Larry’s Pretty Good Reading List

The Long Walk: This was one of my favorite books when I was a teenager. Thirty years on, as an adult, I find the story infinitely harder to stomach. It's incredibly brutal, and even more so when you watch it rather than read it.
But despite the brutality of the premise, it's also a really heartfelt movie about friendship that has enough moments of levity to be enjoyable. Ray's and Pete's relationship is the heart and soul of the movie. Both protagonists are more likable than their counterparts in the novel, and Cooper Hoffman (reminding me vaguely of the "Heartstopper" guy) and David Jonsson (hugely charismatic) were great. All the actors were brilliant, actually – I love how they brought the characters to life and fleshed them out, even those who only got a few scenes.
The book's ending with Ray being the last one standing but seeing an imaginary shadow walker in front of him he's trying to catch up to was so haunting that I vividly remember it decades later. Changing it made it somewhat less memorable, but also gave it more of an emotional impact because it centered the Ray/Pete friendship and was at once triumphant, tragic and ambiguous. ★★★★½

Thunderbolts*: I was fairly unimpressed with the first half hour or so because Valentina assembling a ragtag team of antiheroes, using them for shady missions and then trying to clean up the evidence felt like a knock-off Amanda Waller thing. But I liked how the team came together – grudgingly and with a lot of bickering – first to unite against her and then to save Bob (and save the world from Bob).
I enjoyed all the characters individually, though I felt like Walker turning from a rampant selfish asshole into a mostly okay guy was a bit odd. I didn't know Ava before, but I liked her. I liked Bucky's role in bringing the team together, and how gung-ho Alexei was about being a hero, and the movie's focus on Yelena really worked for me. I'm generally meh about Florence Pugh, but she's great here. Bob was at once such a likable character, and such a scary villain!
I was spoiled for the twist at the end, which is a shame, because I think it would have been hilarious to see it without knowing what was coming. Their dumbfounded looks are so great. The post-credit scene was fun too and actually makes me somewhat excited about "Doomsday", though given that there's not been a single big MCU team-up movie I actually enjoyed much, I'm trying to manage my expectations… ★★★★

The Rip: I thought the first ninety minutes of this were brilliant – I loved how it kept us in the dark who was perhaps a dirty cop the whole time, the mutual suspicion and the manipulation and the character dynamics. 10/10, instant favorite. And then it just… fell off. A predictable, boring car chase culminating in an even more predictable showdown, and a drawn-out ending sequence that looked like it might reveal a clever twist that never came. It was so incredibly frustrating! D:
Ben Affleck is very hot, though. And even though I'm not a big fan of Matt Damon, he and Affleck still have great chemistry. The antagonism between Affleck's character JD and his FBI agent brother (Scott Adkins) was fun as well. I also really enjoyed Kyle Chandler as JD's friend DEA Agent Matty, and Sasha Calle as the young woman sitting on 20 million dollars of cartel money. It was really a shame that the script didn't end up delivering what it promised. ★★★½

Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025): The new screen adaptation seems to try to find some middle ground between the movie and the musical. I wish I'd known that beforehand, because going into it expecting a straightforward movie version of the musical got me off to a disappointing start. The main plot in the prison is stripped of all of its songs, so you really only get the musical when Molina (Tonatiuh) is telling Valentin (Diego Luna) the movie plot about Aurora. It's a decision that makes sense because it enhances the stark contrast between the dire, gloomy reality and the vidid beauty of Molina's imagination.
JLo does a really good job both as the embodiment of a Golden Age Hollywood diva and as the menacing mythical Spider Woman, but it's Tonatiuh's and Diego Luna's performances who make the movie so engaging. It's been a minute since I watched the 1985 movie, but from what I remember, I find the Molina/Valentin dynamic in the new film a lot more emotionally resonant. ★★★★

The Running Man (2025): The 1987 movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger was pretty formative for me when I was a teenager. I haven't watched it in years, I don't know if it would still hold up almost 40 (and let me tell you, writing this number made me die a little on the inside) years later or if I mentally built it up to remember it as better than it was, but the remake doesn't really cut it for me. It was slow to start, has a pretty good, fast-paced and really exciting middle part where Ben is trying to outrun the Hunters, and then it falls off really badly at the end with a resolution twist that stretches suspension of disbelief until it snaps. And Glen Powell just doesn't work for me as some kind of rugged, down-on-his-luck working class guy. ★★★

In the Heights: Watching this as a fan of the stage musical was a bit of a wild ride. The newly added opening sequence with Usnavi (Anthony Ramos, who's amazing!) telling the story to the group of kids threw me for a loop because it seemed to contradict the ending of the movie (and thus turn the entire point of the story on its head), but the ending twist was SO. GOOD. and made me incredibly emotional. So that was a change that really worked well for me.
On the other hand, they cut some of my favorite songs and with it entire chunks of background story and plot – I really missed Nina's (Leslie Grace, also brilliant) parents' songs, but cutting "Everything I Know" in particular feels unforgivable because it's such a pivotal song and arguably the emotional climax of the story.
And still, standing on its own, it's a good movie. The music is fantastic, the actors are great and their voices are wonderful, and LMM as the Piragua guy was a great little easter egg. ★★★★

Eden: It's a weird movie, and it's even weirder to think that this is actually a true story and not one that seems to be heavily dramatized for the screen either. It took me a while to get into it, mostly because most of the characters are deeply unsympathetic, and even when the story started gripping me, it's not a pleasant movie to watch, in the same way "Abwärts" or the Doctor Who episode "Midnight" are unpleasant to watch, because they all show how regular people when isolated and cornered bring out the worst in each other in a way that's frankly frightening. "Eden" has a lot of actors I like (excellently) playing characters I find deeply appalling (Ana de Armas, most of all, but also Jude Law and to a minor degree Daniel Brühl, though the Wittmers are the least unlikable of the bunch).
As the closing credits rolled (presumably over real life footage of the actual settlers?), I had come to feel mostly favorable and mildly impressed by the movie – it's a good movie and an absolutely wild story that it tells in a fairly engaging manner. Will I watch it again? Eh, probably not. ★★★½

Materialists: The plot is very straightforward: a matchmaker (Dakota Johnson, looking weirdly like Anne Hathaway in "The Devil Wears Prada") with a lot of success coupling up wealthy clients but a cynical outlook on love is charmed by the attention of a rich, attractive businessman (Pedro Pascal) who seems like a perfect match for her, but she's secretly hung up on her perpetually broke ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans, looking devastatingly handsome). It's a charming movie. All the main characters are more or less good, if flawed, people, and the movie never tries to create unnecessary drama or antagonism between them, which makes for a really pleasant change of pace compared to the usual romance plots. It's also fundamentally not about two guys competing for one woman but rather a woman trying to figure out her priorities in life.
The only thing is… I was rooting for John and Lucy all along, but absolutely nothing about this story convinced me that their relationship has any kind of future. Despite all the chemistry between them, they're a terrible match, and it's plain to see that their marriage is going to fail for the exact same reasons their first relationship failed. Which made the 'happy ending' feel very bittersweet in a way that I'm 90% sure isn't intentional. ★★★½

I also watched the first 15 minutes of "Sinners", which I know got rave reviews, but I couldn't get into it. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood? I might or might not give it another try at a later point.