WLR #1

Late Night with the Devil

Directed by Cameron & Colin Cairnes

Found footage horror has always held a certain resonance for me, taking me back to memories of childhood, before I had the vocabulary to articulate that dread. I was eight years old when my older cousin decided I was old enough to see The Blair Witch Project. What stuck with me was the aftermath: the way my perception of the woods shifted, the paranoia that turned every shadow into a potential threat. This subtle change in the way I saw the world mirrored, perhaps, the way adulthood was starting to close in on me, even then.

So, when I went to see Late Night with the Devil, a new entry in the found footage genre that's earned the praise of critics and even Stephen King, I was cautiously optimistic. Within the first few minutes, I understood the world I was in. Jack Delroy, the star and host of the fictional Night Owl late-night show, is a man of simple motivations, but the film does a good job of making you feel like you're in the audience, watching his Halloween special unfold live. There’s a quiet confidence in the way the suspense builds—not through cheap jump scares but through the slow burn of anticipation. It lulls you into a false sense of security, only to tear it apart as the night unravels into chaos. When the paranormal elements finally explode into full-blown madness, the film veers into territory so absurd it becomes thrilling in its audacity.

The ending is what lingers. Long after the scenes of demonic possession and rituals, the film leaves you with questions that feel surprisingly weighty for found footage. Was the possessed girl actually an agent of Christ, sent to punish Jack for selling his soul to the devil? Or was it all a scam, a trick of perception designed to elevate Jack’s sinking career and boost his ratings? The film hints at deeper philosophical issues about the nature of good and evil, it doesn’t really have much to say, but it hints.

The biggest is Jack Delroy. The movie wants us to believe he’s a second-tier late-night host, a sort of Conan O’Brien figure—funny enough to be popular, but too quirky to ever truly dominate the ratings. Yet, Delroy, or the actor who plays him, I can’t really tell, lacks the charisma or comedic spark that would make him even remotely believable in that role.

Still, it’s hard to deny the film’s energy. It’s a tightly paced, 93-minute descent into madness that succeeds in scaring you on a budget.

 Three stars

Monkey Man

Directed by Dev Patel

I wasn’t expecting to sit down for a John Wick film. The poster, saturated with reds and blacks, along with the endorsement from Jordan Peele, had primed me for a different of experience. What I got felt far closer to Spider-Man—Tobey Maguire version—along with echoes of The Dark Knight Rises, basically any superhero origin story you can think of. It even reminded me of Jason Bourne. I was struck by how off the mark my expectations had been. It wasn’t that the film was bad, far from it; but it wasn’t what I had gone in wanting to see. Perhaps that’s my fault.

With today’s moviegoing landscape—the inflated prices, the constant calculations of whether something is “worth it”—there’s a pleasure in having the film pass. You can just walk into a theater without spending half an hour scrolling through Rotten Tomatoes or sifting through YouTube critics to justify the ticket. It makes it fun because you can go in blind. Trailers give away so much now…

Dev Patel is a tremendous actor. His performances in Slumdog Millionaire, Lion, and especially The Green Knight have all demonstrated a range and depth that made me eager to see what he’d do with his debut as a director. I guess I hoped for something like the Green Knight, at least in terms of atmosphere. Instead, I found myself in the familiar territory highly stylized action, the kind of film that could have easily been directed by someone like David Leitch, or maybe The Bullitt guys. It felt like a strange fit for Patel, whose prior work had hinted at something more introspective.

And that’s where the tension lies. The film moved with the precision of a well-oiled action vehicle, packed with entertaining set pieces and bloody fights. But for all its beautiful brutality, it left little behind. It’s the kind of movie that, a month from now, I’ll struggle to recall in any real detail. It will blend into the landscape of other competent but forgettable action flicks that do little more than entertain for their runtime.

Perhaps I had set my expectations too high. When someone like Patel, with his résumé, steps behind the camera, there’s an automatic assumption that he’ll bring a certain swag, a certain intelligence to the frame. And while I’m sure some will find that in this film, for me, it fell a bit flat.

Two-and-a-half-stars

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire

Directed by Adam Wingard

I knew what I was walking into. If ever there was a sign of the death of attention spans, the death of critical thinking, it’s the rise of films like these: these cheap but incredibly expensive to produce spectacles, hypnotizing audiences, reducing them into something primal, something resembling the apes on the screen.

But, on the off-chance that I could find some redeeming quality—some silver lining amidst the thunderous noises and clangs and whooshes’ and smashing and ruckus and CGI carnage and whoooosh—I decided to give Godzilla x Kong a shot on a rainy day because I felt lonely. No comparison to be made here with something like Godzilla: Minus One—they’re not playing the same game, not even in the same stadium. And that’s funny because Godzilla x Kong reminded me so much of Pokémon Stadium that I was half-expecting a controller to spawn in my hands. And there it was—its singular redeeming quality!!! It’s a children’s toy!

I looked around and noticed that several mothers had taken their sons to the theater, and by the end of the monster brawl, with all the explosions, crashing, and ear-splitting noise, those boys were on their feet, cheering with joy. It was infectious, in a way. I couldn’t help but smile, my headache notwithstanding as I remembered what it felt like to be that age. I thought of the times I dragged my own mother and father to see The Baby-Sitters Club or The Phantom Menace, convinced that they were the greatest films of all time. My mother endured Batman & Robin more times than I care to admit, and countless reruns of Gossip Girl. I never considered how much patience that must have required.

In that sense, I suppose there’s something to be said for Godzilla x Kong. It’s a children’s video game brought to life, a cinematic amusement park for kids who still sleep tucked in X-Men bed sheets. I can’t begrudge them. The problem arises when you glance around and see grown men—overweight, middle-aged, clapping and cheering with the same enthusiasm as the 12-year-olds beside them. That’s when the existential dread creeps in, the sense that something has gone terribly wrong in the world. And that’s when the death of civilization, as melodramatic as it sounds, feels all too real.

I’m not here to blow a gasket. At a certain age, you realize it’s time to put away childish things and seek out more meaningful forms of entertainment. Because, for all the fluorescent lights, the frenzied editing (wobbly cam!!), the various “worlds within worlds” the film tries to dazzle you with, the film is spectacularly boring. Rebecca Hall delivers exposition every 12 or so minutes, explaining what you just saw on screen, and all I could think of was how bad it was.

That doesn’t make me a snob, does it? It’s just the reality of what films like this have become. Pokémon Stadium: Hollow Version is a complete waste of time for anyone over the age of 12, unless you’re there with your kids. And judging by its box office success, a monster-sized hit, I can only say: God help us.

One star—for little Larry and his mommy.