Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025)

This is nominated in one of the action movie categories for the 2026 Academy Awards, which is where this whole series of movies belong. The movie, as you might suspect if you have seen even one of the myriad of previous Jurrasic movies, is the situation where people are in danger of being devoured by freakish, mutant dinosaurs--that is pretty much it. But it takes an awful lot of slogging through the jungle, literally and figuratively, to get there. ANother thing about it is that they are not wanting for talent--however, a wildly overqualified cast can only do so much with what’s not on the page. Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey do an excellent job at gawking at oversized creatures intent on eating them, runnning to keep one step ahead of them, and hanging precariously from things when required, but we don't really get to know them, beyond one of them is there for the science, and three of them are there for the money. These blovkbuster stars seem game for both the silliness and the physical rigors of making a blockbuster like this but we do not get to know them, despite some long and plodding coversations throughout the movie. They mainly just sit around explaining things to each other.

The Sour Grape by Jory John and Pete Oswald

This is from a series known as Food Groups, and this is my first foray into it. My youngest son works in an elementary school and he has a button down shirt featuring the characters in this book--really fun. I loved this story about a grape who has a difficult experience as a young grape that sours him on others for quite some time--up until when he has a series of unfortunate events that make him very late for a date, and is met with a disgruntled friend--he feels unfairly judged, and it gives him the insight that maybe something went wrong in his pivotal event--which he discovers is true--and that maybe it is better to forgive and move on rather than hold on to the resentment. Really nice message and advice.

Blue Moon (2025)

This is a sad one. It is nominated in several categories for an Oscar in 2026, which chas been a surprisingly fruitful year for interesting big budget films. This one is intimate and raw. Ethan Hawk does a masterful job of portraying the heart and soul of the writer through one of the last nights in the life of Lorenz Hart, who was once one of the most acclaimed Broadway songwriters on the scene before fame and passion stopped returning his calls. He’s now the drunk at the end of the bar, the guy who gets there first and leaves last, and the one who can barely hide the pain behind his non-stop commentary on film, Broadway, and everything else around him. THe director, Richard Linklater, has crafted one of his finest docudramas, a consistently fascinating exploration of the frailty of the artist, buoyed by one of Ethan Hawke’s most remarkable performances.

The Birth of Korean Cool by Euny Hong

There is a lot to learn about Korea in this memoir. Today, the South Korean capital Seoul is one of the most modern on the planet while North Korea, historically the more prosperous half of the Korean peninsula, lives on the edge of hunger. It's easy to forget that, in the 1960s, South Korea's per capita GDP was less than that of the socialist paradise to the north, or of countries such as Ghana. Even as late as the 1970s, there was little to choose between living standards in Seoul and Pyongyang. Today, South Korea is the world's 15th largest economy and London worker bees would buzz with envy at the superfast internet connection their counterparts in Seoul enjoy on their air-conditioned subway journeys to work, all courtesy of enlightened government investment. The author and her family moved back to Korea in 1985, and in the course of describing her life there, she also goes on to bust many myths in her highly entertaining account of how South Korea, once one of the world's poorest and least fashionable countries, became a cultural superpower. One is that private enterprise is invariably a more effective driver of growth than government action – 25% of venture capital in Korea in 2012 came from the government – and that government intervention makes people lazy. May we all learn our lesson.

The Devil Is Busy (2025)

Here we are on the front lines of the war on women. While the sex trafficking of underage women by powerful men is minimized by the current administration--we can all guess why that might be--they are waging an equally destructive war on reproductive health care for women of child bearing age. This is a front row seat into what that health care looks like in the post-Roe era. This is nominated for an Academy Award in the Short Documentary category. The film focuse on Tracii, a staff member at Atlanta’s Feminist Women’s Health Center—now renamed the Feminist Center for Reproductive Liberation—whose workday begins long before sunrise. Her mornings are marked by both practical vigilance—ensuring the safety of the clinic and its patients—and private prayer that sustains her through a job fraught with protest, legal restriction, high stress, and real danger. The film captures the tense choreography of daily life at the clinic: security guards patrol parking lots, staff screen patients to comply with increasingly complex laws, and protesters wield megaphones and scripture as tools of intimidation. Most telling is a man who literally murdered someone himself who spends his days telling women that god will not forgive them while he believes himself forgiven. The audacity and conceit of men is on full view here, once again giving Christianity a bad look, having fully strayed from the teachings of Christ. Yet amid this hostility, the documentary emphasizes compassion—the small gestures of reassurance that Tracii and her colleagues offer women at their most vulnerable moments.

The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

This has been likened to many other stories, but a review that I read said it best. At core, this is an all-too-realistic fairy tale. There are five sisters, all of whom are on the verge of womanhood, about to leave the confines of the house they grew up in. The rumors are that they can turn themselves into hounds and that they hunt by night and are maidens by day. Who has more power than a girl on the age of being a woman, so multiply that by five, give them a bit of freedom, and watch the men in thier sphere try to make sense of them. Given how much the power of women still feels threatening today, imagine what that could mean 300 years ago? The fact that there is a move afoot to try to put that genie back into the bottle in America today, think Salem Witch trials with an are they or aren't they about them.

In Your Dreams (2025)

This was not nominated for Best Animated Film for the 2026 Oscars but I liked it so much more than Elio, which was--and really--this is going to be very unpopular--more than the K-Pop Demon Slayers movie that has been playing on a loop almost at my grandkids house, they like it so much. There is an "in the beginning" scene where Stevie is a young girl and her happy parents are taking a break from playing music together to make her breakfast. Fast forward to the present. Stevie is now in middle school. Her little brother Elliot annoys her because they share a room, he keeps trying to do magic tricks, and he does not recognize the conflict Mom and Dad are now experiencing. Mom is no longer performing with Dad. She is a teacher and is about to leave for an interview with a job that could mean a lot more money for the family. But they would have to move. Leaving their home in the suburbs is unthinkable to Stevie and Dad. The alternative, Mom’s leaving them behind to take the job, is unbearable. Stevie worries about the stress in her parents’ relationship. She makes breakfast but tells each parent the other one made it for them, to try to bring them closer. And then, as can only happen in an animated movie, Stevie finds a magical dreams book. When she and Elliot recite the incantation together, they find that when they sleep, their conscious selves can enter and change the worlds of their dreams. There is a recurring joke about the way Elliot’s white noise machine puts him into a deep, instant slumber. Over the course of the film, Stevie will learn to appreciate Elliot as a partner. And she will learn that she cannot fix everything, and that’s okay. More important, she will learn to see understanding and new opportunities inside what appeared to be insurmountable problems. It is a fun story line and beautifully animated, so while it did not make the final cut, it really is a good one.

Why Taiwan Matters by Kerry Brown

I am thinking of going to Taiwan and there is a dearth of information about the island nation as a tourist destination. Ergo I resorted to learning more about it's history and the complex triangular relationship between Taiwan, China, and the United States. The author asserts that the road to Taiwan’s peace and security runs through Beijing. The better the world understands this, the better informed we are to make decisions regarding this highly sensitive affair. This isn’t to say that Taiwan has no input in the matter – in fact, Taiwan is increasingly becoming detached from China as the generations pass on. Even though the native population of the island is dwarfed by the Han Chinese descendants, which is true on the mainland as well, they are not aligned with China culturally. A distinct Taiwanese identity, which has always existed in different forms, has emerged with greater vigor, especially after the pro-democracy reforms which started in the late 1980s and flourished in the mid-nineties with the election of Lee Teng-hui, frequently referred to as Taiwan’s “father of democracy.” This is an entry point to getting to know Taiwan.

Jane Austen's Period Drama (2024)

This is nominated in the category of Short Live Action for the 2026 Oscars, and it is very short (about 11 minutes--don't miss the blooper though so hang on a few seconds in to the credits), very funny, and available to watch on Kanopy, so free if your local public library subscribes. The opening scen is all too reminiscent of a scene straight out of Pride and Prejudice. A young woman, Estrogenia, is walking with Mr. Dickley on a gorgeous green hillside. He is telling her that his intended has run off with another man and he is therefore free to ask for her hand. He gets down on one knee, and mid proposal he realizes that she is bleeding from her nether regions. He is convinced that she is in need of a doctor and carries her home. Her sisters, Labinia and Vagiana, recognize the problem immediately. Where Estrogenia wants to explain, her sisters are adamant that talking to a man who intends to marry you about menstruation is off limits--rather they kill a chicken, play up the severity of the condition with additional carnage and celebrate when she survives than to reveal the real reason for the bleeding. The names are changed from an Austen classic to increase the hilarity, and it is all good clean biologically appropriate fun. Happy Valentine's Day!

Helm by Sarah Hall

I found this book through the New York Times Notable Book list, and while I enjoyed it, I am not quite sure that I completely go it. One thing is that the main character is wind, Cumbrian wind to be exact. The second is the time span, which is Neolithic times to the present, which is hard to fathom, but again, the wind is timeless. It changes in both quality and quantity over time, it is constant. Every era in the book has its own seeing; the same land, the same wind filtered through time-specific fears and hopes and work, time-specific attributes as well, from a neolithic world interpreted through animal behavior to the present with social media, pub menus, emails and the like. There is an undertone of what has changed and a little bit of why that would be, but it is the undercurrent of the story, not the story itself. It is wildly innovative, easy to read, and something to think about.