Tag: EXPRESSO

[EXPRESSO] Wildwood (2026) | The Cracked Brass Bells Will Ring

I was more than ready to see Laika newest film, i wanted to since the trailer was out, i was gonna support them anyway as they’re one of the very few good things to come out of nepo babies using decadent amounts of money for the actual arts, keeping stop motion animation alive still, even if we already know these movies are never making back the budget.

But frankly i was honestly surprised by Wildwood, like, damn, even putting aside how this one has been in development for 15 years and it shows, it’s absolutely stunning to look at.

Set in Portland, the plot sees a 13yo girl, Prue, left to attend his baby brother Mac at home, but she doesn’t listen, brings him alongside in a cart, meets her nerdy classmate Curtis, and has her brother snatched by a pack of crows, so the two chase to the mist shrouded Forbidden Forest where she got told to never ever go, found a mysterious way in, entering a world full of magic, talking animals and factions that were on the verge of war, getting caught up in this against her will.

It’s remarkable not only how this looks even better and is pure delight for eye of the stop motion aficionados (even by Laika’s own high standards), but how the apparently generic “fantasy forest fable” theming is used to develop an interesting world, with the everything from infantry wolves, talking owls, barbarians and the main antagonist, the forest witch, which is an excellent tragic villain, matched by some really likeable and well rounded protagonists and secondary characters alike.

There’s no dead air, all the way through its + 2 hours runtime, it’s also surprisingly funny, witty and willing to be “brutal”, avoiding easy kids films’ cop-outs.

PLEASE, just go see it.

[EXPRESSO] Clayface (2026) | The Gumby Horror

When i first saw the trailer for Clayface, i was quite intrigued.

This is a surprisingly good idea for a new solo DC movie, sure, the general backstory for Clayface is a perfect fit for a body horror film…even if a few days before viewing the film in theathers, i had the feel like i was gonna walk into another Morbius.

Thankfully that isn’t the case, even if it basically an origin story for Clayface, a Batman villain, here framed as antihero, Matt Hagen, an upcoming new star that encounters the ire of a Gotham mob boss, mangling his face and destroying his career when he was finally hitting it big.

Desperate to restore his face, Matt tries as an experimental nanocells treatment to restore but he overdoses and becomes able to basically shapeshift into anything or anyone, making use of his barely controlled ability to get revenge on anyone who ruined his life…..

The issue is that the movie doesn’t really live to its own good premise, as the plot is a very simple story of revenge with a romantic subplot, not an issue in itself (as isn’t the slow burn pacing), but even in terms of gore, themes and drama, Clayface keeps it a bit too simple and superficial.

I did enjoy the movie, the acting is solid and it has its moments, but it feels strangely “unambititious”, afraid to stray too much either way.

On one hand you might argue that you could only expext so much by trying to work off a B-tier Batman Villain, heck, we had Clayface in the fuckin Suicide Squad Isekai, but considering we got eventually a good film out of that premise, yeah, this is quite decent but also kinda disappointing, the main concept still “crying out” for a better execution.

[EXPRESSO] Primetime (2026) | Pederast Ratings

I’ll be honest, the most i know about To Catch A Predator is just having heard about the program and its controversy back then, and having seen it parodied many times (even on Robot Chicken and fuckin Squidbillies) while never watching the actual show.

Keep this in mind.

Then again, this is sold as more or less fictionalized retelling of how in 2006 journalist Chris Hansen devised a new format, To Catch A Predator, where he both fed into the newfound hunger for “reality tv” by the population, and mounted essentially a sting operation, as he and his team (via hidden cameras, actors and computer experts) lure out sexual predators into a trap scenario, with Chris onfronting the “predator” inside while the police is on the ready outside.

The hypersensationalistic format proves popular enough that NBC moves the program to the “primetime” slot, making it compete in popularity with frigging ABC’s Lost, and so Hansen gets more and more incensed to keep the ball rolling, to try and keep interest in the format and rating alive and well, to continue his moral crusade and escalate it further and further…

Pattinson is playing a hyper narcistic sleazy human monster, in a way not too different from Jake Gyllenhall’s reporter character in Nightcrawler, and the movie focuses also heavily on a young actor that gets hired to play one of the “bait teens”, confronting the many, MANY questionable aspects of the format, etc.

It’s not too original, it’s another tale of how power corrupts, how the media machine feed into the voyeurism of “reality tv”, exploititing sensitive issues for the sake of summary mob justice, though it doesn’t hit too hard in the days of the Epstein list (plus the ending could have been better), but its still good, pretty solid stuff.

[EXPRESSO] Whalefall (2026) | Of Monstro And Men

Figures the best movie i see all week is the one that might sound like an Asylum turducken proposal, since it was marketed heavily on the premise of a guy scuba diving that not only sees a giant squid, but accidentally gets swalloved by a sperm whale that was hunting and already gobbled said squid, and is forced to try survive the inexpected Pinocchio style innerwhale exploration.

Sure you can word it to sound stupid and outrageous, but even without the squid it’s already a terrifying and novel premise for an underwater survival thriller, you really can’t get much more claustrophobic than the insides of a living creature, and the many moments of body horror it brings.

Yeah, there’s not too much to premise itself, that is gist, with the protagonist having just 1 hour of oxygen left to escape, but already the context makes it clear the themes underlining the spectacle of the survival itself, since the scuba diver, Jay, decides to go under in spite of everything else because he hopes to find the body of his estranged father, whom afflicted by cancer, decided to drown himself.

He wants to get closure due to the troubled relantionship he had with him even before the cancer, but in these moments of desperation, Jay recalls the many lessons his very stern father taught him (often teaching him the importance of the ocean and its creature), confronting his repressed feelings and coming to also understand – a bit more – why he was like that.

Not wholly original but its very effective, as the emotional core of the film sustains the intense, gripping and often disgusting survival, the few main characters are pretty well defined (and very well acted by Abrams and Brolin) and i feel is as long as needed.

[EXPRESSO] Street Fighter (2026) | Human Killing Machine

FIY, i never saw the old 1994 live action adaptation (or the 2006 one).

Still, there is something to be said about modern videogame films somehow failing to adapt the source material, getting lost in bullshit of their own making.

It’s just tiresome to see the new Street Fighter live action reboot catch every rake in the face like Sideshow Bob.

Despite on paper adapting the plot of Street Fighter II, this story focuses on Ryu and Ken being trained together as martial artist, like brothers, until a tragic event sets them apart, but now, with Lord Bison helming the second World Warrior Tournament, they are now bound to meet again….

it’s not bad per sé, but the narrative doesn’t move, as it stumbles drunkenly to setpieces from setpieces for 2 hours, with no focus to anything (we just outright skip big chunks of the tournament), hyperactive editing and weird choices that let you see very little of the otherwise entertaining fight scenes, all leading up to a “stop”, overconfidently setting up the sequel instead of writing a third act.

it has the same kinda of nostalgia (just swapping the ’80s for the ’90s) of the recent Masters Of The Universe film, and the same tone issues, flipping constantly from a quippy comedy where they forgot to put actual jokes in, or being sincere, in a way that neither works, with the actors either sleepwalking their parts or going full ham.

the best thing this movie has, the anime styled flashbacks are cool… just makes you wish the entire movie was made that way.

This isn’t awful, i did enjoy it at times, but it’s on the lower side of mediocre, and i docked the vote down a notch, for similar reasons i already did on the MKII film review.

[EXPRESSO] Other Mommy (2026) | Doppel Mutter

Know what, i can’t claim that the trailers for Other Mother were misleading, this indeed the kind of slapdash, jump scare ridden thing you’d expect, boiling down to someone trying to make an entire horror movie about a screenshot of Other Mother from Coraline someone forwaded them.

Bela is a regular kid… well, aside the fact she is friends with an entity that lives in her house and she has come to call “Other Mommy”, because she looks like her actual mother.

The entity has had enough of just being “second banana”, so it manifests in increasingly dangerous fashion trying to sway the girl to her side…

In a way i was surprised because the movie doesn’t play any cheap trick of the “Unsorry Mommy” being just in the child’s imagination or not, this thing is real, tangible and will explode your brain into confetti, and there’s no half the movie predicated on the parents slowly realizing the entity is actually real.

… But that isn’t nearly enough to make this even mediocre, let’s not accept “things do happen” as an actual standard when there’s little to no plot, the characters are paper thin stereotypes, the jumpscares limp, most of the “weird morphing” fees like rejected Backrooms-esque material.

I’ts never proper scary, though it’s hard to even feel any tension because not a single character reacts appropriately to anything that happens, they all just shrugh it all off, regardless.

There’s little to no logic (or depth) to almost anything, and frankly this feel like an untentional “supernatural entity” variation of the Pickle Rick episode.

It’s not boring per sé, nor is it “the worse thing ever”, it’s not, yet at just 93 minutes feels stretched, and it’s also not quite unintentionally hilarious, just a “slightly different than expected” kind of garbage.

[EXPRESSO] L’Estranea/The Spiral (2026) | Not My Uzumaki

The latest from italian director Marco Strippoli, after his celebrated La Valle Dei Sorrisi (released worlwide as The Holy Boy), L’Estranea, which translates to The Stranger but is releasing under the international title of The Spiral.

And before you ask, no, it’s got nothing to do with Junji Ito’s Uzumaki/Spiral, this is actually a psychological horror revolving around the fall from grace of a previously wealthy and influent South Italian family.

After years, the mother shows up at her daughter’s house in Rome, trying to explain how all the disgraces the family had to endure where brought about by how, after an accident with the family dog, the mother struck a Faustian deal with a mysterious woman.

But after the first two very, very good chapters, the movie just kinda drops off, instead of exploring further its themes and ideas it just sticks to repeating them, to hold pattern, in a very traditional way that kinda clashes with the ambition of being more akin to a modern psychological horror film.

It’s a shame because the acting is great and direction is so good you almost won’t care…. until the finale, which is both fitting but doesn’t that much going on after all, and while not underwhelming, it franklyit feels like a compromise so we can fish for some Oscars and to be more like an A24 release, to walk an already overtrodden path, despite the intent to also give the movie its own Italian identity being successful.

I will subtract a point because i really respect Strippoli, i do agree it’s one of the new promising authors of Italian horror, so i won’t be handing out pity points to an author that doesn’t need them, since he had already demonstrated he’s capable of even better.

Still worth seeing, absolutely so.

[EXPRESSO] The Social Reckoning (2026) | Nothing Ever Changes

It feels like aeons ago when i saw The Social Network, which gets more impressive in retrospective as it tackled issues that would explode just some years later, while this sort of follow-up (also written by Aaron Sorkin) has the issue of being dated on arrival, being set between 2019 and 2021, tackling the changes made by Facebook that shaped it as an echo chamber designed to promote hate speech and harassment, leading to January 6th insurrection at the Capitol and a former Facebook employee helping move a federal case by a series of exposè via the Wall Street Journal.

So you already know that Facebook simply tanked the issue and nothing really changed (for the better), that there was no actual “reckoning”, and it’s convenient how the timeframe is very safe to make the point about the necessity to speak out, to fight for justice regardless, plus it’s utterly spineless that despite the January 6th insurrection being a pivotal event that the movie comes back to a lot, Donald Trump isn’t named once.

That aside, the other main issue is that the drama is just drab, not unwatchable, but it’s hard to care about the Facebook data analyst girl that acts as whistleblower and helps this “tech illiterate” political journalist unveil Zuckenberg’s plans, or anyone else, the very good cast really can’t work miracles with these flat characters, and both factions frankly do very little considered what is at stake.

even when the company learns of the leaks and the girl fears retaliation, it amounts to a lot of empyt posturing, so there’s so sense of menace or urgency to any of the drama.

You can tell Fincher didn’t direct this one, i’ll say that much.

Maybe Guadagnino’s Artificial (if it ever comes out in theathers) will be better?

Early October Midweek Check

This week will be relatively dry of EXPRESSO reviews, as the one for Other Mommy has been delayed, but you can look forward to the ones for The Social Reckoning and Strippoli’s L’Estranea (sold internationally as The Spiral).

I would love to catch a preview screening for Godzilla Minus Zero at one of Italy’s biggest comic conventions, Lucca Comics & Games, but at the moment i’m not even sure i will be able to go at all (and even if i can go, i might decide not to because every year tickets are more expensives, unbelievably so), it’s still all up in the air, so i can’t promise anything on this specific matter… yet.

See ya tomorrow for the next Spooktacular Eight review!