Day: August 8, 2025

Sinners and Weapons are both supernatural horror films, snd are therefore occupying the same award-season popcorn genre slot. The problem for Sinners is that Weapons is a far superior film. This will soon be known everywhere, by everyone. At which point Sinners will begin to experience a precipitous drop in terms of Oscar nom cred…sorry.

Many will insist that Sinners is the “better” of the two, and that will be their right as citizens of a great democracy. But alongside Weapons, Sinners (which will still be nominated in this or that category because of the identity component) is now more or less finished…no longer the hot-to-trot, bold-as-brass, multi-category contender because Weapons is the sexy new gunslinger in town, and that’s life in the big city, unfair as this sounds.

This will sound funny coming from me, what with my constant contempt for spoiler whiners since this column launched 21 years ago. But you really, really don’t want to read any reviews of Zach Cregger ‘s Weapons before seeing it.

It follows that the community conversation is sure to spill over and spoil. Stay away from X and Reddit chatter and just hightail it down to the plex. I’ll post a deeper-into-it piece sometime tomorrow or maybe Sunday.

I saw it last night in a fairly virginal state, and “blown away” is a reasonably accurate, non-hyperbolic description of my reaction.

I wasn’t just gripped and fascinated by the radical strategy of shifting POVs with occasional plot-point overlaps. I was almost completely unable to guess what would happen next, and you really don’t want to ruin things by reading discussions. And the finale…amazing!

I hate low-rent horror, and Weapons certainly isn’t that — it’s fucking elevated, man! I haven’t been this knocked out by…let’s call it a “horror exercise” rather than a mere horror film…by any thing in this realm since The Babadook.

Except Cregger isn’t just a grade-A horror film guy…he’s a grade–A filmmaker.

All hail Variety’s Peter Debruge for comparing Weapons to a classic, sporadically horrific Grimm Brothers fairy tale (remember the bear slicing open his own stomach? Hansel and Gretel munching on the witch’s fingers?). Totally spot-on.

And an extra-hearty bro hug for Josh Brolin, who has the lead male role but also executive produced this fucking thing. Weapons is absolutely one of the wowser highlights of Brolin’s career, right up there with No Country for Old Men.

When my 6:45 pm Weapons showing ended, a guy sitting behind me clapped and went “whoo-whoo!”

Even when people like a film, they rarely ever clap. This film is masterful…a landmark thing.

Jordan Ruimy agrees with my take and wouldn’t be surprised, he said this morning, if it generates Oscar buzz.

However honestly or dishonestly, this Waltzing with Brando trailer is presenting a film that is more or less a low-key goofball farce. Ghosts can’t throw up, of course, but at the very least Brando’s ghost is wretching.

Yes, I realize that trailers routinely lie and that the film (Iconic, 9.19) may be better than the sell.

On top of which Waltzing, directed and written by Bill Fishman and set between 1969 and 1974, side-dips into the whole Last Tango in Paris thing with Maria Schneider and Bernardo Bertolucci, only a few months after Being Maria screened in NYC.

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If I, an audience member, never watch a depiction of a 19th Century public hanging in which the condemned (a dude) not only experiences sexual arousal but jizz-spurts in front of onlookers as he succumbs to strangulation…if I never sit through such a spectacle (let alone one in a reputedly grotesque Emerald Fennell film) it’ll be too soon.

Compassionate hangman to condemned man: “Do you want to die with your britches on or off? I ask because you may want to maintain a vestige of dignity during your final moment of life. What’s that? To hell with dignity? You want your britches off and your fully tumescent schlong in full view of the citizenry…women, children and nuns?”