The last time audiences saw superpowered alien symbiote Venom (Tom Hardy) and his human “host” Eddie Brock (also Hardy) on the big screen, it wasn’t in a “Venom” movie, it was in a mid-credits sequence in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” The scene saw the pair briefly hop universes into the Disney-controlled Marvel Cinematic Universe, but then quickly get sucked back into the Sony-controlled Marvel universe – the one that has “Spider-Man” characters, but no Spider-Man (and is not to be confused with the animated Spider-verse). The scene is shown again at the beginning of “Venom: The Last Dance,” but it has no bearing on the story. Fans of the character should know not to expect MCU quality from this movie. This is the “Morbius”/”Madame Web” arm of the franchise.

The new film sees Eddie and Venom as fugitives in Mexico following some frowned-upon crimefighting in 2021’s “Let There Be Carnage.” They try to flee to New York, where they should be safe from human authorities, but they fail to factor in threats from non-humans. Venom’s recent activity inadvertently activated a device called a Codex, which exists as long as a symbiote and its human host are both alive. Supervillain Knull (Andy Serkis), imprisoned on a faraway planet, can use his minions called Xenophages to steal the Codex, break free and conquer the universe. I think the way it works is that if the Xenophages can swallow Venom alive, that counts as stealing the Codex for Knull. And simple evasion isn’t an option for Venom because the Xenophages are sure to cause a lot of collateral damage to Earth, and he’s the only one that can stop them. He and Eddie are going to have to fight.

If you thought I was spouting too much exposition just now, wait until you see the subplot about the secret Area 51 facility where symbiotes are studied by scientists like Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple). The character comes complete with a backstory about feeling guilt over the death of her brother, who wanted to be a scientist. I get the impression that she only devotes herself to science out of guilt and not passion. If the character is supposed to be passionate about her work, it’s not coming through in Temple’s performance. She has several conversations with the facility’s enforcer Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), one of those grunts that wants to kill any being he doesn’t understand, where all they do is explain the facility’s purpose to one another. Almost all of their dialogue could be preceded with the dreaded words “as you know…” because there’s no way these characters wouldn’t know all of this information already, but the audience has to be filled in.

Literally thrown off their flight, Eddie and Venom hitch a ride with the hippie Moon family, led by Martin (Rhys Ifans), on their way to Area 51 to try to see aliens. I guess the family’s scenes are supposed to be comic relief, but they aren’t funny. What is funny is a brief stop in Las Vegas where Eddie and Venom share a dance with franchise mainstay Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu). Could the scene be cut without doing a disservice to the story? Yes. Should the scene stay in because it’s a welcome distraction from the story? Also yes.

That scene aside, “Venom: The Last Dance” is a slog. The script is a mess, the new characters unlikeable, the action murky and hard to follow, and the mindless Xenophages are terrible antagonists, with Knull not exactly helping by sitting on the sidelines the whole time. I’d say that Hardy comes off relatively unscathed because he has pretty good chemistry with… himself (I can’t decide if that makes the repartee easier or harder), but then I found out he has a story credit on this slop, so I can’t let him off the hook. I hope this really is the “Last Dance” for these “Spider-Man”-adjacent movies outside the MCU and Spider-verse.

Grade: D

“Venom: The Last Dance” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, bloody images and strong language. Its running time is 110 minutes.

Robert R. Garver is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at New York University. His weekly movie reviews have been published since 2006.

Trap is an unconventional effort from director/writer M. Night Shyamalan. He leans into the expectations in building a captivating suspense film with a mostly satisfying finale.

Shyamalan gets unfairly dinged by critics who impatiently wait for his film’s twists and then get upset when it doesn’t deliver. For Trap, Shyamalan relies far less on a movie-altering twist. Instead, the focus is on the relentless quest to track down a serial killer.

Cooper (a terrific Josh Hartnett) is vying for Father of the Year honors. He’s scored floor seats so his daughter, Riley (Ariel Donoghue) can fangirl out over the Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan) concert.

While it’d be an easy layup to scream “nepotism!” to the heavens over Shyamalan casting his daughter as the pop starlet, it’s irrelevant. Saleka Shyamalan can sing and has a genuine pop star presence on the concert stage. And it’s not like he’s asking her to give some Oscar-winning dramatic performance. She just needs to play a pop superstar, which doesn’t feel like that big a stretch given her talent.

With its concert setting, the music is an integral part of Trap and Saleka Shyamalan is a major contributor as she wrote and performed 14 of the songs. The songs were catchy enough to warrant checking out the soundtrack (now available on Amazon).

Cooper quickly notices an unusually high concentration of police and armed security manning the entrances. He’s no fool and deduces they’re on to him. In a smart storytelling choice, Shyamalan doesn’t drag out the big reveal until the end — Cooper is indeed the serial killer the police are on hand to apprehend. The only catch is they’ve got no clue what he looks like just that he’s in attendance at the Lady Raven concert.

Hartnett’s performance is amazing. There are clearly different sides of Cooper at play from the trying too hard to be sweet and kind father making sure Riley has a great time and the calculating mastermind trying to escape this carefully constructed trap. Hartnett is in complete control of both aspects of Cooper’s personality in one of his strongest performances.

Donoghue is also enjoyable as the daughter who is actually appreciative of her father instead of hoping he’ll leave her alone. It makes the inevitable fallout that much more meaningful as the bond between father and daughter is well-earned.

Cooper keeps thinking ahead and avoiding the well-thought-out strategies of the profiler (Hayley Mills) on hand to aid the FBI and police making for some very suspenseful moments. It’s a little weird in the sense how Shyamalan wants the viewer engaged and marveling at Cooper’s strategy all while realizing there’s no good way to root for a serial killer.

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There are some moments that feel like Shyamalan got a little too cute in ignoring basic logic in favor of a more dramatic moment. Some of the concert crowd shots feel too intimate in a way that suggests most of the crowd were filled in via CGI.

The actual concert shots are well staged as Shyamalan places more emphasis on the singing and dancing via the large monitors rather than the stage. This provides more of a feeling of watching a concert onsite as opposed to watching a movie with a concert playing out.

Given the 1 hour and 45-minute run time, it would have been nice for Shyamalan to offer more insight into Cooper’s motives. Yes, Shyamalan provides a cursory rationale of Cooper feeling a monster is inside him and some basic mommy issues, but Trap would have played out stronger with an actual explanation beyond “he’s crazy.”

At the midway point, Shyamalan seems to have that elusive motive lined up in his sights when Cooper mentions that Riley battled leukemia. Cooper’s murder spree being the result of him getting some measure of revenge on the doctors, hospital staff and insurance agents that let Riley suffer could have provided Trap with a more complicated narrative.

As seemingly is his norm, the third act starts to get away from Shyamalan a bit. Fortunately, he can lean heavily on Hartnett to get it back on track. Trap has some problems, but it’s a fun suspense thriller that kept me engaged right through to the credits.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Photo Credit: Warner Bros. 

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Blitz opens amidst a terrifying conflagration on a nighttime city street. This is the blitzkrieg, the German bombing of London in 1940 in the early days of World War II. But as writer-director Steve McQueen casts it, it’s not about an entire street or even a single building on fire. It’s about a loose fire hose whipping about wildly and the heavy industrial nozzle whacking an anonymous fireman in the head as he struggles to bring it under control.

It’s a moment of feral intensity, and of ferocious intimacy. It reminded me of nothing so much as snippets from early in the TV series Chernobyl, about the 1986 nuclear-plant disaster. Just an ordinary schmoe firefighter not even thinking twice about doing a dangerous job, because it has to be done.

Blitz is not about that firefighter. But the brutal randomness of that opening sequence sets the stage for what is to come. This is not a sentimental story about British stiff upper lips and keeping calm and carrying on. There were scenes in this movie when I gasped out loud and actually clapped a hand to my mouth in shock — I can’t recall if I’d ever done that before. McQueen (Widows, Shame) seems to be deliberately pushing back against how the British and especially the London experience of the war has been ex post facto propagandized into cheery, chipper camaraderie and complacency. Indeed, the whole “keep calm and carry on” thing was a propaganda slogan developed during the war but barely used then, and was almost entirely forgotten until it was rediscovered in 2000 and subsequently weaponized for whitewashed and commercialized nostalgia.

McQueen plays with those expectations but smashes them at every opportunity with this tale of nine-year-old George, who’s furious that his single mom, Rita, has relented and agreed to evacuate her son to the countryside, finally, after so many other London children had already left. Blitz is the picaresque misadventures of George as he decides to take himself home, Nazi bombs be damned, and to the inadvertent horror of his mother, once she is informed that the authorities who were supposed to be in charge of George’s safety have lost him.

(George is played by wonderful newcomer Elliott Heffernan, a real find on McQueen’s part. Rita is portrayed by Saoirse Ronan [Foe, Little Women], as ever a standout, and the best thing even in an all-around terrific movie, as this is.)

McQueen is pushing back against another sort of whitewashing, too, of the more literal kind: the bizarre notion that, somehow, “diversity” is a 21st-century invention and that people of color haven’t always been a part of, in particular, majority-white colonial nations like Great Britain. (This is hugely applicable to the US as well.) The filmmaker had said he was inspired in this story by an old photograph of a mixed-race Blitz evacuee, a small boy standing on a WWII-era railway platform, and wondered what his life was like. And so McQueen — who is Black British — builds a sketch of vibrant, multicultural life in century-ago London. Partly through flashbacks, of the lively jazz-club scene where Rita partied, pre-war, with George’s father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), an immigrant from Grenada who is no longer in the picture. But McQueen’s portrait of a London that some would like to pretend never existed blossoms, enormously affectingly, via the air-raid warden George encounters on his journeys: Ife (Benjamin Clémentine: Dune), a Nigerian immigrant to London. Sharply but gently — so gently: Ife is one of the loveliest characters I’ve met onscreen in a long while — McQueen’s exuberant, diverse London subtly suggests that this, very much this, is what was worth fighting the Nazis to protect.

(Relevance to today? Sky-high, no pun intended. It was WWII horrors like the Blitz, as well as the Allied firebombing of Dresden, in Germany, and the American atomic attacks on Japan that have helped shaped our ideas about what constitutes warcrimes today. Bonus points to anyone who can pinpoint multiple indiscriminate military attacks on civilians happening right now around the planet.)

Yet nothing here is romanticized, either. Racism is a real and pervasive presence — the sequence in which George has his eyes opened to just how ingrained the denigration of Black people has been by the British Empire is heartbreaking — as is the opportunism of those who would take advantage of the chaos of the Blitz: Stephen Graham (Boiling Point, Greyhound) and Kathy Burke (Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, Pan) as scavenger-thieves who descend after the bombs fall, and who rope George into their schemes, are terrifying, akin to the Thenardiers of Les Misérables but devoid of their bleak comedy.

Blitz is McQueen’s most accessible, most mainstream film yet; his previous works include 2010’s IRA hunger-strike movie Hunger, 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, and last year’s Occupied City, a four-and-a-half-hour documentary about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely brutal. This is a movie about childhood adventure that is a lark, until it isn’t. It’s about community care and small moments of kindness from strangers in passing, and also about stomping on your neighbors in moments of panic and terror. It’s wildly human, artistically masterful, and completely magnificent.

more films like this:
• Empire of the Sun [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• 12 Years a Slave [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Netflix UK (till Nov 15) | BFI Player UK]