Overview: In Venom: The Last Dance, Tom Hardy returns as Venom, one of Marvel’s greatest and most complex characters, for the final film in the trilogy. Eddie and Venom are on the run. Hunted by both of their worlds and with the net closing in, the duo are forced into a devastating decision that will bring the curtains down on Venom and Eddie’s last dance.

Verdict: The third and final episode in the Venom saga issues a third and final reminder that the world never really needed a Venom saga in the first place. Once again, an incongruously excitable Tom Hardy stars as Eddie Brock, the longtime loser who’s been something of a winner ever since a smart-aleck alien symbiote named Venom (also voiced by Hardy) started living rent-free inside his body.

The same uneven entertainment equation that blighted the first two Venom movies remains firmly fixed in place: for every occasional minute of great stuff, you must sit through six minutes of grating stuff. You’ll find the great stuff on the far fringes of Hardy’s hyperactive performance style, where he clearly ignores the script and starts going off on tangents of his own making.

As for the grating stuff, much of that occurs when the filmmakers pay too much attention to the script, and dual fogs of confusion and boredom descend on the viewer.

Overview: An aging gangster attempts to reconnect with his children and rectify the mistakes in his past, but the criminal underworld won’t loosen their grip willingly.

Verdict: Liam Neeson has been in this territory before. His nameless character, identified in the credits only as Thug, is an ex-boxer working for a Boston mobster, and he’s suffering from memory lapses diagnosed as CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the untreatable disorder caused by repeated head injuries. (As the doctor notes, boxers suffering from it were once referred to as punch-drunk: see “Requiem for a Heavyweight.”) That situation is not unlike the one faced by Alex Lewis, the character played by Neeson in 2022’s “Memory,” a remake of a Belgian thriller; Lewis was an aging hit-man suffering from the first stages of Alzheimer’s.

In each case the medical reality leads to redemptive choices. In “Memory,” it was Lewis’ decision to protect a young girl he was commissioned to kill. Here, Thug tries to reconnect with the family he’d abandoned and rescue a young woman forced into prostitution. In both movies, however, the characters aim to continue their “work” as well.

Neither film is particularly good, but this one is the better of the two, mainly because Neeson, working again with director Hans Petter Moland, with whom he collaborated on one of his best recent films, “Cold Pursuit,” gives a more soulful performance here. Under Moland’s guidance Neeson’s Thug comes across as genuinely burnt out, yet capable of volcanic eruptions of anger and violence. Nonetheless both actor and director are hobbled by the predictability of Tony Gayton’s script, which also fills in too many gaps about Thug’s past with reams of dry narration Neeson has to deliver in voiceover.

When he’s introduced Thug is obviously a tired man, but still loyally serving Charlie Conner (Ron Perlman), his long-time boss. In fact, Conner has charged him with introducing his son Kyle (Daniel Diemer) to the practicalities of his operations, specifically by accompanying the smug, cocky kid on a job transporting a shipment to the city for drug lord Gamberro (Javier Molina), who also runs a brothel as a side business. It’s there that Thug encounters a girl, Araceli (Deanna Nayr Tarraza), whose desperation touches him.

But Thug also links up with an older woman (Yolanda Ross), who pursues him after he punches out a guy manhandling her in a bar. They get close, but at the same time, haunted by dreams of his father (Josh Drennan), whom he remembers brutally toughening him up, he tries to contact the children he hasn’t seen in years. He hopes to get contact information on his son from his daughter Daisy (Frankie Shaw), a stripper, but she tells him brusquely that her brother died of an overdose some time ago. That leads him to try to build a relationship with Daisy, along with her adolescent son Dre (Terrence Pulliam), whom he takes to the gym where he still occasionally serves as a sparring partner for younger fighters. But he advises the boy, who’s been dropped from a football team for fighting with a teammate, that often it’s better to walk away from confrontation.

As all this is going on, Thug is attacked by three gun-wielding goons while taking a payoff for Conner from a priest (Kris Eivers) who’s in debt to the mobster for reasons undisclosed. He dispatches them all, but the episode convinces him that the Conners, both father and son, are not to be trusted. It also moves him to try to make amends by providing for Daisy and Dre, and to buy Araceli from Gamberro. Things do not go as smoothly as he hopes, however.

Moland stages the convoluted and frankly overplotted business fairly convincingly, aided by a gritty production design by Jørgen Stangebye Larsen while working at a deliberate pace in tandem with cinematographer Philip Øgaard and editor Dino Jonsäter, all to the strains of Kaspar Kaae’s mournful score. For the most part the Massachusetts locations are nicely employed, but there are lapses. The attack on Thug, for instance, is staged in the middle of downtown, on a street hemmed in by tall skyscrapers, in broad daylight, yet there’s not another car or pedestrian to be seen anywhere within what seems a two-block radius—a simply ludicrous circumstance, even if it does allow for some beautifully composed images. And a lengthy dream sequence, in which Thug accompanies his father on a leisurely fishing expedition, strains for a degree of psychological depth a genre picture like this really can’t sustain.

Still, this story of a bruised man struggling for redemption is itself redeemed to a considerable extent by Neeson’s committed performance, and by strong turns from much of the principal supporting cast. To be sure, Perlman isn’t really doing much more than his usual gruff shtick, and Diemer’s preening smirk is awfully grating. But Shaw’s hard-bitten Daisy is convincing, and Pulliam makes Dre an agreeable young man. By contrast Molina is quite persuasive as a true thug.

Overview: When an American family is invited to spend the weekend at the idyllic country estate of a charming British family they befriended on vacation, what begins as a dream holiday soon warps into a snarled psychological nightmare.

Verdict: Do they even have toxic masculinity in the Netherlands? Don’t send me angry messages—I’m being facetious. But I ask this nonsense question that I already know the answer to because Danish director Christian Tafdrup somehow managed to make, what I consider to be, a horror masterpiece with his 2022 version of Speak No Evil without resorting to what is kinda becoming the cliched boogeyman of our age as its Big Bad.

But the 2024 remake from Eden Lake director James Watkins that hit theaters this past weekend—the one notable for rightly exploiting James McAvoy’s many, many bulging muscles in its ad campaign—decided instead to go the most routine of routes. Basically, at every turn. And so 2024 Speak No Evil does manage to become its own thing outside of the shadow of the original, but by paying the price of being a far less interesting film.

Also, don’t get me wrong—toxic masculinity certainly has it coming. I have nothing against toxic masculinity getting a thousand pies in the face. That was certainly there happening in the sidelines of Tafdrup’s film, for sure. But that rot was only part of the original film, which accused our entire culture of a moral malfeasance from tip to toe. The problem was systematic—the film’s title was a furious accusation of middle-class complacency. The turning of blind eyes nearly as weaponized as Jonathan Glazer did in his Nazi Family Holiday picture The Zone of Interest.

If one has or wants to choose, I recommend seeing the original film, pitch-black as night as it might be, far above and beyond seeing the remake. At least see the original first. Tafdrup’s film rewired my brain. Watkins’ version, while certainly containing plenty of small cinematic pleasures, which we’ll get into (I did already mention James McAvoy’s muscles, right?) accomplished no such feat. It’s fine, kinda meaty fun, but nothing we haven’t seen a million times since Straw Dogs in 1971.

So the story in both films remains the same, save some small particulars that eventually turn into bigger ones as they roll down the hill of the story, but we’ll get to that. We have ourselves a family of three—cuckolded dad Ben (Scoot McNairy), high-strung mom Louise (Mackenzie Davis), and their anxiety-riddled tween daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler). Americans who’ve recently moved to London, we meet them on vacation in a pornographically amber-colored corner of Italian countryside.

Despite the beauty surrounding them, there is very clearly an unspoken tension lurking between this threesome. And so when they spy a robust and happy-making family of three across the pool at the same villa—papa Paddy (McAvoy), much younger mama Ciara (Aisling Franciosi of The Fall and The Nightingale), and their boy Ant (Dan Hough) who seems to be roughly the same age as Agnes—they feel shabby by comparison. And yet extremely drawn to them as well. If those people can have such fun here maybe we can catch some of it, they seem to be thinking.

The six-some do quickly bond, in the way of those impermanent vacation relations we’ve all had. But a tossed-off invitation from Paddy to the Londoners to come visit his farm in the remote English countryside seems kind of absurd. Until it doesn’t. Now back in London Ben and Louise find themselves slipping back into their unhappy routines, so when a postcard from Paddy and fam arrives reiterating the invite a second time, they make a slightly rash decision to take it up. A long weekend in the country will surely do them all some good again, right? (Yeah, think again. We’ve seen this movie before!)

At this early point, the 2024 version of this story has already changed a few beats—ones that become pretty important down the line, so I feel the need to note them. The biggest one is that in the original film, it’s the father who makes the decision to take up the invite, bypassing his wife entirely. Tafdrup’s movie makes it wildly, crystal clear that this is out of his repressed attraction to the other man. The sexual tension between those two is played to the hilt, y’all. And so the original becomes essentially a tale of this father’s repression dooming his family. It can be argued (and I certainly would) that internalized homophobia is the original film’s villain; the quicksand that ultimately devours them all. That’s interesting stuff!

But in the remake it’s Louise who makes the choice that the family should go on this second trip, all because she’s feeling guilty about having recently cheated (by text!) on Ben. This certainly gives Mackenzie Davis more to do in this version of the film than the actress playing this role did in the original, and I can’t knock that. Davis is one of our most underrated actors, and she and Franciosi are the film’s acting MVPs, in my eyes. (For different reasons, but yes, we’ll get to that.)

But as far as “blame” can be assigned for what happens to the family in the film, it’s far less interesting to make the dynamics of their situation be those of a harridan-ish wife and her cuckolded husband learning to be proper spouses and parents. The lesson simply becomes one of rah-rah heteronormative self-improvement here. Ben’s got to learn to be a “man”—just the right kind of man. Not the James McAvoy kind. He needs to be the kind of man who lets his wife hit dudes in the head with hammers too, dang it.

If it wasn’t immediately obvious—is there anyone who didn’t see the ten billion ads they ran for this movie that gave away the entire plot?—Paddy is not the good guy they all think he is. And his invite to Ben and Louise and Agnes was not made with their family’s wellness in mind. And much of the middle portion of the remake goes exactly the same as it did in the original, with the small niceties of human relations playing their roles as the individual steps down unto the ninth circle of Hell. Both versions make an absolute feast out of our ability to doom ourselves by not speaking up when we need to, due to the overwhelming feeling of obligation we have to be polite.

It’s here where the actors really get to shine. The rubbery extent that Mackenzie Davis’ wondrous face is capable of contorting through in the span of a sentence is here wielded brilliantly and is truly something to behold—she is hilariously funny playing a woman for whom swallowing her derision takes every gangly limb’s worth of effort to do. And James McAvoy is himself having a grand old time chewing the scenery—he says he modeled his performance on British shitheel Andrew Tate, and it shows (although Tate wishes he could have 1/1000th of this charisma).

The thing is though, making all of this entertaining, that’s a big choice! One that robs us of the sinking fatalistic miserablism of the original that I found so genuinely disturbing. The only person in the cast who underplays, and brilliantly, is Franciosi—for ninety percent of this telling we have no idea what Ciara’s role is in all of this. So even as a noted fan of the original, I could not pin down where Franciosi was taking this woman. And then when it is all out there it comes as an actual gut punch; one that gives the remake’s last-act swing into over-the-top action theatrics some genuine heft and meaning. She makes the stakes feel real, and as horrific as they ought to feel.

If I’ve left out McNairy’s turn-up until now it’s because his performance, and what the remake does with his character, is the least interesting thing about it all. Ben is simply a weak man who needs to learn to be strong, but the right amount of strong that balances out correctly with his decency. He’s choosing the Tim Walz path, not the JD Vance one, which yeah, huzzah, do that. Everybody do that, please!

Overview: From renegade auteur Jacques Audiard comes Emilia Pérez, an audacious fever dream that defies genres and expectations. Through liberating song and dance and bold visuals, this odyssey follows the journey of four remarkable women in Mexico, each pursuing their own happiness.

The fearsome cartel leader Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón) enlists Rita (Zoe Saldaña), an unappreciated lawyer stuck in a dead-end job, to help fake her death so that Emilia can finally live authentically as her true self.

Verdict: There appears to be only one person in the musical Emilia Pérez who knows the kind of inconsistent movie they’re making.

That would not be Zoe Saldaña, here playing Rita Moro Castro: a disaffected defense lawyer who starts off criticizing Mexico’s corrupt justice system and ends up jamming a man’s face into the crotch of her red velvet pantsuit. It would not be Selena Gomez’s Jessi — the platinum-haired moll of a notorious drug lord, who ping-pongs between domestic distress and singing to her cellphone camera in a never explained or explored subplot about social media obsession.

And it is not the various bit parts scattered throughout. At times they tack serious, delivering heart-rending laments on the piles of unidentified human remains littering the Mexican landscape, innocent victims of the country’s unending drug wars. At others, they dance through operating rooms with goofily unnerving smiles plastered on their faces, chanting: Penis to vagina, or vagina to penis: what will it be?

Instead, the only character somewhat granted the gift of consistency is the one who also goes through the most obvious change: Emilia herself. Played by actress Karla Sofía Gascón, Emilia is expectedly the heart and soul of the movie, and handles even the more ridiculous aspects — of which there is absolutely no shortage — with a serious consideration that emotionally grounds the story. At least, when it focuses on her.

That’s true even if the plot sounds like something of a fever dream. Prior to transitioning, Emilia is that notorious drug lord married to Jessica — a growling voice on the phone that hires Rita to track down the clinics, doctors and recovery spaces that will allow her to become the person she’s always wanted to be.

The only problem is the family she’ll have to leave behind — the wife and young children who are told nothing about any of these plans. Instead, Rita sets them up in a fancy Swiss mansion, helping them weather the media and political storm at home — after Emilia fakes her own death and goes on to live a new, secret life. That is, until she changes her mind four years later, re-employs Rita to bring her family back to Mexico, and poses as her own estranged cousin to force her way back into her sons’ lives.

But as convoluted as that sounds, that particular storyline takes up less than half of the 130-minute runtime. The rest is stuffed with the random side quests that define Emilia Pérez, crafting the meandering telenovela-style it’s often compared to, which works much better in a long-running TV format than film.