For It Is Man's Number: kathryn newton

Showing posts with label kathryn newton. Show all posts

Tuesday, 31 March 2026

Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come (2026)

Anybody keen to be served up a sequel to Ready Or Not is going to be kept happy enough with this, a film helped by the fact that everyone returns to their main roles, both in front of and behind the camera, and by the fact that it seems to be even more gleefully sadistic.

Things pick up immediately from the end point of the first movie. Grace (Samara Weaving) is taken to hospital, soon to be visited by an unhappy estranged sister (Faith, played by Kathryn Newton), who only ends up there because Grace forgot to change her main emergency contact. Nobody believes Grace about the shocking events of the past day, but the worst part of it all is that her ordeal isn't over. Grace AND Faith are snatched, terms are explained by a lawyer (Elijah Wood), and it's time for a whole new bunch of rich and entitled psychopaths to hunt some human prey. They're headed up by Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus Danforth (Shawn Hatosy), and they are happy to use Faith as leverage to keep Grace in line.

It's clear that Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett returned to this premise because they figured they could have more fun with it. That's exactly what they do, adapting a story about two sisters into something that writers Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy could easily fit into the Ready Or Not world. It's a classic case of "here's what you enjoyed, but a little bit more of it", for the most part, and the direction keeps the focus on fun in a way that makes the slightly longer runtime (this is 108 minutes compared to the 95 minutes of the first film) feel just right.

Weaving slips back into her (iconic?) character with ease, and believably becomes more badass and dangerous as she becomes more desperate to stay alive, and keep her sister in the same condition. Newton is a great addition, entertainingly unhappy with her sister, but also soon showing how much they are cut from the same cloth when things start getting bloody and deadly. Gellar and Hatosy have a lot of fun in their roles, and the former always seems very aware of, and respectful of, the genre baggage she will forever carry into any project. Wood is fun, a calm presence in the middle of a lot of madness, and there are good moments for Dan Beirne, Olivia Cheng, Nestor Carbonell, Kevin Durand, Varun Saranga, Nadeem Umar-Khitab, Antony Hall, and even a cameoing David Cronenberg.

Much like the first film, there are no scares here, and there's very little actual tension, but you get some inventive kills and a whole lot of bloodshed. One or two sequences are drawn out into a showcase of violence and pain, many others are all about the hilarity of how quickly some people can be killed when they're not hidden away in a protective bubble. Everything is very enjoyable for those who were eager to rejoin Weaving in another bit of deadly gameplay.

And special recognition has to go to costume designer Avery Plewes on the outstanding dress that makes an important appearance in the very last scenes. You'll know what I'm on about when you see it. It's a stunning look, but also nicely in line with the journey that the main character has been on.

7/10

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Tuesday, 23 April 2024

Abigail (2024)

I am going to have to make a decision here, whether to include some spoilers in this review or not. Although I would normally work hard to avoid spoilers, Abigail has arguably already been spoiled for you if you have seen the trailer or some of the alternate poster designs. I understand why. It makes more sense to draw in the horror crowd it is aimed at, which wouldn’t necessarily happen if it was sold to look like a straightforward crime thriller. So . . . I am going to discuss it as if it is a pretty straightforward crime thriller, but I am assuming that you will all be aware of the fact that it is more than that.

Things start with a kidnapping. Six people work together to snatch a little girl (Abigail, played by Alisha Weir) before driving to an isolated country home where they have to stay holed up for 24 hours. If all goes well then the payday is $50M. All isn’t about to go well though. It turns out that not only is Abigail’s father very rich, but he is also very powerful and dangerous. And Abigail may share a few of his traits.

Written by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, this is a very smart and funny horror comedy that makes a lot of things very obvious from the opening titles (for those familiar with the music cue). The twists and turns aren’t presented as major rug-pulls, nothing here will surprise fans of the tropes being played with, but they keep being thrown into the plot with a sense of glee, curveball after curveball for our main characters to deal with. With directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett at the helm (directors of the last two Scream movies, as well as the very enjoyable Ready Or Not), everyone going into this should have an idea of what they are getting into. It’s playful, it’s bloody, and it’s a fresh take on some very familiar material.

The cast are all on the same page, happy to fit into their archetypes and just allow themselves to be part of a group that descends into chaos as everything around them starts going wrong. Melissa Barrera is much better here than she was in the Scream movies, making for a great central character to root for, and Dan Stevens is having a whale of a time as the cold-blooded leader of the group. Kevin Durand and Kathryn Newton are much simpler, more sweet-hearted characters (relatively speaking), and both Angus Cloud and William Catlett do well in their respective roles, even if they seem less important to the group than some of the others. Everyone is a bag of clichés, but it doesn’t matter when they are being used in such a fun way. Weir is the star though, and proves more than capable at conveying the many different moods her character goes through during the unraveling of the kidnapping scheme. It is also worth mentioning a couple of excellent cameo turns from Giancarlo Esposito and Matthew Goode.

Unabashedly profane and bloody throughout, Abigail is the most fun I have had with a mainstream American horror movie in a hell of a long time. It’s well-paced, it looks gorgeous throughout (even as the sets become drenched in blood), it’s inventive, and there are numerous easter eggs dotted throughout that can be enjoyed or ignored without changing how you feel about the rest of the film. All in all, it’s a bloody good time for fans of those involved.

8/10

Tuesday, 5 March 2024

Lisa Frankenstein (2024)

The feature debut from director Zelda Williams, who has already amassed a number of shorts and music videos to her name, Lisa Frankenstein is a film I have been keen to see since I first heard about it. It stars Kathryn Newton (a plus), it is another horror comedy written by Diablo Cody (another plus, and I am someone else who always enjoyed Jennifer’s Body, please enjoy that rough and brief review), and it has a late 1980s setting and vibe (plus). This should have been a home run for me. It was not.

Newton plays Lisa Swallows, a young woman who doesn’t feel as if she fits in anywhere. She doesn’t have her own people at school. She keeps engaging in an exhausting battle of wills with her step-mother (played by Carla Gugino). She doesn’t even seem to enjoy living as much as most people, and that is how she is well-suited to becoming a friend to someone who unexpectedly returns from the dead (Cole Sprouse). Can this other outsider help her resolve a number of issues, or will he just make Lisa more determined to loathe those living their lives in relative bliss.

It is all too easy to review this movie by making the obvious comparisons to Frankenstein’s creation. The tonal shifts are jarring, a number of elements don’t work as well as they could, and it is constructed in a way that leads to a clumsy and ugly result. Nobody should want to lead an angry mob to set this on fire, but I can certainly see why it hasn’t been a roaring success (although I am sure it will do better in the home rental/retail/streaming market).

Unlike her previous work, Cody doesn’t seem to know what main points she wants to make here. There’s no obvious target, although the scattershot approach tries, and fails, to hit a number of small bullseyes. Williams does nothing to help, seemingly focused on the style and aesthetic ahead of a cohesive and satisfying narrative through-line, so it’s up to the cast to lift the film up.

Fortunately, Newton is an absolute star. Sprouse, limited by the character he is playing, also does well, but the film brightens up whenever it stops just to let Newton shine brighter, which she gets to do on a few different occasions (a rendition of a well-known ‘80s hit being the highlight of the whole film). Gugino is fun, as is Liza Soberano (playing Lisa’s sister, Taffy). Henry Eikenberry also does well, playing Michael, the object of Lisa’s unrequited affection, and Joe Chrest is an amusingly passive father. None of them rival Newton though, and I continue to look forward to watching anything that she’s in.

I still found enough separate elements here to enjoy, but it was hard work. There are so many decisions made here that fall short of the mark, from the soundtrack to ineffectual backstories for our leads, from the awkward early scenes to a bold, but slightly mishandled, ending. Some will be able to overlook the main failings and love it, and I already know one or two friends who had much more fun with this than I did, but I was saddened to find that the bad counter-balanced the good throughout, forcing me to mark this as an absolutely average viewing experience.

5/10

Friday, 26 May 2023

Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

I have enjoyed the Ant-Man movies, despite them always feeling like lesser Marvel movies. While everything was building towards grand Avengers-based adventures, being taken on tangents with Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and co. felt refreshingly small-scale (no pun intended) and more simplistically fun. And I own them on 3D Blu-ray, which is the best way to get maximum enjoyment from them, as far as I’m concerned.

Try as I might, however, I could not work up any enthusiasm for this third instalment in the series. Marvel have been wildly inconsistent after achieving an astonishing modern cinematic success with the finale of the Infinity War saga, and I wasn’t thrilled to think of an entire movie set on the quantum realm. We have been there before, very briefly, and it’s visualized as an alien landscape in which people can very easily lose their minds.

But here we are. Things start very quickly. Cassie (Scott’s daughter, now played by Kathryn Newton) has been working on a device to map the quantum realm. It works by beaming a signal down there, which causes a problem when something locks on to that signal and drags Cassie, her dad, Hope Van Dyne AKA The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), and Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer). The quantum realm is even more dangerous than ever, thanks to the looming presence of Kang The Conqueror (Jonathan Majors).

Peyton Reed may be an experienced pair of hands back in the director’s chair, and he may have his cast happy to work with the usual large amount of invisible environments to be added in later, but writer Jeff Loveness is the one trying to fit everything into the film in a way that mixes humour and tension as it sets up the new main villain of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sadly, he isn’t up to the task, leaving the cast floundering and the screen full of garishly overdone CGI that wouldn’t look out of place in some of the Star Wars prequels.

The only thing this gets absolutely right is the build-up for Kang, and that is as much down to the performance of Majors as it is to the script. Jokes are very hit and miss, with way more of the latter than the former, and it’s strange to even think of a whole movie set in the quantum realm when previous movies had delivered such dire warnings about accidentally going there. Then you have the issue of scale, changing scale often being a vital fun factor for these movies. It isn’t as enjoyable to watch someone shrink and supersize, depending on the situation, while they are in a world with less substantial reference points to help underline the rapid changes.

It isn’t necessarily ALL the fault of Loveness, who I am sure will have been given plenty of notes and plot points to hit, but the script here, in every way, keeps this bogged down near the very bottom of the Marvel movie pile.

Rudd is still a great choice for our hero, arguably even better at portraying an reluctant everyman hero than Tom Holland in the Peter/Spider-Man role. Newton is a great addition, playing her socially-conscious teen with an energy and naïveté that stops her from ever becoming too annoying. Douglas, Pfeiffer, and Lilly are all as good as you would hope, and all get involved in some of the action set-pieces, and there is a surprising reappearance in the series for Corey Stoll, although I am still making up my mind on whether I liked or disliked his character. Majors is the other highlight though, as I have already said, and the third act at least does well to give viewers an idea of how this character should so effectively threaten, and could even change, heroes, timelines, and realities.

There are some fun cameos, and one that feels a bit too smug and irritating (for some reason), and an intriguing moment at the end, as expected, and I will admit that some of the third act came close to making up for some of the lacklustre scenes that preceded it. Close, but not quite close enough. Visually, tonally, and even conceptually, this is a mess. It’s a shame that it couldn’t at least manage to be a consistently entertaining mess.

4/10

Wednesday, 9 February 2022

Prime Time: The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things (2021)

I do enjoy a good time-loop movie, and it's a film sub-genre that tends to have many more great examples than poor ones. In fact, at this exact moment I cannot think of one time-loop movie that I haven't enjoyed.

Oh, The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things is a time-loop movie. That's only a spoiler if you knew nothing about this film other than the title. The very first moments make clear that this is a time-loop movie, showing Mark (Kyle Allen) going about his day with the confidence and skill of someone who has been through the familiar motions many times before. He doesn't know why he is reliving the same day over and over again, he just knows that he's the only person aware of the situation. Until he realises that he isn't. Yes, there is one other. That person is Margaret (Kathryn Newton). Once they realise that they are both anomalies stuck in an . . . anomaly, well, they start to think up ways to pass the time. And that is when they come up with the idea of a map of tiny perfect things.

The second feature film from director Ian Samuels, this is a big step up from his previous feature, Sierra Burgess Is A Loser. I am willing to say that the difference in quality stems from the script, written by Lev Grossman, adapting his own short story. It's fun without striving to be too funny, emotional and complex without bringing everything grinding to a halt, and somehow easy to believe without having to give a full explanation for things (not until one or two main reveals anyway). It’s a better mix of something for everyone, and Samuels handles everything well.

It also helps that both leads are fantastic. Allen has the charm of someone who knows how to improve any situation, or his character does anyway, and that emanates from the screen whenever he is around. Newton follows up her fun performance in Freaky with something that allows her to be effortlessly cool and likeable. Her character is going through a lot that she tries to hide, but her downswings offset the attempt to be constantly positive from Allen’s character. There are other people involved here, and a couple of the “minor” characters really grow throughout the movie, in terms of how our leads view them anyway, but this generally rests on the shoulders of Allen and Newton, and both are more than up to the task.

It may be more of a teen movie than many other time-loop flicks, but that doesn’t stop it from being almost as good as any others you could choose from. There’s a pleasant score from Tom Bromley running alongside the clean visuals, and the editing is as sharp as it needs to be for this particular sub-genre.

I am not sure how many times I could end up watching this, but I am definitely glad I decided to check it out. It may not be a perfect tiny thing, but it comes close at times.

8/10

Friday, 9 July 2021

Freaky (2020)

Co-written and directed by Christopher Landon, the man who gave us the enjoyable Happy Death Day movies, Freaky is a similar fun mash-up of slasher movies and something, well, very much not a slasher movie. This time around you get some body swap shenanigans with your slasher antics.

Vince Vaughn is the killer, The Butcher, and we first see him deapatching a group of teens in entertainingly varied ways. An encounter with Millie (Kathryn Newton) and a magic knife leads to a lot of confusion when the killer wakes up in Millie’s body, and Millie is suddenly confused about why she is suddenly an adult male. Can she convince her friends, Nyla and Josh, that she is not actually The Butcher. And can she stop the killer, now able to mingle with a whole school full of potential victims, from committing a bloody massacre.

The best thing about Freaky, similar to Happy Death Day, is the way in which it so successfully mixes the slasher movie moments with the high concept. You have lots of scenes that are simply fun, and both Vaughn and Newton have a blast portraying one another, but you also have some inventive, and impressive, kills. Things are so well put together that I didn’t even mind the lapses in logic.

Landon directs well, and he certainly keeps things moving briskly enough that the 101-minute runtime never drags, and the script, also worked on by Michael Kennedy, instinctively knows how to make the most of the body swap potential. It isn’t as strong elsewhere, particularly in a strand that explores Millie’s strained relationship with her mother, but it at least has the sense to minimise any time not focused on the central cat and mouse element.

Vaughn and Newton are both excellent in their roles, with the former arguably best in that silent opening sequence (why has Vaughn so rarely been used for characters with real darkness in them?) and the latter allowed to gain a cool “no fucks given” attitude as soon as she gains the soul of a killer. Celeste O’Connor is fine as Nyla, and Misha Osherovich provides a lot of laughs as Josh. Dana Drori and Katie Finneran are just fine in their roles, Drori as Millie’s sister/local Police officer and Finneran as the mother with a drinking problem, and Uriah Shelton is cute enough as the boy that Millie has a crush on.

Not AS good as the Happy Death Day movies, mainly due to the fact that the character change is instant, for obvious reasons, rather than a journey that shows real growth, this is still a great slice of funny, gory entertainment. It also has at least three superb, and memorable, death scenes. And Alan Ruck brilliantly portraying a teacher who is quite a douchebag you want to see unwittingly piss off a serial killer.

7/10

Monday, 1 June 2020

Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019)

The extent of my Pokémon knowledge is very limited. I know that people have "gotta catch 'em all". I know the best way to get Pikachu on a bus . . . poke 'im on. And I know that the mobile game was massively successful, and seemed to be the latest thing that everyone was obsessed with when it was released, for all of a month. I was also vaguely aware of the Detective Pikachu videogame. That's it. So I am not sure if it is a good or bad thing that I enjoyed this movie so much.

Justice Smith plays Tim Goodman, a young man who travels to tidy up some affairs after the death of his father, Harry. He ends up finding a Pikachu that seemed to belong to his father. He can even understand what it is saying, while others only hear sounds like "pika pika". The pair team up to find out what happened to Harry, which leads them to big battles, interrogating a creature that communicates via the medium of mime, and crossing paths with Mewtwo.

I've looked into this (these reviews aren't just slapped together without any care or effort, you know . . . not all the time anyway) and it seems that Pokémon Detective Pikachu is an entertaining movie that manages to satisfy both fans and newcomers alike. There are numerous nods and references scattered throughout every scenes, and the main storyline makes good use of some familiar characters. If you're going to make a movie from this particular brand, this isn't a bad way to go about it.

Smith is a good young lead, and he quickly builds a nice chemistry with his Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds). The two are a classic mis-matched duo, and Pikachu is nicely realised with some perfect CGI. Having said that, I cannot think of any mis-steps here, on a visual level. Every character is rendered in a way that aligns with their traits (some are a bit more cartoonish, some more realistic) and the production design is often gorgeous. As for the other humans, Bill Nighy and Ken Watanabe lend their not-inconsiderable talents to the proceedings, and it's amusing to watch them have some fun, Kathryn Newton is a plucky investigative journalist, Lucy Stevens, and has great onscreen presence, and you have some fun support from Chris Geere, Suki Waterhouse, Rita Ora, and Karan Soni (the latter two having much less screentime than the others).

Director Rob Letterman also helped to write the screenplay with Dan Hernandez, Benji Samit, and Derek Connolly, from a story also co-created with Nicole Perlman, and this may be his best work yet. His animated movies always felt like second-tier efforts (especially Shark Tale), but his live-action work has been on a steady upward trajectory, from Gulliver's Travels to Goosebumps and now this.

What could have been a painful cash-in is instead an impressive and amusing detective flick that benefits from the care taken with it, from the writing to the many details tucked away in every scene. Although not a traditional Pokémon story, it manages to treat all of the characters, and the whole universe, with respect. Fans of the series should have a lot of fun with this, and movie fans who don't know much about the games can also have a lot of fun. I THINK it's a very good Pokémon movie, but I KNOW it's a very good movie.

8/10

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You can watch the full movie, for free, here.

Thursday, 9 August 2018

Blockers (2018)

Blockers is a comedy that looked pretty awful from the first trailer. The rest of the advertising I saw for it didn't make it look much better. Then people went to see it and I started to hear some say that it was actually quite good. Some even said that it was very funny, with particular praise going to John Cena for his performance. I was willing to give it a go, and started to feel more optimistic about it. Well, it wasn't as bad as those trailers made it out to be, but it wasn't great either.

Cena, Leslie Mann, and Ike Barinholtz play three parents who discover that their daughters (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan, and Gideon Adlon) have made a pact to lose their virginity on prom night. Yes, this is a nightmare scenario for most parents. So they set out to put a stop to things. Well, Cena and Mann want to make sure nothing happens. Barinholtz is the cooler (aka less responsible) parent who tags along because he doesn't want the others embarrassing his daughter. And that's the premise.

Directed by Kay Cannon, making her feature debut in this role (although she has a number of decent credits as a producer), and written by Brian and Jim Kehoe (who have one previous feature and a couple of shorts under their belts), Blockers is handled slickly and professionally enough. The characters are sketched out quickly, although they're not the deepest, and the various elements that will cause more problems for the parental pursuit are made glaringly obvious. This is not a film that cares for subtlety.

Cena IS very good in his role, and he's the funniest of the three concerned parents. Barinholtz can be slightly irritating at times, due to his character, but also does well. Mann gets the short end of the stick, given the least of the comedic material as the writers instead focus on her stress and overprotective nature (similar to the way Cena is shown, but his ends up creating more laughs). That's a shame, because Mann can be very funny with the right material. What proves to be a pleasant surprise is that the film doesn't focus on the parents as much as you might think. It also gives plenty of time to Newton, Viswanathan, and Adlon, showing how they differ from one another and complement one another in their close friendship. All three young women do well, although it seems as if, once again, the writers had less to give the one of them (Newton, playing the daughter of Mann's character, funnily enough). You also get to find out more about their dates for the evening, and another potential love interest (Ramona Young) for one of the three, despite the fact that she is hoping to forge ahead and see if sex with a guy will change how she feels about her sexuality.

Considering the main premise, Blockers takes time to consider what the younger characters are going through, in terms of friendship, peer pressure, being on the brink of adulthood, and relations with their parents. It also manages to move deftly enough from the comedy to the sweeter moments, which come along, predictably enough, in the final act. What it doesn't do so well is provide the big laughs. You get a lot of chuckles, which are fine, but there aren't any great set-pieces here, and the script isn't smart and/or tight enough to make up for that.

Enjoyable enough, especially if you find Cena likable, but it's not one I can see anyone revisiting too many times.

6/10

You can buy the blu ray here.
American friends can buy it here.