Movie: Klara and the Sun (2026) Spoiler warning. I knew Jenna Ortega as the girl from Wednesday. I didn’t know she could do this. She plays Klara, a solar-powered robot bought to keep a sick girl company, and it’s an Oscar nominee level performance. I’m at 79 out of 100, and she’s the only reason it’s that high. I read that Ortega studied Buster Keaton, the silent movie comedian from the 1920s who pulled off crazy physical stunts with a dead straight face, to figure out how Klara should move. That work paid off big time. Kudos to her. This is someone who obviously takes their craft seriously. Ortega also copied the wobbly way her nieces and nephews moved when they were toddlers, because Klara is brand new to the world and basically learning how to work a body for the first time. You can see all of it pop-off on screen in a great way. Wednesday was dead eyes and no blinking, and Klara lives in her eyebrows. Same actress, total opposite instrument and technique. Impressive range. She is the story of this movie. Without her it loses 50 points. Even the critics who trashed this movie couldn’t stay mad at her. One festival review called her faultless, and Inverse said she’s the only thing keeping the whole movie from feeling glib. The rest of the cast showed up too. Amy Adams - stunning as always - played a complicated mother who is desperate and ice cold at the same time, and Mia Tharia as Josie, the sick girl, holds her own in every scene with Ortega, which is not easy. Tharia was outstanding as well. The best scene in the movie is the party where the “lifted” kids, rich kids who got genetically upgraded, come over to the house and treat Klara like a toy. It took me straight back to high school and college where you could see the gap between the kids with money and everybody else. I wrote an essay in high school about how the Advanced Placement classes felt like a different school within the same school after I had to sit in a non-AP class taught by the same teacher. And that divide is coming for all of us at an exponential rate in real life with AI. Robots, ChatGPT, whatever comes next, the people with money get it first, and the gap only gets wider from there. The problem is the movie never tied that scene back into the main story. It was a side mission. A great side mission, but it felt like it belonged to a different movie. That’s the bigger issue. Grief, class, faith, pollution, AI, love, all of it was fighting for room, and one critic said the real plot gets lost in all the noise. I agree. Then they throw in Josie getting jealous because Rick, the neighbor boy, gave Klara a piggyback ride. She threw a fit like he took the robot to prom. It added nothing, and one critic summed that scene up perfectly: “Just, no.” Here’s my biggest problem though. I'll have to read the book to find out if it's the source material or the adaption issue. The moral is supposed to be that you can’t copy a person, because who you are lives in the love of the people around you. There’s a whole plan to rebuild the human daughter, Josie, inside a robot body if she dies, and the movie treats it like a horror show. But the hero of the movie is a robot who loves. And a robot can be copied. So if a machine can love like that, what stops a copy of Josie from doing the same thing? The movie argues against its own message, and that’s why the ending didn’t land for me. I walked out not totally sure what happened or what it was supposed to mean. Michael Giacchino’s score and that gold storybook look were gorgeous, two of the best things in the whole movie. I’ve never read the book, but this made me want to. From what I've researched, the novel is told entirely through Klara’s eyes, and that tight focus is exactly what this movie needed to center the story. Ironically the author Kazuo Ishiguro said he wanted Waititi’s wacky, surreal take. Fine, but the author asking for it doesn’t make it good. Ortega is the only reason this isn’t a bad movie. The critics hammered it. It’s sitting at 24% on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Hollywood Reporter called it the worst movie ever made from a Kazuo Ishiguro book. Sounds brutal until you remember one of those other movies is The Remains of the Day, which got eight Oscar nominations. Being last behind that isn’t the death sentence they think it is. Go see it for Jenna Ortega, before everybody else catches on and the Oscar talk starts. 79/100.

Perfect example of how time can change perspective on a movie. Revenge of the Sith is 100/100 and the best in the series. The Empire Strikes Back is not better, and it's not even close. The strength of that final act also boosts the value of Episodes I and II.

Movie: Clayface (2026) Spoiler warning: I'm going through everything in this one, the kills, the twist, and the final scene, so if you haven't seen it yet, take my score and go buy a ticket before you read another line. Clayface is a 100 out of 100, the best Clayface origin story ever put on screen, comics and Batman: The Animated Series included, and I walked out of that theater shocked at how damn good it was. Critics have it at 75 percent on Rotten Tomatoes while the verified audience has it at 93, and Forbes already called that a record audience score for James Gunn's new DC universe. Warner Bros. made it for a reported $44 million, roughly one-fifth of the $225 million they spent on Superman, and I'd sit through this one ten times before I'd sit through Superman again. In the 1961 comic, Matt Hagen is a treasure diver who falls into a radioactive pool and uses his new powers to rob people. In this movie, Hagen is a small-town actor who made it big, got a little cocky in a nightclub with a mob boss's girl, and paid for it with his face carved open. His money man Frank, played by Eddie Marsan, has already cleaned out his accounts, so Hagen loses his face, his career, and his fortune in the same stretch. An experimental stem cell treatment built on AI nanotech rebuilds his face, and then it keeps right on rebuilding the rest of him whether he likes it or not. The comic version was money motivated, while this version is grieving the story of his whole life, and that's why you end up rooting for a man who is literally melting. Dr. Caitlyn Corr, played by Naomi Ackie, runs the experiment, and she's engaged to John Borrelli, the Gotham detective working the attack who starts eyeing Hagen as a suspect. Hagen's powers are out of control and his head is a mess, and the one thing that calms him is her touching him. The AP wrote that Ackie played the part "with real soul," and that undersells it, because she carries the emotional weight of the whole movie and I believed every second of that triangle. The first half takes its time, it's slower, and it should have been. I saw Other Mommy, which shows you the monster in the first five minutes and has nothing left to build on after that. No one wants to wine and dine a girl for it to climax 2 minutes after getting back to your place. Clayface makes you wallow in Hagen's fear and anger first, so it payoffs later. The gore is the perfect level, because they save it for the moments that make you cringe in your seat. There are scalpels near the face, and there's Hagen on an airplane cutting open the skin sealing his eyes shut with scissors while the plane bounces through turbulence. I read that they built that bathroom on a moving rig, used four pairs of scissors ranging from sharp to rubber, and Tom Rhys Harries was really cutting through prosthetic skin glued over his eyes. Legacy old school special effects built 18 separate stages of his transformation, and that work is why this movie never feels like a CGI cartoon. Director James Watkins told CinemaBlend he could have gone a lot further with the blood and decided that was enough, and boy was he was right. When you use too much gore the audience gets numb to it, kinda like the Wolverine video game that came out. It gets old quickly. When Hagen poses as the scientist Caitlyn and turns his hand into a spiked mallet, you see the shadow beating down on the dude and then the aftermath. That restraint hits harder than a full splatter shot. It's funny when it wants to be, too. Hagen gets an entire nightclub doing a choreographed line dance while the mobsters stand there staring at him, and I was dying. During that club sequence he also flashes his own father's face, and that father is Aaron Paul, which I completely missed in the theater. I will catch it when I see this again though, nice easter egg. Then the ending. The most difficult part and they knocked it out the park. Hagen kills John and walks around wearing his face, Caitlyn figures it out, shocks him, and hits the kill switch on the nanotech. He melts into the sewers and survives. In the last scene he's holding Caitlyn and kissing her, until you realize that Caitlyn is made out of his own body, two halves of one lonely man, and then he becomes the monster we know. Absolute cinema. There's no Batman anywhere in this movie, and that was the right call. I stayed through the credits waiting for a cameo, and I was glad nothing came. Watkins said he didn't want to get too cute and just wanted to be honest to the story, so he built a villain who carries his own film without a single franchise crutch. Rolling Stone's David Fear wrote that watching Clayface was like eating a handful of Play-Doh and twice as flavorless, then added that Supergirl doesn't look so bad now. Supergirl sits at 52 percent with critics and cost a reported $170 million, so I'll take the $44 million Play-Doh every single time. This movie is ten times as good as Supergirl, and I thought Supergirl was decent. Harries is perfect as Hagen, a small-town guy who came up big and lost it all, and you feel every bit of it. Gunn said at the premiere this isn't the last we'll see of Clayface, so keep him. Mike Flanagan, the guy behind The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass, wrote the story and co-wrote the script, and that script is the foundation of the whole thing. This is the first R-rated movie in the new DC universe, and it's real R, nudity included, which means my kids can't go, and that's fine because this is what DC is supposed to be. Cancel the Superman stuff, make the next Batman rated R, and give the villains their own movies. HBO is already developing a Poison Ivy series, so put her on the big screen as a solo movie with no Batman, and give Mr. Freeze and Nora the same treatment after that. Score: 100/100. If you think this movie is a 75, I don't care what you think about movies.