Mike Schulz met up with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra at Awake Coffee to discuss all matters movie. There was no broadcast the previous week, so the trio had a bit of ground to cover.

To whit:

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• Harold and the Purple Crayon (dir Carlos Saldanha, starr Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds, and Zooey Deschanel). Based on the 1955 children’s book of the same title by Crockett Johnson. Not for acidulous adults like Schulz, but his preadolescent pal had a ball.
  
• Trap (dir M Night Shyamalan, starr Josh Hartnett, Ariel Donoghue, Saleka Shyamalan, Hayley Mills, and Alison Pill). A killer premise wedded to a shlocky execution, but entertaining nonetheless. His mom liked it.
  
• It Ends with Us (dir Justin Baldoni, starr Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, and Hasan Minhaj). Based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover, the film concerns Lily Bloom (Lively), who’s had a history of bad relationships, though you figure out why before long. And drama.
  
• Cuckoo (dir Tilman Singer, starr Hunter Schafer, Jan Bluthardt, Marton Csokas, Jessica Henwick, and Dan Stevens). Thus continues Schulz’s latter-day encounters with low-budget independent horror films (this one budgeted at $7 million). Off the 103-minute run-time, the first ninety minutes are engagingly creepy, but the movie eventually becomes bogged down in a convoluted human/plant hybrid body-horror concept. David Cronenberg would have made better work of the material, had he been engaged to the project. Schafer is very effective in her role, though.
  
• The Instigators (dir Doug Liman, starr Casey Affleck, Matt Damon, Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlbarg, Paul Walter Hauser, Ving Rhames, Alfred Molina, Toby Jones, Jack Harlow, and Ron Perlman. A potato-faced crew out of Boston (or, rather, “Bass-ton”) undertakes an armored-car robbery, which goes about as well as any shady enterprise undertaken in the twenty-first century can be expected to go. The film is streaming on Apple, and if you’re up for a film out of which the Coen Bros might have made a complete dinner (back when they were still working together), rather than Liman’s series of hors d’œuvres, you should know, it is there, waiting, for you.
  
• Borderlands (dir Eli Roth, starr Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramirez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, and Jamie Lee Curtis). Based on the Gearbox Software video-game series. An unmitigated disaster all around: Budgeted between $110 and $120 million, Borderlands has made back less than a sixth of that; and Blanchett has done interviews recently where she likened it as “an act of COVID madness,” where she leaped at any excuse to get out of the house — and by “any excuse,” we really mean any excuse. Filmed in 2021, Borderlands sat in the can until 9 August of this year; and, for all the quality Roth brought to this enterprise, it could have stayed there another twenty, thirty, forty years or so. Any civilization that might hail this as a cultural high-water mark should be waving a plain white flag on a piece of stick.
  

As for the previews:

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• Alien: Romulus (dir Fede Álvarez, starr Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu) is the seventh film out of the Alien franchise. The enduring appeal of the Ridley Scott original, and the sheer presence of those xenomorphs, are what keeps Schulz returning to this well, even after the previous couple sequels that Scott helmed, which, if we’re being honest here, neither he nor anyone else can probably remember what they entailed. But those xenomorphs, man!
  
• Dìdi (dir Sean Wang, starr Izaac Wang, Joan Chen, Shirley Chen, Chang Li Hua, Stephanie Hsu, and Spike Jonze). A Taiwanese-American coming-of-age film. Hmmm. . .
  
• Skincare (dir Austin Peters, starr Elizabeth Banks, Lewis Pullman, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Luis Gerardo Méndez, and Nathan Fillon). A crime thriller concerning dermatology starring Elizabeth Banks. Would that she had directed this one as well, by the looks of it. . .
  
• My Penguin Friend (dir David Schurmann, starr Jean Reno, Adriana Barraza, Rocío Hernández, Nicolás Francella, Alexia Moyano, and Thalma de Freitas). Sounds cute. It’s got Reno in a lead role, though, so. . .
  

“It Ends with Us,” “Cuckoo,” “The Instigators,” “Borderlands,” “Trap,” and “Harold and the Purple Crayon”