[EXPRESSO] Wild Horse Nine (2026) | Party In The RA.PA.NUI.

Martin McDonagh (Seven Psychopaths, Three Manifests Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Banshee Of Inesherin) is back with a black comedy spy thriller, Wild Horse Nine, which takes back to the not-so-funky ’70s, just before the 1973 Chilean coup-de-etat, with the CIA bureau chief, MJ (Steve Buscemi) dispatching two officers, Chris (John Malkovich) and Lee (Sam Rockwell), to Rapa Nui, as in, Easter Island.

The trip from Santiago there already proves hardous, as Chris seemingly suffers from some sort of alzeihmer, while also being overly candid about their motives and intentions, but among the peaceful tourist life and the gazing at the moai, many conspiracies are actually being acted on, putting Chris and Lee longtime friendship and loyalties to the test, especially as Chris befriending a local rebellious girl might sent the whole “operation” (whatever that is) to go belly up…

While the plot actually thickens and progressively reveals the real stakes at play here (or more correctly the machinations), the main crux of the film is how this affects the relationship between Chris and Lee, not only as colleagues but as genuine friends, as both events from the past and future treathen this too, especially due to dangerous cocktail of Chris’s deteriorating memory, its involvement in many secret operations and its questioning of those in his old age…

It’s honestly an amazing film, starts off a bit slow but the pay off is immense, as it manages to be incredibly funny, the comedy fairly brutal, not pulling any punch on the sensitive themes (and political period of yore) it tackles, but also able to deliver devasting emotional blows as well as many quotable lines, and everyone is on top of their game (even if Tom Waits is being progressively “Nick Nolte’d” the more he continues to appear in movies).

Highly recommended.

[EXPRESSO] One Battle After Another (2025) | Leonardo D. Caprio

While i would have been happy with Licorice Pizza being the last film of Paul Thomas Anderson… wait he did say he wasn’t planning to “do a Tarantino”, and even if he did it would have been hard to believe, as his new film, One Battle After Another, demonstrates.

Which is already a surprise as its not set in some past but in modern days… after starting in the 1980s by showing the freedom fighters-vigilantes calling themselves “The French 75” freeing a group of migrants, one of the being “Ghetto Pat” (DiCaprio) who’s trying to prove his worth to the crew with his explosive expertise, and gets together with the crew’s leader, “Perfidia Beverly Hills” (Teyana Taylor), whom in the operation holds hostage the camp’s commander, Sgt. Lockjaw (Sean Penn).

Later Perfidia and Pat do have a daughter, but Perfidia storms out and goes missing.

16 years later, Pat, now known as “Bob Ferguson”, is forced back into the revolutionary stuff as Lockjaw is back searching for him and his daughter with a PMC worth of forces, so “Bob” has to try and contact the “old band” to save his skin and his daughter… despite being so out of the loop, beyond “rusty”, as he forced to confront his past despite not being cut out for it, at all.

I mean, he’s manic, paranoid, and looks like The Dude if he was more of a mess in every regard, being so out of place, desperate and oddly – but fittingly – tangential in this humour crime comedy drama that is actually able to transition with effect from comedy delirium (there’s a cabal of Santa worshipping hyper racists in it, for once) and the grim, depressing reality of how the injustices keep repeating for the future generations.

A must see film.

[EXPRESSO] Captain America: Brave New World (2025) | The Credible Hulk, Part 2

I haven’t seen the Falcon And Winter Soldier this apparently continues from (in general i don’t care about the tie-in shows for these), i honestly don’t care too much about Captain America, the character itself or the film subseries, but sure, Harrison Ford is here as the US president (not that one?) and Giancarlo Esposito is here as well, so why not?

I honestly think it’s decent, it’s fine, it’s far from the worse ones, again, considering what we should expect from these era Marvel movies, but it also has most of the issues we’ve come to expect, from trying to juggle too much without fully committing to anything in terms of themes, with subplots and characters that are set up to be important but (most likely by the many documented and reported reshoots, rewrites and production troubles) don’t really add up to the plot.

A plot which itself it’s half reharshing The Winter Soldier, half being basically the unofficial sequel to the 2008 Hulk movie, so much returns and comes to play from that film into what’s extensibly a movie about the new Captain America trying to advert a conspiracy meant to undermine the new presidency of General “Thunderbolt” Ross, trying to turn a new leaf after his questionable past, as the new “Cap” is trying to live up to Steve Roger’s legacy.

On the upside, Mackie makes for a good “Cap’”, some plotlines that were seeded in other movies but were then mostly “abandoned” get revived or given a purpose, the action is often good, but the “New Cap” VS “Harrison Ford as Red Hulk” brawl (which features some iffy special effects) kinda feels there because they based the marketing on that and the movie it’s almost over, so it had be squeezed as the unintentionally anticlimactic climax.