2026 at the movies

I've seen two horror movies to start 2026. "The Plague" is like Kids-era Harmony Korine writing the first half of Full Metal Jacket. Well-acted but it's mostly trafficking in very old metaphors about adolescence and bullying. In the end, I was pretty annoyed by it. But other reviewers seem to love it and apparently it got like a 15 minute standing ovation at major film festivals, so what do I know? I think I can definitely mark a change in personal taste in books and movies over the last couple of years, in that I’m reacting a lot more positively to structure and story and have less patience for works that are mostly operating on a symbolic level. The real anchor for me is characterization and character development, and maybe “The Plague” didn’t do it for me in that department, so I had nothing else to blunt my irritation with the rest of the movie.

The second is "Primate," pure B-movie trash that's gives people exactly what it promises. And it’s not promising much. The film is gorier than I expected, but otherwise no surprises. In fact it's so interested in not being surprising it includes prefatory quotes establishing the chimp's problem before the movie's first frame. It's kind of a shame crap like this can get made while screenplays from far better storytellers never see the light of day. But that's life.