Sadly, there hasn’t been much of a reason for me to go to the cinema these past few years, and I say this as someone who was once an inveterate moviegoer. It’s expensive and it’s uncomfortable (I hate those “luxury seats”: they’re too warm, and they make my legs cramp unless I put the seat all the way back, which puts me right to sleep!). I’ll admit I’m getting old, but I can’t abide horror, can’t follow the action franchises, and can’t find anything funny in the current slate of comedies. And when I do find something I want to see, it shows up on one of the streaming services almost immediately. 

Somehow, though, I have ended up in a movie theatre five times in the last six weeks. This is more actual cinema than I think I saw all of last year! My experiences have been varied, and I offer these mini-reviews to let you know my thoughts about a couple of BIG titles that gave me feelings I didn’t expect, a dramatic piffle that was nearly saved by its star, and two films that you might have skipped (one I’ll bet you haven’t even heard of) but should definitely see. Okay, here we go . . . 

The Christophers

Over twenty-five years before he became Gandalf, Ian McKellen was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company and came with them on a California tour of their production of a strange play called The Ik. They stopped by U.C. Berkeley to perform the show and to give a couple of acting workshops to advanced drama classes, including my own. I don’t remember anything about the play or the workshop, but I do remember McKellen! 

In this film by Stephen Soderburgh, which played at film festivals in 2025 and a year later had a ridiculously brief theatrical run, my old buddy Sir Ian plays Julian Sklar, a once-applauded artist who lives in his squalid London home and guards in his attic a series of paintings of a mysterious boy named Christopher. Rumor has it that the series is unfinished, and Sklar’s unscrupulous children (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) hire Lori Butler, an unsuccessful but talented young artist (Michaela Coel), to get hired as Sklar’s assistant and then surreptitiously complete the Christopher paintings so that the siblings can sell them for tons of money after their father’s death. Lori has her own personal reasons for participating in this fraud, but she doesn’t reckon with the relationship she will forge with Julian, a mostly unpleasant man who will also be profoundly changed. 

In a landscape of bloated epics, this small and lovely film is primarily a character study of two lonely, fascinating people. It’s not short on plot or suspense either, and it delivers a powerful ending that is a meditation on both the legacy of the artist and the strange vagaries of friendship. The Christophers is the only film on this list that I eagerly look forward to seeing again. 

The Sheep Detectives

I’ll enjoy watching this one too, the one film on the list that is definitely for my regular mystery-loving readers. There’s nothing baaaaaad about Leonie Swann’s 2005 comic mystery novel Three Bags Full, about a flock of sheep who try to solve the murder of their shepherd, but I did not get on with it. Twenty-one years later, it has been adapted to film by Amazon MGM Studios (where I’m sure you will be able to stream it eventually) – and it is a delight. First of all, the actual whodunnit has been altered from the novel and is, in my opinion, vastly improved. (I won’t get into details, but there are clues and everything, and I didn’t guess the ending.) 

In addition, the film is blessed with two wonderful casts, both in terms of the live actors (which include Emma Thompson, Hugh Jackman, and Nicholas Braun) and, even more so, those who voice the sheep characters (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Brett Goldstein, Patrick Stewart, and many more). As you might expect, the sheep are better drawn characters than the humans, and I ended up feeling a modicum of guilt over how much I enjoy a good lamb chop. 

Please don’t dismiss this as a children’s movie, although as long as your kids are okay with murder mysteries – this one is pretty bloodless – I say bring ‘em along. The Sheep Detectives is a warm and funny film that contains a pretty darn good puzzle, too! There’s even a message at the end which, I have to admit, made me openly weep.

The Devil Wears Prada 2

Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt, and Stanley Tucci are back together again – and shame on them all! This is a blatant cash grab perpetrated on those of us who loved the first film (and I do!); it is boring, unfunny (even Streep isn’t good!) and frankly a baffling waste of talent. The plot has something to do with the erosion of print media in a world of online publication, which is an interesting idea that gets lost in this jumble of moments designed to remind us of the best parts of the first movie. 

Let’s keep this short and sour. I took my mom, and she liked the fashions. (But she much preferred The Sheep Detectives.) 

Power Ballad

Here’s another film that showed up in theatres and disappeared in a week. It’s all about a fading rock musician turned wedding singer (Paul Rudd) now living with his wife and daughter in Ireland, who meets a just-past-his-prime boy band star (Nick Jonas) at a gig where Jonas is a friend of the groom. They end up spending the night jamming together in Jonas’ room, where Rudd plays a song he composed years ago but never recorded. Jonas steals the song and makes an international comeback with it, leaving a stunned Rudd trying to pick up the pieces of his foolishness. 

That’s the whole plot, ninety-eight minutes and done, so it doesn’t stretch things out (there isn’t much to stretch!) There are only two ways this film can end: Rudd finds justice and superstardom, or he takes stock of how truly happy he was without either of these things. Somehow, the film manages to give us a muddy version of both endings. 

Rudd is, as always, wonderful, even when the movie embraces plot points that other films have worn to the nub. The song he wrote is catchy enough, I guess, although even after hearing it fifty times in the film I can’t remember a note. And that kind of describes the film itself: catchy in the moment and then utterly forgettable. 

Disclosure Day

I waited a week before seeing this, eying the highly mixed reviews with a sense of dismay. I remember the thrill of seeing both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.: the Extraterrestrial when they first came out (in 1977 and 1982, respectively). For decades, no other films about space aliens filled me with such bittersweet emotions until I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival in 2016.

With his latest film, Steven Spielberg is trying to strike a tone between Close Encounters and Villeneuve’s film, and you would do well to go in not expecting a big, soaring epic like those early blockbusters. The most intriguing aspect of the film is how it presents huge plot points – the world is on the brink of a nuclear holocaust, the mythology of Roswell is all true – through almost peripheral vision. This is a big film (it’s certainly a long one), but it’s parsed out primarily in smaller moments through the experiences of a group of good and bad guys, led by the traditional Spielbergian wide-eyed Everyman (Josh O’Connor), who is caught up in a government conspiracy led by a smooth villain (Colin Firth) and must, with the assistance of a splinter group of rogue good-guy agents, led by Colman Domingo, fulfill his fate in order to save the world. 

No biggie – and, no, he can’t do it alone. The other part of the equation is a perky weathergirl played by Emily Blunt who starts to experience unexplainable things and is drawn inexplicably to O’Connor and to Devil’s Mount- oh, wait, wrong movie! Well, it’s the same basic idea, but instead of lots and lots of grand visuals, this film is more about the people and some BIG IDEAS cobbled together in smaller moments. It’s notable, in fact, how intimately Spielberg tells most of this story. Even John Williams’ score is small!

These are all characters we’ve seen too many times in Spielberg movies, but they are at least well-performed here. Blunt is magnificent, shouldering the story’s emotional heft, and it’s her small interactions with the dozens of people she encounters that are the highlights of the film. O’Connor is rapidly becoming one of my favorite actors, and he perfectly fits into the role occupied by Richard Dreyfuss, Tom Hanks, Roy Scheider, and other male stars occupying the same Spielbergian role. He gets most of the action sequences, and they are, of course, expertly done, but they’re sequences with heart because we experience them through O’Connor’s eyes.

One big idea that falls a bit flat has to do with the perceived conflict between the potential existence of aliens and the concept of God. This burden falls on the shoulders of Eve Hewson, playing a former novitiate who has fallen in love with O’Connor’s character. There simply isn’t enough space given to her character to do more than throw out a few ideas, which are then quickly tied with a bow by a wise nun (Elizabeth Marvel). (In the musical version of this, the nun would simply sing “Fly Every Spaceship” and that would be that!)

A better served idea, dramatized by the conflict between Firth’s agency leader and Domingo’s “traitorous” second, is basically the fight between those who believe that aliens bring a message of hope and unity and those who view them as a menace. It’s not a new theme for Spielberg, but in an era when Americans are so deeply divided between nationalists and globalists and the issues of immigration and citizenship is are being brutally reassessed, this is what made Disclosure Day resonate with me. A lot of critics have complained about David Koepp’s script, particularly the way it ends not with a bang but with something quieter. It’s true that we do not wind up on Devil’s Mountain, but, for the most part, I did like the ending. Much of its power comes from an actress named Courtney Grace, who steals the final ten minutes of the film from everyone else. Does Spielberg leave a few plot strands dangling? Yes, he does. Still, I didn’t mind the mess and all the open questions; it’s as if the director is telling us that we’ve got a lot of cleaning up to do in this world, and we can’t expect Steven Spielberg to have all the answers.

Well, that’s my line-up of spring movies. (I guess Disclosure Day is the first sign of summer.) Be sure and catch The Christophers and The Sheep Detectives, let me know what you loved and/or hated about Disclosure Day (you know you’re going to see it), and skip Power Ballad and Devilx2 altogether, unless you’re a Rudd or Streep completist. Now let’s just hope that there are some summer movies coming up that are worth paying $21.50 a pop for!