Mike Schulz, Dave Levora, and Darren Pitra celebrate Schulz getting his car back, which cramped his style for at least a week in the preceding month. Schulz said he had been wondering why there weren’t too many movies for him to review in January, and then it hit him: The writer’s strike is still being felt by us all.

Anyway, to the movies!

• Origin, directed by Ava DuVernay and starring Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Niecy Nash-Betts, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood, and Donna Mills. Origin is about Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote a study in 2020 called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system,.and Wilkerson’s efforts to get past a huge personal tragedy and adapt Caste as a film. It’s very meta, in case you didn’t wonder. It will be playing The Last Picture House presently, which seems like the perfect place for such a film.
  
• Nimona, an animated science fantasy adventure comedy drama directed by Nick Bruno and Troy Quane, featuring the voices of Chloë Grace Moretz, Riz Ahmed, Eugene Lee Yang, and Frances Conroy. This was a catch-up film for Schulz, as it’s been on Netflix since January. Nimona, based on the graphic novel by cartoonist ND Stevenson, has a hugely entertaining script by Robert L Baird and Lloyd Taylor, and is worth watching.
  
• American Symphony, a documentary directed by Matthew Heineman, concerning a year in the life of musician Jon Batiste, his music career, and his wife’s struggle with leukemia. This was another catch-up for Schulz, as the film hit Netflix back in November 2023. In the time since Schulz didn’t see it, Symphony had been nominated for a ton of awards, and won quite a few of them. The only Oscar for which it’s nominated is Best Original Song, “It Never Went Away,” by Batiste and Dan Wilson.
  
• Flamin’ Hot, directed by Eva Longoria in her feature-length directorial début, and starring Jesse Garcia, Annie Gonzalez, Dennis Haysbert, and Tony Shalhoub, is a “completely harmless” affair, neither awful nor great. Worth mentioning is the fact that Diane Warren, who is also up for a Best Original Song Oscar, has been nominated fourteen times before — nine of them w/n a ten-year period — but has never won it. Will her Cheetos song turn the tide for her?
  

As for previews:

• Argylle, directed by Matthew Vaughn and starring Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, John Cena, and Samuel L Jackson, is also a meta afffair, and based on its buzz on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s not getting a lot of love in the lead-up. Schulz doesn’t like anything Vaughn has done, so it’s all uphill for him.
  
• Scrambled, directed by and starring Leah McKendrick, also features Ego Nwodim, Andrew Santino, Adam Rodriguez, Laura Cerón, and Clancy Brown, and concerns Nellie Robinson (McKendrick), who decides to freeze her eggs after a break-up. McKendrick based her story on her own experiences with egg-retrieval. No telling which way the critical weather vanes are pointing. Seems worth a watch, given its reception last March at South by South West.
  
• A film that has garnered a lot of anticipation is The Zone of Interest, written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis, and starring Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Ralph Herforth, Daniel Holzberg, Sascha Maaz, Freya Kreutzkam, and Imogen Kogge. It answers the question, Is love possible among people who have the Auschwitz concentration camp right next to their backyard?
  

“Origin,” “Nimona,” “American Symphony,” and “Flamin’ Hot”