Happy October, everyone! It’s time to stock up on the scares as we get closer to Halloween. What better way to do so than with our very own 31-day list for horror this October? From familiar classics to the newest scares in theaters, this is Don’t Tell’s official list for Horrortober this year!
- 1. Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)
- 2. Scream (dir. Wes Craven, 1996)
- 3. Backrooms (dir. Kane Parsons, 2026)
- 4. The Blob (dir. Irvin S. Yeaworth, 1958)
- 5. The Blob (dir. Chuck Russell, 1988)
- 6. House (dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977)
- 7. Basket Case (dir. Frank Hennenlotter, 1981)
- 8. The Shining (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
- 9. Other Mommy (NEW!) (dir. Rob Savage, 2026)
- 10. Hellraiser (dir. Clive Barker, 1987)
- 11. NOPE (dir. Jordan Peele, 2022)
- 12. Lisa Frankenstein (dir. Zelda Williams, 2024)
- 13. Companion (dir. Drew Hancock, 2025)
- 14. Hokum (dir. Damien McCarthy, 2026)
- 15. Zombieland (dir. Ruben Fleischer, 2009)
- 16. Crawlers (NEW!) (dir. Angel Gómez Hernández, 2026)
- 17. The Blair Witch Project (dir. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
- 18. Cloverfield (dir. Matt Reeves, 2008)
- 19. The Orphanage (dir. J. A. Bayona, 2007)
- 20. Warm Bodies (dir. Jonathan Levine, 2013)
- 21. Spree (dir. Eugene Kotlyarenko, 2020)
- 22. Fresh (dir. Mimi Cave, 2022)
- 23. Clayface (NEW!) (dir. James Watkins, 2026)
- 24. The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
- 25. Perfect Blue (dir. Satoshi Kon, 1997)
- 26. Coraline (dir. Henry Selick, 2009)
- 27. Bodies Bodies Bodies (dir. Halina Reijn, 2022)
- 28. Obsession (dir. Curry Barker, 2026)
- 29. We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (dir. Jane Schoenbrun, 2021)
- 30. Hereditary (dir. Ari Aster, 2018)
- 31. Resident Evil (NEW!) (dir. Zach Cregger, 2026)
Whether you eat your treats in your home or in the theater, we wish you another great October filled with great thrills and scares! Don’t tune out just yet though, as we’ll be bringing you the newest, spookiest news and reviews throughout the month. Want some alternates for your personal 31-day list? Check out our extensive catalog of evergreen horror flicks over on our sister site, Galxy.tv!
We’ve been doing a lot of talking this month on Don’t Tell about the depth an ounce of humanity adds to a story. With Lanterns and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that brand of humanity comes in the form of the locality of their narratives. A level of banter and chemistry that feels crucial to the characters of any work can help it feel that much more immersive, in its work and who the major players of the film are. Last night I went to go see A24’s Tony, directed by Matt Johnson (Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, BlackBerry), a biographical drama about the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts that jumpstarted Anthony Bourdain’s career in culinary authorship and the art itself. The film is full of a small-town culture that I find incredibly particular to replicate on screen, the cast riffing off each other in such a close-knit way you’d think they were working in that kitchen for years prior.
Dominic Sessa portrays a young Anthony Bourdain, a troubled young writer studying at Vassar College in hopes of landing a writing fellowship on the east coast. When reality sinks in that someone else landed the opportunity, Bourdain travels to Massachusetts in a snap decision as he begins working at the Flagship, a seafood restaurant by Cape Cod, in exchange for shelter on the owner’s back porch. Tony was shot on location, which helped instill the feeling of locality as early on as the first time the film takes us to the shore.
One of the parts of Tony that fascinates me (that I wish I saw more people talking about) is this being Matt Johnson’s first American film—kind of. 2016 brought us Johnson’s Operation Avalanche which was shot on location at NASA, though in secret. Sneaking around got the director somewhere as its crew convinced NASA staff they were filming a student documentary as they walked around the facility. Tony is a stark contrast to other Matt Johnson productions. The absence of his long-time collaborator Jared Raab is definitely felt in the cinematography department, though the camerawork this time was headed by Michael Bauman of One Battle After Another fame. Contextual to the narrative Tony strives for, I think they knocked it out of the park. Shots in the kitchen can feel frenetic and manic during work hours, but also focused and solitary when Bourdain learns from the owner of the Flagship (Antonio Banderas). The chemistry between the Flagship cooks can feel broken and cutthroat while also having the energy of found family and an ultimate trust.
Trust is one of the big themes I found was explored throughout the story, with Bourdain lacking trust in anyone around him—himself included—while actively deceiving those placing their trust in him during the summer. That’s another part of Tony that stays local, its conflict and the looming bookend of the film. Anthony Bourdain did not forever stay as Dominic Sessa portrayed him during that summer, and yet his transformation throughout the film burns on slow simmer just long enough for any drastic change to feel earned. It’s nonlinear and messy, an approach that I found was the most realistic for the shift his character needed throughout this story.
Matt Johnson’s Tony is now playing in theaters nationwide.
This Sunday’s premiere of DC Studios’ Lanterns on HBO Max was met with highly positive reception. Between the chemistry of Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), the gritty detective approach to the Green Lantern character, and an overall great grounding of what a Green Lantern could be, the verdict’s already been ruled on Twitter: the DCU could be back in a major way. I’ve had a bit of hope for this show myself, mostly for virtue of righting wrongs; studio head James Gunn has mentioned Lanterns will expand on some concepts introduced in the series finale of Peacemaker. I didn’t like the way Peacemaker left off like that—I felt it to be sudden and unsatisfying—so it’s great we’re finally going to get some clarity not too long after that. However, what’s giving audiences hopes for this series is not the teased tie-ins to the greater DCU, but rather how grounded its story keeps itself despite the Green Lantern’s traditionally fantastical nature.
Hal and John aren’t the Green Lantern troops we’ve been introduced to previously in the DCU—that would be Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), who is set to appear later in the season. However, the two have a dynamic that makes the most sense within the series’ narrative. The show takes place in the Midwest as the two Green Lantern agents investigate a murder Hal suspected was linked to intergalactic forces. I think this more grounded approach is what’s captivated audiences so much with just one episode. It’s not like the show doesn’t retain some of the more fantastical elements of the Green Lantern story, I mean, we see Hal Jordan fly off pretty early on as well as John Stewart using the ring to survive a car crash. Even with these elements, the show retains a small-town focus on a mystery that could have ramifications on their whole world, or worse.
This localized, realist approach to superhero series and films is something the genre has been missing for a while now, and I feel those elements returning in series like this and films like Spider-Man: Brand New Day is what’s drawing audiences back in after what feels like years of on-and-off productions following Avengers: Endgame. As much of an escape as the medium of film can feel for many, often times a level of immersion needs to be sustained; the story taking itself seriously enough for the viewer to invest themselves fully, emotionally and mentally. There’s a stark contrast in how Marvel and DC portray their narrative in films like Thor: Love and Thunder and Shazam: Fury of the Gods versus Brand New Day and Lanterns. Keeping your story human is what keeps others drawn—the characters themselves don’t even have to be quite human, but in nature the plot we follow should implement the human experience as seamlessly as they can.
We don’t have much to go off currently aside from what’s just been aired. As it stands, the pilot for Lanterns strikes a chord that I wasn’t expecting any DCU production to hit so soon after Peacemaker‘s second season. We’ll keep our eye on this one as it develops, and hopefully concludes on a better-rounded note than the previous series.
Lanterns is now streaming on HBO Max.
If you missed out on AMC’s previous Scream Unseen screening, you dodged a major bullet and I envy your position. On Monday, August 3rd, 2026, AMC gave audiences an advance screening of Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man ahead of its official release date this weekend. It’s an unrated horror splatterfest where the titular ice cream man turns the children of Bayleen Bay into psychotic vessels who turn to murdering the adults of the town.
Here’s what we wanted the mystery movie to be going in:
- – Jane Schoenbrun’s Camp Miasma
- – Casper Kelly’s Buddy
- – Not Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man
As soon as the film opened with Roth’s foreword, everyone I came with let out a sigh of disappointment knowing this was the reality of the situation. I’ve heard talk of people who walk out of the Screen Unseen events when it’s not for them, and while I understand—different strokes for different folks—it’s always personally been my policy to see a movie through to the end in the theater. The atmosphere around you plays into that special feeling you just don’t get watching something at home. This was the first time I ever considered walking out of a movie in the theater. And no, it wasn’t because the movie was grotesque. It wasn’t the excessive levels of gore and violence. It wasn’t the subject matter at all. Plain and simple, this is one of the worst movies you could spend money to see.
Just a waste of time all around. It felt like over half an hour passed by the time we barely reached the fifteen minute mark. This movie drags the hell out of a premise that never held much water to begin with and never believed in itself enough to warrant anyone being invested in the stakes. Except, apparently, for the guy sitting left of our group who seemed to be the biggest (if not ONLY) Eli Roth fan in the room. This? THIS is what you applaud? My friend liked Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving and retroactively lowered it one star on Letterboxd after we exited Ice Cream Man. This is absolutely no hill to die on. I could count everything I liked about this movie on one hand—no, one finger. There was one joke that made me laugh in the first 20-25 minutes. That was the only thing I ever felt besides complete boredom and suffering.
I can handle a film that’s very self-aware in how bad it is and how fundamentally it does not work, but this just felt like such an insult to the medium itself that any possible attempt at self-awareness just bounced right off everyone in the theater. You’ve definitely heard by now that the film uses AI-generated visuals in certain sequences, when some of the children have speech-bubbled thoughts depicted in the style of rubber hose animation. It’s such unbelievably blatant AI slop animation that it takes you out of the whole thing, it was so immediately recognizable I’m shocked Eli Roth tried to pass it off as hand-drawn. Generating animation like this has a look that’s unrecognizable as anything but AI slop. It definitely couldn’t have done that much more to the budget to have a small team of guys who know what they’re doing and making like 4-5 short animations in that style for the film. THAT’S it. That’s the SMALL amount of scenes it was used in and they still decided that would’ve looked better and appealed to more people. At that point, why even have animation bits cut in at all? A number of them were confusing and didn’t fill anyone in on what was going through the kids’ heads.
My browser froze for like a minute when I was trying to insert that link up there. This movie sucks so hard my PC doesn’t want me typing about it anymore. I use these keys for writing entertainment news, movie reviews, and Big Walk. Ice Cream Man does not qualify as a movie. It’s a stain I don’t think any director, actor, or producer would want on their filmography for the rest of their life. Even on a night where someone sits down on their couch, browsing streaming services for a bad movie to throw on, I can’t imagine a reality in which this is anyone’s choice. After this movie exits theaters, I expect a quiet shelf life for it on Tubi or Fubo or something before it fades into obscurity, Out of service, like I hope to one day find the career of Eli Raphael Roth.
This is the part where I’d tell you Ice Cream Man is now playing in theaters nationwide, and I still will… because it is. Go see Tony instead though, or Camp Miasma or Buddy when they come out. Just please spend your time and money on anything but this.
Written by D.S. Foster
Edited by J. Nagle
Cinema as a singular event… Christopher Nolan, Hollywood’s most dependable manufacturer of prestige-slop, should have exhausted his commercial mythology by now. Following the theatrical coronation of The Dark Knight, the Oscar benediction of Oppenheimer, the “Barbenheimer” evangelization of moviegoing into social-media crusades, and of course, the sacrament of Interstellar in the hearts of emotionally constipated men everywhere, what kingdom is left for him to claim?
The Odyssey answered with $264.1 million worldwide, eclipsing Nolan’s previous debuts and every other R-rated release this year. Second now only to Marvel’s catalogue giant, Spider-Man and his Big Day Out or whatever… I’m just kidding, those movies are fine. The number matters less as another laurel for Nolan than as an indictment of an industry incapable of recognizing the audience’s appetite for depth—for films of enduring cultural value.
Hollywood’s supposedly safe investments have exposed the fraudulence of franchise logic: sequels, remakes, and interconnected product lines increasingly resemble the residue of a creatively exhausted system. Nolan offers an expensive but persuasive alternative. A proven filmmaker, charismatic performers in practical danger, immense physical scale, and images worth leaving home to see can still generate collective excitement.
Hollywood will welcome the film’s success and almost certainly misunderstand it. The lesson is not simply to finance more tent-pole epics or imitate Nolan’s aesthetics, but a broader principle to invest in filmmakers rather than properties, cultivate anticipation rather than flood the market, and treat visual grandeur as an artistic instrument instead of a promotional adjective.
The Odyssey succeeds through a union of high culture and mass sensation that Hollywood’s marketing departments usually regard as incompatible. Homer supplies intellectual legitimacy, Nolan’s celebrity-auteurship supplies commercial viability, and spectacle supplies the decisive promise. Photographed by Hoyte van Hoytema in open-matte IMAX 65mm, the film makes theatrical exhibition inseparable from the work. Nolan has long wagered audiences will pursue experiences streaming cannot flatten into the convenience of the home. Projection, photographic craft, sound, and physical magnitude become part of the drama’s meaning.
Nolan against Homer and critics against Nolan… Homer’s Odyssey casts the human condition as a struggle toward home. Odysseus returns from Troy through erotic distraction, monstrous appetite, natural chaos, and divine vengeance, pursuing Ithaca as both destination and an embattled idea. His wife Penelope, outwits parasitic suitors while his son Telemachus, searches for an absent father. The poem turns adventure into moral and spiritual testing: hospitality against violence, memory against temptation, identity against disguise, presence against absence; and Odysseus survives through cunning more than virtue.
Nolan refracts Homer’s heroic tradition through the spiritually corrosive psychology of modern warfare. He approaches Homer not as a record to reconstruct or monument to preserve, but as inherited human mythology to interrogate and translate into contemporary cinematic language. The results rank among his strongest films because The Odyssey recognizes epic not merely as scale, but as a crisis of consciousness. Like David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, it turns landscape into an arena for moral reckoning.
Nolan’s Odyssey confronts the Homeric paradigm as damaged ideological machinery. The Odyssey as Western civilization’s foundational action-adventure narrative; as archetype of conquest, masculine honor, patriotic sacrifice, and the endlessly commercialized Hero’s Journey. Nolan asks what remains when the hero no longer believes his legend. The grandeur that once confirmed Odysseus’s greatness now exposes the moral and psychological wreckage required to produce it.
Critics such as Daniel Mendelsohn claim Homer’s humorous trickster has been stripped of his wit and cleverness, becoming another guilt-ridden “Nolanite;” Odysseus as a tormented cousin to Batman or Oppenheimer. [1] The diagnosis is accurate, but not the dismissal. Nolan remakes Odysseus for a culture that places heroic masculinity on trial. The film asks not only whether the hero won, but who paid for his victory; not simply whether he returned home, but whose home was destroyed to make his return possible. Odysseus’ cleverness remains, but the moral cost of his cleverness has become unbearable.
Homeric heroism depends on excellence demonstrated through action and preserved through communal memory. Nolan’s Odysseus inhabits a world in which those signs of distinction have become spiritually meaningless. His ingenuity does not free him from violence; it makes him responsible for violence on an unprecedented scale. The Trojan Horse becomes the central image of that responsibility.
In Homer, hospitality is both social contract and sacred warning, binding stranger and host beneath the possibility that either might be divine. The Trojan Horse corrupts that law absolutely. A gift becomes a weapon, hospitality becomes infiltration, and trust becomes military strategy. Odysseus’s supreme act of cunning abolishes the distinction between guest and invader. Nolan reduces the crime to a damning proposition: one man’s trick has broken divine law.
The Trojan Horse therefore becomes the hero’s original sin. Troy’s destruction is not some abstract victory, but Odysseus’s design, burden, and nightmare. He does not merely struggle to return to Ithaca; he struggles to return from the self the war created. The Trojan Horse recurs in fragments like an accusation that survives every attempt at exoneration. Troy can be conquered in one night, but the memory of conquest cannot be escaped so quickly.
Nolan’s interpretive audacity will inevitably be mistaken for eccentricity or being “woke” by viewers who prefer mythology embalmed rather than examined and history accepted rather than questioned. Consequently, Nolan transforms the homeward journey into an examination of victorious guilt. Glory becomes a cultural deception that preserves the hero’s name while aestheticizing atrocity. Each mythic trial strips away another illusion—control, righteousness, certainty, invulnerability. The Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens, shipwreck, hunger, and isolation become externalizations of Odysseus’s stained soul—of appetite, aggression, grief, and the compulsive need to dominate.
Time is not the film’s puzzle. Time is its wound… Nolan’s characteristic anachronism is no longer simply a visual or conceptual game. It becomes the syntax of his interpretation. Odysseus is both archaic warrior and contemporary veteran, conqueror and damaged witness, a figure whose geographic exile cannot be separated from the duration of his displacement. His journey is not organized as a reassuring sequence of adventures—this happened, then this happened, then this happened—but as the convulsive return of experience that has never become safely past.
Nolan’s temporal machinery has rarely felt more emotionally necessary. Editor Jennifer Lame abandons linear exposition for invasive recollections, asynchronous timelines, and psychologically charged crosscuts.
Past and present do not alternate; they contaminate one another. Odysseus is incapable of remembering the war from a stable position outside it because he remains a prisoner of memory. Time is not the film’s puzzle. Time is its wound.
Photography as memory… Van Hoytema’s IMAX photography enlarges reckoning between time and memory. Ships become specks between water and sky; bodies disappear into beaches and battlefields. The scale is mythic rather than merely historical. Monsters viscerally embody the consequences of physical domination: the Cyclops is a grotesque practical creation, Circe’s transformations become tactile body horror, and the Laestrygonians loom through forced perspective. Nolan rescues mythology from decorative fantasy by restoring its terror. In the underworld, fallen soldiers rise not to honor their commander but to accuse him. They are not supporting characters in his legend; they are the human cost that legend conceals.
The image carries particular force in a nation that prefers its victims silent. American history repeatedly transforms suffering into patriotic symbolism while avoiding questions of responsibility. Wars are remembered through commanders and casualties; sacrifice is celebrated while inquiry into who ordered it, who benefited, and who returned home is discouraged. Nolan’s dead refuse that bargain. They reclaim their voices from the man whose glory depended on their deaths.
These episodic trials become splinters of a war that hasn’t ended for Odysseus. Scylla and Charybdis force him to calculate which men must die, reproducing the command decisions at Troy. Calypso offers oblivion, but forgetting cannot heal what hasn’t been confessed. The Sirens seduce by exposing true desire beneath declared desire: perhaps Odysseus does not truly want to return home because home demands accountability.
Matt Damon’s weathered physicality suits this interpretation. Nolan transforms his face into a landscape scarred by the ruins of victory. He anchors myth not through aristocratic grandeur but through the fatigue of a man who has spent years inventing reasons for others to die.
The gods remain largely unseen, appearing through weather, sound, coincidence, and elemental violence. Poseidon need not materialize because the sea itself becomes his face. Odysseus reads every storm as a verdict because guilt has taught him to recognize accusation everywhere. By minimizing Olympian intervention, Nolan removes the metaphysical alibi that protected heroic action. Suffering can no longer be attributed to divine stage direction; it becomes the consequence of human choice.
The film remains tethered to Odysseus’s consciousness, and that emphasis creates limitations. Nolan interrogates heroic masculinity without fully escaping its privileges. Penelope’s grief is beautifully framed but psychologically diminished, turning her too often into the keeper of a home Odysseus endangered. This belongs to a broader cultural habit in which women, especially Black women, preserve emotional and domestic order while men receive complexity, failure, and redemption.
Yet Anne Hathaway gives Penelope sovereign dignity, intelligence, anger, and resolve. Her weaving and unweaving becomes the film’s governing formal principle. Narrative threads are assembled, dismantled, and reassembled; events change meaning as Odysseus’s relation to them changes. Penelope does not merely delay an unwanted future. She performs, in miniature, the movie’s revision of the past.
The casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy carries significance beyond screen time. Western culture has traditionally imagined Helen as a marble ideal, aestheticizing whiteness until it appears metaphysical. Nyong’o’s presence breaks that spell. She does not simply modernize Helen; she confronts the racial imagination through which the West has pictured perfection and exposes how the classical ideal has been curated by those empowered to recognize themselves within it.
Celebrity becomes part of the film’s mythic grammar: recognizable faces appear like apparitions, briefly taking possession of the narrative before vanishing. Benny Safdie’s Agamemnon for instance, consists almost entirely of “vibe,” haunted vanity, and what Gen-Z calls aura farming. Safdie understands Agamemnon’s gravitas depends more on the social performance of inevitability than on psychological disclosure. Agamemnon enters the frame, already surrounded by the legend he wishes to impose upon others. Nolan’s casting turns such grandiosity into a joke without diminishing its menace.
Tom Holland and Zendaya remain recognizably themselves. Viewers already persuaded by either performer will find confirmation; skeptics will not be converted. This is not necessarily a flaw. Nolan uses their existing screen identities rather than pretending to erase them.
Production design and photography are master classes in material persuasion. Costumes that appeared synthetic in publicity stills acquire ritual dignity in motion. Texture, weather, architecture, and bodies create a convincing visual ecology. Heightened color makes flesh, fabric, flame, sea, and stone elements in a moral landscape. IMAX produces monumental scale without emotional remoteness. The image can contain armies and still register dread in a human face.
The film’s treatment of war is its most politically provocative achievement. Odysseus’s trauma is real, but it is not morally exculpatory. Nolan confronts a contradiction American culture often avoids: a soldier’s suffering may be genuine even when the war that produced it was imperial, criminal, or catastrophic for others. The veteran’s fractured consciousness becomes part of the historical damage, not a substitute for acknowledging those destroyed beyond his field of vision.
The film’s parallels to the Iraq War, the War on Terror, contemporary Israel, and militarized national destiny are difficult to miss, though they do not form a simple allegory. Every empire imagines itself as the returning hero and its victims as obstacles along the voyage home. Leaders manufacture aura, warriors transform devastation into legend, and nations call plunder destiny.
The homecoming story conceals the question no conqueror wishes to answer: What kind of home can receive a man built through cunning and war?
For all its severity, The Odyssey is exhilarating cinema: formally ambitious, tactile, psychologically coherent, politically abrasive, horrific, humorous, and mythic. The advertising sold scale. Nolan has made a film about the moral cost of scale. Nolan’s Odyssey then becomes a deconstructionist parable about the exhaustion of the Hero’s Journey. It asks whether contemporary culture can continue celebrating departure, conquest, ordeal, victory, and return without confronting the violence those stages conceal. The monomyth has become one of commercial cinema’s most dependable evasions, disguising domination as self-discovery.
The real transformation is not Odysseus becoming worthy of legend, but recognizing that legend may be the obstacle to a moral and fulfilling life. His ultimate lesson is accountability. His healing begins with the abandonment of godlike self-regard. He becomes free to live only when he relinquishes the fantasy that made death meaningful by making killing glorious.
Adaptation has always changed stories. Oral tradition is not a museum but an argument across generations. Nolan treats Homer as something to be disputed because it still possesses authority. His fragmented recollections and competing perspectives show legend being manufactured in real time. Odysseus exists differently in the memories of Penelope, Telemachus, soldiers, servants, and enemies. The hero’s identity becomes communal property, claimed by everyone affected by his actions.
The film’s flaws remain: its antiwar argument can become melodramatic, its action can lose clarity, Penelope is diminished, and reverence for male guilt sometimes becomes male self-importance. Yet Nolan turns the Hero’s Journey inside out and that is not without merit. Physical return cannot restore the spiritual and moral order the hero violated— The true journey is toward accountability—the recognition that intelligence without ethics becomes treachery, victory may become desecration, and legend itself may obstruct moral life.
Nolan’s Odyssey is not Homer preserved but Homer placed under pressure. That pressure keeps the myth alive. It allows women, Black audiences, veterans, and descendants of conquered peoples to ask the forbidden question: What if the monster was never merely waiting on the island? What if it sailed there beneath the hero’s flag?
The Hero’s Journey no longer ends when Odysseus reaches Ithaca. It ends when he recognizes that he may have brought the monster home with him. The question is not merely whether his body can return, but whether his conscience can arrive with it.
A strong four out of five. See it on the largest screen available.
If you wanna see another interpretation of the story, go check out Troy: The Odyssey over on our sister site, Galxy!
As much as Marvel tries to make all their releases feel like event films, even in their prime, few titles managed to dial into quite the same togetherness Spider-Man brings each installment. The web-spinner’s franchise consistently opens with meteoric box office numbers, becoming the hot topic among theatergoers online and in person alike, inspiring conversation anywhere you’ll go upon release. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the superhero’s first outing since 2021, having swapped directors yet keeping the writing team onboard. Pre-release interviews with Tom Holland indicated a different tone the film would take in its performances and narrative, with trailers and stills echoing his sentiment. How did this different tone pan out in the long run for our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?
I found this film to be more emblematic of the magic that makes Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy so beloved than the previous film that paid direct homage by casting Tobey Maguire. Keeping Spider-Man street level and the plot grounded in New York was an excellent choice, keeping Brand New Day from feeling bloated and fantastical like it must have been hard for the executives to resist. The film is stuffed with many different characters, ideas, and thought trains, but the way they stick close to the locale makes none of it feel out of place at all. I especially loved Jon Bernthal’s role as the Punisher in this, feeling authentically New York just like Spidey as the two banter throughout the narrative. I found it helped build their onscreen bond as characters while allowing Peter Parker to outline how his own is changing.
Sadie Sink’s role in the film is one theorized by many beforehand and accidentally confirmed, and if you’re reading this, you likely already know or can hazard a guess as to who she is. What I will say without spoiling much is that her character’s inclusion felt natural and earned, making sense in line with who Peter has become as a character without feeling like she’s setting up as much as she inevitably has. Setup in a Marvel movie has thrived in the past when it’s not the focus of the original narrative but can be pieced together later on. I don’t think Avengers: Doomsday will hit nearly as hard as this return to Spider-Man has with audiences, but I hope the reality of this film helps put the MCU as a whole into perspective as to where to go creatively.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now available in theaters worldwide. If you’re in the mood for more superhero epics, check out The Return of Captain Invincible on our sister site, Galxy!
Get Some Strange!
