Movie Death Match: "Spider-Man 2" v. "Into the Spider-Verse"

With Spider-Man: Brand New Day a bigger hit than anyone predicted, Movie Death Match executive producer Sam Van Hallgren’s impulse to pivot away from our planned Teenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma-themed contest to a battle of the most beloved Spidey-flicks proved to be more than sound.

My frequent Pop Culture Happy Hour co-panelist Daisy Rosario reps the 2018 Oscar-winning animated flick Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse while Screencrush editor and lifelong Spidey fan Matt Singer argues on behalf of Sam Raimi’s 2004 Spider-Man 2. It’s our most amazing / spectacular / ultmate / web-of / 2099 death match yet! Listen below, True Believers!

Artificial Stupidity: "Mercy," reviewed.

Kali Reis and Chris Pratt are pitiless LAPD cops in Mercy. (Amazon MGM Studios)

We used to crash cars in movies in this country, dammit. My Washington City Paper review of what I’m hoping will be one of the worst pictures of 2026 is right here.

The Out-of-Frame Horror: "The Zone of Interest," reviewed.

Sandra Hüller has a dream house next to hell in The Zone of Interest. (A24)

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin was my favorite film of 2014 (though it was released outside of the U.S. a year earlier). My review of his even-more-challenging follow-up, The Zone of Interest, is here. I wrote, erroneously, that the movie was in black-and-white. It’s not, but monochrome was how I remembered it. That’s definitely the strangest mistake I’ve ever made in (digital) print.

The Old Vampire and the Sea: "The Last Voyage of the Demeter," reviewed.

He’s well-fed on his ocean voyage from Romania to England.

My Washington City Paper review of the Dracula… mid-quel. I guess? … The Last Voyage of the Demeter is here.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: "Glass" and What's Making Us Happy

Not Acting Enough, Acting Too Much, and Acting Just Right (Universal)

I am chuffed to be back on the iHeartRadio Podcast Award-nominated Pop Culture Happy Hour this week to discuss Glass, fallen auteur M. Night Shyamalan's joint sequel to 2000's Unbreakable and 2017's Split. It isn't very good, but the movie has an anachronistic quality that's sort of... sweet. While it's made explicitly clear—every damn thing in this movie is explained and re-re-re-explained—that Glass is set 19 years after Unbreakable, Shyamalan acts as though superhero comics haven't become Hollywood's No. 1 source of grist during the back half of that period. (In the years since Unbreakable, we've seen three different A-list actors play The Incredible Hulk, for chrissakes.)

A goodly portion of those films have featured Samuel L. Jackson, who, to be fair, looks like he's having at least as much fun sitting in a wheelchair staring into the middle distance in Glass as he does when he's cashing another check as Nick Fury. After his brief return to acting in both Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom and Rian Johnson's Looper back in 2012, I'd hoped maybe Bruce Willis would deign to open his eyes again, but no such luck. And the movie's top-billed star continues to perform his solo show Scares Ahoy with James McAvoy.

"'Man' Ain't Spelled G-U-N, Son!" The Equalizer 2, reviewed.

Denzel Washington and Ashton Sanders have a nice rapport in a bloody action movie.

If you can stomach the fridging, The Equalizer 2 has a lot to like. Denzel trying to get Ashton Sanders from Moonlight to read Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, for one thing. Here's my NPR review.

Pop Culture Happy Hour: Annihilation! (emphasis mine)

Gina Rodriguez and Natalie Portman breach the perimeter in Annihilation. (Paramount)

"Annihilation" and What's Making Us Happy

NPR

Here is a joke you will not hear on today's episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, wherein I join old friends Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson and new friend Daisy Rosario to dissect (heh) Annihilation, the new thriller from Ex Machina writer/director Alex Garland starring Natalie Portman and involving lots of cool but hella gross body horror stuff:

 Portman hand

Portman finger

Portman foot

Portmanteau

(Bows.)

Let nothing, nothing go to waste. You can hear the episode here.

You Got to Have a Mother Box For Me: Justice League, reviewed.

How Green Was My Screen: JK Simmons, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Ben Affleck, and Ezra Miller (Warner Bros.).

Early in Justice League, while director Zack Snyder abuses yet another Leonard Cohen song, we see a glimpse of a Metropolis Post front page with a headline about vanished heroes that puts Kal-El in the middle of a triptych with Prince and David Bowie. It feels like a joke from Men in Black (another comic book-derived movie) 20 years ago. Anyway, it's good to see that Metropolis is still a two-paper town.

Here's my review of Justice League, where I did not really have room to complain that J.K. Simmons, the J. Jonah Jameson of Sam Raimi's no-longer-canonical Spider-Man trilogy, is now Commissioner Gordon, which feels like double-dipping, or that Gordon has once again been demoted to empty trenchcoat after being a vibrant, fully-developed character in Christopher Nolan's no-longer-canonical Dark Knight trilogy. These movies, man.