Taking a toddler to the movie theater is always a bit of a gamble. You buy the tickets, pay the extortionate popcorn tax, and cross your fingers that the sensory spectacle will buy you roughly ninety minutes of uninterrupted peace.
On September 5, we rolled the dice on Tom and Jerry: The Forbidden Compass. We didn’t make it to the credits.
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Yesterday afternoon, I walked into the AMC to catch Clayface in Dolby Cinema, hoping for a decent comic-book-adjacent thriller. What I got instead completely shattered every expectation I had going in.
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Every once in a while, a movie comes along that feels like a minor miracle simply because it exists—and Coyote vs. Acme is that miracle wrapped in an Acme-brand stick of dynamite.
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I have a small confession to make: until late August, I had never actually watched the original The Fast and the Furious from beginning to end.
Sure, I knew the mythology. I’ve caught twenty-minute chunks on cable on lazy Sunday afternoons, I know all the “family” memes, and I know that Dom Toretto lives his life a quarter-mile at a time. But somehow, across two and a half decades, I just never sat down in the dark and let the whole story play out.
So when our local theater announced a 25th-anniversary re-release, I figured it was finally time to fix that blind spot. I grabbed a ticket for a late-August evening showing, expecting maybe a dozen nostalgic millennials scattered across empty rows.
Instead, the place was completely sold out.
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If you know me, you know my complicated, obsessive love affair with the SAW franchise. I’ve seen every single movie multiple times. I rewatch them, analyze them, and unabashedly adore them—even though they remain the only horror movies on the planet that genuinely make me want to cover my eyes because of how stomach-churningly grotesque some of the traps and deaths are (a fact I reflected on when revisiting the original film).
Naturally, when I heard about SAW The Musical: The Unauthorized Parody of Saw at the Walnut Street Theatre, I had to go. However, what I wasn’t prepared for was to walk out of the theater with a gigantic smile on my face, covered in stage blood, and completely blown away by this incredible show.
It is, without exaggeration, one of the best musicals I have ever seen.
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I walked into the AMC on August 18 with genuinely low expectations.
If you’ve seen the marketing for The End of Oak Street, you probably know why. The trailers made the whole setup look downright goofy—almost like a bargain-bin Jurassic Park knockoff trading on nostalgia and cheap creature tropes. I fully expected to spend two hours chuckling at cheesy dialogue, predictable set pieces, and an overworked CGI budget.
Instead, I walked out completely surprised. It’s actually a really good movie.
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Every once in a while, a trip to the theater hits differently in hindsight. On August 10, I headed over to AMC to catch Muppet Treasure Island as part of their “Fan Faves” program. Believe it or not, it was my first time watching the film. I went in expecting a lighthearted afternoon with Kermit and the gang, and while it delivered plenty of laughs, reflecting on that screening today carries a much deeper resonance.
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I sat down at AMC on August 6 to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day, and it came with a personal milestone: it was my first time watching a Tom Holland Spider-Man film. Going in without the direct theatrical baggage of his earlier trilogy gave the whole experience a fresh slate, and overall, I walked away genuinely impressed and thoroughly entertained.
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If you have a toddler or young child at home, you already know that PAW Patrol is practically an institution. But recently, the franchise reached whole new heights by combining two things kids obsess over most: heroic pups and giant prehistoric dinosaurs. Between catching the new PAW Patrol: Dino World movie on the big screen and diving into the brand-new Xbox video game, our household has been fully immersed in Dino Island—and it has been an absolute blast.
Here are my thoughts on both the theatrical experience and the latest console adventure.
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If you know anything about my taste in cinema, you know that Robert Englund is royalty in my book. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare holds the top spot as my absolute favorite movie of all time, and I still have vivid, incredibly fond memories of sitting in a packed theater back in the day to watch Freddy vs. Jason. So when I saw Englund himself post about Pinocchio Unstrung on Facebook, I hesitated for zero seconds. Any chance to see a brand-new Robert Englund movie on the big screen in theaters is an immediate, non-negotiable ticket purchase for me.
Going into it, I expected campy fun, but I didn’t expect just how thoroughly entertained I’d be.
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