Martinez Tribune The website of the Martinez Tribune.
BY TYLER HENSON
This is a good week to go to the movies. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil opened even bigger than expected and is already well on its way to becoming one of the year’s breakout hits. This critic didn’t feel it was a great film, but director Cregger sure has an ability to entertain. Read the full review on Friday.
Families looking for a Halloween treat should check out Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom. A stop-motion charmer from the reliable Aardman Animations, it’s perfectly lighthearted spookiness for young viewers. Older fans of classical movie suspense ought to check out indie release The Weight. This is a smaller film, without the advertising reach of major titles like Resident Evil, but it’s an excellent story stocked with great performances that deserves as much attention as it can get. Read more below.
This weekend brings the release of Brad Pitt’s survival thriller Heart of the Beast, the DreamWorks fantasy animation Forgotten Island, and Robert Pattinson’s Oscar contender Primetime. We’ll be sharing reactions to this lineup next week. Avengers Endgame also comes back to theaters to get fans pumped for the upcoming Doomsday in December.
The Weight (112mins)
It is the Great Depression and times are tough for Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke) and his daughter Penny (Avy-Berry Worrall). When a grave misunderstanding lands Samuel in a prison labor camp, he faces the possibility of losing Penny forever. A shifty warden (Russell Crowe) offers him a deal. Samuel must lead a small group of prisoners through the Oregon woods to illegally transport some gold. If all goes well, he’ll be reunited with his daughter, but the journey will be fraught with peril, paranoia, and greed.
Evoking the feel of a vintage thriller from the 1970s, The Weight is a movie that could have easily starred Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman back in their heyday. It’s grizzled, tough, and not without a sense of fun beneath the hard scowling. There’s real intelligence to the screenplay and rock solid confidence in the direction. Tension is constant, and many an inspired choice heightens the suspense. Even familiar setups, like the scene where a rickety old wooden bridge must be crossed, are reinvented through cunning execution.
Hawke leads the story with natural movie star presence. He and Crowe have both aged into the kind of performers who wouldn’t be out of place in a wilderness Western like The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) or a prison suspense thriller like Escape from Alcatraz (1979). In fact, put those two movies together and you pretty much have the recipe for The Weight. Sound intriguing? Then don’t miss it. This is excellent old-school filmmaking.
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (81mins)
Shaun the Sheep gets into the spooky spirit with his third big screen adventure. Shaun plays mad scientist this time around, creating a growth formula that will supercharge the flock’s pumpkin patch just in time for Halloween. This leads to trouble when the Farmer mistakes Shaun’s formula for a hair growth solution. Unrecognizable beneath a coat of endlessly growing hair, the Farmer is mistaken for a monster by the townspeople ! It’s up to Shaun and the animals to save the day.
This is the latest feature by Aardman Animations, the stop motion company behind perennial family favorites Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run (2000). Once again, their lovingly hand-crafted clay characters and the quaint little world surrounding them conjure irresistible charm. Monster movie dads will get a big kick out of this one. Beast of Mossy Bottom contains many knowing references to classic horror. The original Universal monster movies are singled out for special tribute, especially Frankenstein (1931). This might be a fun way to find out if you have a monster kid on your hands.
The movie is lighthearted and sweet, and its scares are played as innocent farce. If you’re not familiar with the Shaun the Sheep series, it’s important to know the stories are essentially silent comedies. Dialogue is limited to some nonsensical babbling. Story is cleverly conveyed through visual means and witty sight gags come at a quick pace. Viewers of any age will be able to understand what’s happening, and you don’t have to be familiar with previous entries to enjoy this one. Families would do well to seek out this early Halloween treat.
Hope (157mins)
Hope Harbor, a small town near the North Korean border, becomes the site of a monster attack in South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s rowdy mixture of sci-fi horror, high-octane action, and wickedly dark humor. Opening with a massive forty minute set piece, and closing with an equally ambitious chase on horseback through the woods, Hope achieves jaw-dropping levels of frenetic speed.
The film features some erratic CGI creature effects, which have been the subject of much criticism. The astonishing stunt work surrounding those effects, and the velocity of Na’s direction, make it hard to complain. The screenplay audaciously refuses to fully explain what’s going on in the story, and Na freely blends contrasting tone, often infusing serious moments with slapstick absurdity.
It’s a terrifically bumpy ride, perhaps too quirky and unwieldy for some. This critic felt it was one of the best movies of the year, an action epic of ambitious physical scale and first-rate artistry, comparable to Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). Hope doesn’t seem to be finding much of an audience yet, but it will probably score big once it moves to VOD and streaming. To get the full adrenal impact, try to see it on a theater screen while you have the chance.
By Any Means (107mins)
An FBI investigation into the murder of a civil rights leader in 1960s Mississippi hits a dead end. The case is assigned to Special Agent Wayne Strider (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), one of the bureau’s few Black agents, and much to his surprise, he is partnered with mafia hitman Greg Scarpa (Mark Wahlberg). Scarpa doesn’t hesitate to beat, shoot, and even murder his way through the case, leaving Strider shocked at the lack of oversight. But the hitman’s nasty methods seem to be their only chance of getting results.
Loosely inspired by true events, By Any Means starts as a conventional movie about the Civil Rights era, then starts to morph into a morally ambiguous and ugly crime thriller. Things get most interesting when Scarpa shows up, chummy and talkative, quite happy to cause havoc and very pleased that he’s being payed by the government to do so. Wahlberg sports a distracting false nose, but is otherwise compelling in the role. Abul-Mateen gives a strong lead performance, conveying split emotions. Strider is a disciplined and principled man, yet his principles waver under the gratifying thrill of violence.
The movie doesn’t probe these moral questions that deeply, nor does it take the risk of working without guardrails, embracing the lurid excitement Tarantino-style. It ends up swerving lightly around the middle, trying to get its hands dirty while remaining a respectable drama. That’s a bland choice in the aftermath of movies like Sinners (2025), a movie that also deals seriously with racism, but had the nerve to jump wholeheartedly into pulpy genre entertainment. By Any Means is well made and well acted enough to be engaging, but it feels out-of-date.
Coyote vs. Acme (103mins)
The Looney Tunes return in another live-action/animation hybrid. Wile E. Coyote, fed up with his Acme products constantly backfiring on him, decides to take a break from chasing the Road Runner to seek some justice. He hires a shabby small claims attorney, Kevin Avery (Will Forte), and files a massive lawsuit against the corrupt megacorporation. The case seems hopeless, until they begin to uncover some of the company’s tightly guarded secrets.
Already famous for being buried by its original studio, until Ketchup Entertainment purchased it for release following a public backlash, Coyote vs. Acme has met with an extremely positive reception. This critic was one of the few dissenting opinions. Compared to previous Looney Tunes films, like Space Jam (1996) and Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), the energy level is on the lower side. The Tunes’ anarchic irreverence has been restrained by an intricate conspiracy/legal thriller plotline, and the script spends too much time focusing on Kevin trying to overcome his own personal cynicism and burnout. The Coyote’s plight doesn’t get quite the foreground space it deserves.
Still, it’s a clever idea, filled with plenty of in-jokes for life long Looney Tunes fans to chuckle over. John Cena, as Acme’s slick and villainous attorney Buddy Crane, again proves his nimble capability as a comic performer. One scene features him verbally sparring with Tweety Bird and it’s probably the most delightful in the movie. The public goodwill towards this release, rescued as it was from the tax write-off trash bin of a major studio, appears to be resulting in a modestly successful box office performance. No matter the film’s flaws, the fact that it’s being seen and supported feels like justice served.
The Odyssey (173 mins)
Have you seen The Odyssey yet? Because almost everyone else has. Matt Damon stars as Odysseus, who survives the Trojan War only to endure the most protracted and challenging journey home anyone could imagine. He and his men face sirens, giants, a cyclops, and the wrath of the gods themselves. Year after year passes at sea and their numbers gradually dwindle.
Meanwhile, back home at Ithaca, Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) keeps at bay a horde of impatient potential suitors, including the conniving Antinous (Robert Pattinson), as her son Telemachus (Tom Holland) tries to figure out what happened to his dad. Christopher Nolan’s star-studded adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, one of the foundational texts of Western literature, features some of the most eye-popping images you’ll see all year. The scale of the production is incredible and the IMAX 70mm photography captures the massive scenes with remarkable detail and clarity.
The film was shot almost entirely on location and the majority of its effects were accomplished in-camera, so when you see hundreds of soldiers hauling the enormous Trojan horse over miles of landscape, you’re seeing it for real. Even fantastic creations like the cyclops have been done with puppetry and trick-perspective. Already a front runner for Best Picture and many other awards, The Odyssey, will likely be dominating the movie conversation for the rest of the year. It was made for theater screens, so make sure you don’t miss it.
All of the above movies except Hope and The Odyssey are currently playing at the Contra Costa Cinema. You can visit https://contracostacinema.com for both current and upcoming showtimes.
