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Oscars 2026: One First-Timer After Another

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Paul Thomas Anderson (left) and Ryan Coogler (right), now official Oscar-winners, for One Battle After Another and Sinners , respectively. (Source: Facebook )  The 98th Academy Awards ceremony had a collective evening with a lot of diverse films and projects from 2025 collecting at least one Oscar statue. Veteran actress Amy Madigan picked up the first win of the night (a big surprise) for her chilling supporting role in Zack Cregger’s horror hit Weapons (a rare thing for the genre). The Norwegian drama Sentimental Value was recognized as the year’s Best International Feature, with director Joachim Trier inviting the cast present that night on stage (including nominees Renate Reinsve, Elle Fanning, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Blockbuster releases like F1 and Avatar: Fire and Ash won for their sound and visual effects, respectively, while Guillermo del Toro's version of Frankenstein picked up technical awards for its makeup and hairstyling, production design, and costume desi...
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REVIEW: “Hoppers” (2026)

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(Source: IMDb )   Before its theatrical release this past weekend, people have already been saying that Pixar’s latest is their funniest movie to date. (If you were to ask me, I’d argue for  a bug’s life  and/or  Monsters University . Unpopular opinions, maybe. But trust me, they’re worth it.) On the surface,  Hoppers  seems like a conventional, save-the-forest comedy with human beings transferring their minds into robotic forest critters—a premise that undoubtedly rides the coattails of  Avatar  (which they directly reference in the marketing). To those going in with those same expectations: you may be surprised.  Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda) is an eighteen-year-old girl who loves animals and the forest. So much so, that she’s willing to stand up to protect and defend them, even if it means getting in trouble for it. And she certainly has a knack for that at school, as well as with local authority figures, considering her sometimes question...
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REVIEW: “The Bride!” (2026)

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(Source: TMDB ) More than five months after  Guillermo del Toro’s masterful take  on Mary Shelley’s legendary Gothic novel, actress-turned-filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal (in her second directorial effort since  The Lost Daughter ) brings her own radical spin on the Frankenstein story with a period update of James Whale’s 1935 cinematic classic,  The Bride of Frankenstein , which centered around the titular creation’s own companion. Essentially a monster movie in the guise of a crime-thriller, set in 1930s Chicago,  The Bride!  stars Christian Bale as the inaugural creature a.k.a. Frank (this is the actor’s first collaboration with Gyllenhaal since  The Dark Knight ), and Jessie Buckley as a newly-dead corpse named Ida, sparked back to life as the titular spouse.  After  the first trailer  premiered, one person commented on social media that it looked like the kind of film that  Joker: Folie a Deux  should’ve been. And it should c...
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REVIEW: “KPop Demon Hunters” (2025)

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(Source: IMDb )   Last spring, Ryan Coogler released his most original and ambitious film to date with the period vampire horror epic, Sinners . It was a daring and challenging combination of dynamic, powerful music/songs and supernatural elements. It was also a very bloody, hard-R story. Two months later, Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation released their own original and ambitious feature that equally emphasized the power of music against supernatural forces. Only this one was much more stylized. And PG-rated. But while Coogler’s film had more to do with retribution, I found KPop Demon Hunters to be a surprisingly resonant story. It's easy to see why it became such a fan-made phenomenon—and not just because of its cool and colorful aesthetic and vibe.  The plot combines Korean folklore and mythology with the country’s contemporary pop music scene, which sounds daring enough. Its titular trio consists of music artists who have secret lives as demon slayers, with their latest...
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REVIEW COLLECTION: “TRON” Series (Second Edition)

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(Source: Hyperpix )   WRITERS NOTE: The following reviews were originally posted on September 26, 2025 ( Tron ) ; October 3, 2025 ( Tron: Legacy ) ; and October 17, 2025 ( Tron: Ares ) .   TRON  (1982)  Visual effects have reached many milestones throughout the history of cinema, dazzling moviegoers for more than a century. One of the most significant steps came in 1982, during a time when computers weren’t a general household item, while many animators feared they would lose their jobs because of it, and only a few artists and technicians saw the potential for how they could be used in filmmaking and in service to the stories they could/would tell. Writer, director, and animator Steven Lisberger developed and eventually presented the idea of a hacker, video game developer and arcade owner, who gets zapped into a computer and must escape to stop the head of a technological corporation. That became the premise of the 1982 live-action feature,  TRON , a film ...
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