Caught Stealing: New York, Crimes, Baseball, and Cat
The trainwreck is hot but tame.

Kirovakan, Armenia, 1968. A street in the town is being renamed, but nobody seems to know whom after. A chance encounter between a student running late to his thesis defense, and a young woman determined to leave the town forever. 25 years earlier, Genrikh Zakaryan, a young resistance fighter, smuggles a secret Nazi operations map through occupied territory. Imaginings and history meld into one, echoes of past and future coalesce: “the fate of Genrikh Zakaryan is intangibly intertwined with the fate of today’s youth.”
The trainwreck is hot but tame.
Clocking in at about four hours, Stranger Things season 4 volume 2 is the length of a double feature. Despite the length and the hype, the finale still falls short of expectations thanks to poor pacing, poor character choices, and poor diverse storytelling.
Its predictability shouldn’t distract from the enjoyment that the pure cinematic imagination behind the camera elicits. It is a movie of crises both moral and mortal, oozing with CGI, and thoroughly enjoyable.
Him is visually stunning—all concrete cathedrals and bone-rattling impact shots that look like a nightmare highlight reel. Marlon Wayans is magnetic as this legendary quarterback who's basically selling salvation with a smile that never quite reaches his eyes. But the story keeps running in circles: more tests, more cryptic pep talks, more ritualistic drills. The sports-as-religion metaphor beats you over the head when subtlety would've been more effective. The middle drags, and that finale chooses spectacle over substance. It's undeniably stylish, but left me cold. Also worth noting: despite the Monkeypaw connection, this isn't actually a Jordan Peele film—he didn't write or direct.
J Brooke, Incluvie Guest Columnist on 'Life and Beth' and 'Sort of': while living one’s truth is freedom, speaking it as a mandatory assignment can become captivity.
This Halloween movie is based on the toy line of the same name.