge and charismatic personality that fits Johnny Cage and is fun to watch onscreen. Josh Lawson’s dirtbag mercenary Kano gets some fantastic scenes here, and the two add a lot of charm that some other characters may lack. Adeline Rudolph is empathetic and believably tactical as Kitana. Gabrielle’s Jade isn’t given enough key scenes to shine, but there’s clear potential for the character in future iterations.

Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) isn’t the deepest character, but Bloomfield makes him memorable, and his relationship with Johnny Cage is always a fun watch. While Tan’s Cole Young has something to do in Mortal Kombat II, he’s much less of a focus here, as are returning favorites like Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim’s Bi-Han.

There are new characters, many moving parts, and a narrative that’s more a string of battles than a traditional Hollywood tale, leaving some favorites underutilized. Because of the need to introduce new characters, most of the existing ones are relatively one-note. Kitana and Johnny Cage get ample screen time, even character arcs, and Kano, Baraka, and some others do get standout moments. Most characters, however, remain one-note figures.

Mortal Kombat II Doesn’t Fully Make Sense, but It Mostly Hits Hard

Lewis Tan as Cole Young in Mortal Kombat 2. — Warner Bros.

While Mortal Kombat 2 doesn’t have the biggest fights you’ll see this year (that would be The Furious), it does have quite a few memorable ones with great finishers. The final fight with Shao Kahn has a solid ending, and many get standout moments as the movie proceeds. Kitana, Baraka, Liu Kang, Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion, and Kung Lao all get particularly unforgettable moments.

A more faithful structure also makes this round’s fights feel a bit more like one is playing an actual Mortal Kombat game, which is welcome. Most are well-paced, though a few could use tighter editing. Unfortunately, the story is more than a little muddled. Shao Kahn wants a Maguffin to be unkillable, sure, but if the tournament rules allow an invasion of Earthrealm if and only if Earth’s champions defeat Outworld’s five times, isn’t an immortality-granting amulet the equivalent of steroid use? Where are the referees?

Some characters (like Jade) change allegiances almost at random, with no consistency. There are several moments when characters make choices that don’t make sense, or at least we don’t have enough information to understand them.

Altogether, Mortal Kombat II learned from quite a few of the issues the first film had. It swapped out protagonists for one with a flashier personality, better replicated the game’s elements and structure, and had kills to boot. That’s largely enough to succeed for the kind of film it is, but it still has issues.

There are too many characters to develop in any interesting way, the tournament rules and character plans don’t make total sense, and the pacing is quick in some moments and slow in others. Nonetheless, it’s a delightful outing and feels just like a big ol’ violent video game (complimentary).

Final Rating: 7/10

Mortal Kombat 2 is playing in theaters.

Movie Reviews

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

Published

22 hours ago

May 9, 2026

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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

1 day 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.

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