🍿 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) was better than it had any right to be. You can figure out within minutes whether people know, understand and love the IP they are trying to bring to the screen, and boy does it show here. Pitch perfect family fun.

🍿️ Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) was available on Apple TV and heavily referenced in Ted Lasso, and not having watched it before it was a natural choice for the family’s Saturday night viewing.

• It aged much better than other 80s teen comedies (looking at you, Revenge of the Nerds).
• Contains a surprising amount of cursing, but a distinct lack of alcohol, sex or violence.
• A surprisingly short intro credits scene made me think that this was re-cut for the modern viewer but no, this is the original. Also has a post-credit scene. How very modern.
• If this were remade, Charlie Sheen’s druggie would have been the main character, no? The mood has shifted away from celebrating rich brats like Ferris, or Saved by the Bell’s Zack Morris.
• What is the message for the your audience? If you are charming enough and don’t behave too too badly you can get away with much shenanigans? Ain’t that the truth.

🍿️ The Last House (2026) was pitched, or so I would like to imagine, as a blend of Home Alone and a Lovecraftian apocalypse. Instead of Macaulay Culkin you get a whole picture-perfect nuclear family; Joe Pesci becomes Cthulhu. No surprise, then, that the ending is a soppy, schmaltzy mess.

🍿️ The Dead Don’t Die (2019) looked exactly like you would imagine a zombie movie made by Jim Jarmusch to look, especially if you knew that he spent his childhood watching matinee double features. Not his greatest, but it hit the right spot: between the fracking references (the apocalypse came about because some brilliant minds decided to frack the Earth’s poles), Murray and Driver’s deadpanning, Tilda Swinton’s out-of-this-world turn and the Iggy Pop cameo, there was much to love.

🍿 22 Jump Street (2014) was even better than its predecessor, with the best credit sequence in recent memory. I do hope they don’t skip medical school.

🍿 Backrooms (2026) was the horror movie Wes Anderson would have made if he made horror movies and forgot everything he knew about plot. Fortunately, the plot was not the point — the physicality of the set and special effects more than make up for it.

🍿 The Dink (2026) was a goofy blast. I knew absolutely nothing about pickleball beforehand and know marginally more having seen the movie. It still seems kind of dumb — why don’t they just take up badminton? — and therefore the perfect centerpiece for a Dodgeball/Blades of Glory-style farce.

How can an article about actors playing made-up versions of themselves not mention Being John Malkovich? The omission is almost as egregious as the one FT video game writer did to Planescape: Torment. Both of the snubbed works of art came out in 1999, which I can only assume was too far behind the authors’ time horizon, but then if you write about a field for a living shouldn’t you know about its (fairly recent) history?

I am of firm believe that to know a thing is to know its roots. Yes, this can go too far — see the name of this very blog — but most people most of the time don’t go far enough back, the most common knowledge border being their birth year. Which is fine for a blogger, not so great for professional journalists.

🍿 The Sheep Detectives (2026) was so-so as a murder mystery but absolutely delightful as a family movie that’s bursting with color and character.

Happy Mother’s Day to all who celebrate! This is what we’re watching tonight.