Dust Bunny (2025). A little girl hires a hit man (Mads Mikkelsen) who lives across the hall to kill a monster under her bed. Or, Roald Dahl meets John Wick.

This is listed as a "horror thriller," which I guess is true in the same sense that the Barbie movie is a "political drama." I would be more inclined to call this a dark fantasy/action movie. It's also rated R, and I legitimately do not know why; this is like a mid-tier PG-13. I kept waiting for things to get gory and justify the rating, and they never did, so I recommend managing your expectations on that front.

The aesthetic here goes extremely hard. Their apartment building is an absolutely incredible art nouveau confection. We visit other locales with similarly heightened decor, but honestly nothing is nearly as visually stunning, which I think is fine, because the apartment building is the heart of the movie.

The acting here is all extremely good. In addition to Mikkelsen and the child actress, who is fantastic, we also have Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, and someone I didn't know named Sheila Atim who is delightful.

This is fun ride and great time. I spent most of the movie having absolutely no idea where it would go next. If any of this piques your interest, I definitely recommend it.

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Wicked: For Good (2025). First, props, the subtitling is clever. Anyway, this is the second half of the story of a good witch and a bad witch fighting/collaborating with the machine while pining for each other and also some guy who's just kind of there.

Honestly, "just kind of there" describes a lot of this movie. It doesn't really expand on any of the political motivation from the first movie, so I had trouble remembering exactly WHY the wizard and his henchwoman have decided to demonize the animals and by extension their defender Elphaba. Fiyero the awkward third wheel, whom I actually found quite charming in the first movie, got almost nothing to do here. No animal character got any kind of significant development; the closest we got was one of the flying monkeys, who didn't even get any lines for plot reasons. There's a subplot involving Elphaba's disabled sister becoming increasingly more unhinged and embittered by her romantic disappointment and probably ableist society at large, but then, you know, she dies from a house falling on her, so that's the end of that. There's a Big Reveal about Elphaba's parentage that literally everyone saw coming, but which Elphaba herself doesn't even get to find out about or react to. There are barely even any big musical set pieces and basically no dance choreography at all. The only song that made a real impression on me was Elphaba's big heel turn song No Good Deed, and I hear from the theater folks that it was kind of weaksauce compared to the live musical version.

All that said, this is the Elphaba and Glinda show, and they're great, honestly. Ariana Grande's comic timing is impeccable. The pining truly is spectacular; there's an amazing scene towards the end that must be seen to be believed. The shippers feasted.

ficinabox reveals have happened, and after being a post-deadline pinch hit (and then a post-post-deadline pinch hit...) and being a little nervous about it, I got some great things. :3 More recs to come once I get a chance to explore the rest of the collection.

i said farewell (i meant don't go), Red Sonja (2025), Sonja/Petra, 7k. Petra survives the arena, goes traveling with Sonja after the end of the movie, and absolute does not pine or have any feelings about it (and then gets abducted by an eldritch cult, oh no). Jaded traumatized warrior women/young earnest warrior woman, what an excellent ship. :') The writing here is gorgeous, and the fic hits that good tropey goodness in a way that can be hard to find in femslash.

Probably readable canon-blind? If this sounds like your jam at all, I definitely recommend. This fandom is SO SMALL that the tag is unwrangled on AO3, and I worry that no one but me is going to find this fic and read it.

The Lonely Ones, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Alexis Rigby pre-slash, 5k. One misterable stormy night, Alexis appears on Booth's doorstep, to their mutual surprise. This is the first fic for this ship longer than a drabble, and I am so delighted it exists. The writing is really delicate and lovely, and very careful, as it needs to be when writing Booth making new personal connections (whether he wants or not).

Reflections, Kyle Murchison Booth stories, Booth/Ratcliffe, 3k. Despite his best intentions, Ratcliffe loses touch with Booth and then starts to form some suspicions about why that might be. I love this premise of Booth being a kind of liminal being as well, which fits right in with some of the ways Monette treats time and setting in canon. A nice shippy little ghost(?) story.

Wake Up Dead Man (2025). A young priest accused of murder in a small parish in upstate NY pleads his case to famous detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig).

This is the third movie in the Benoit Blanc franchise, and I enjoyed it a lot. The cast is great, as always, and Josh O'Connor in particular as the young priest is fantastic and is the heart of the movie. The writing is solid and often very funny, with some great laugh lines, even if this wasn't trying quite as hard as Glass Onion did. These movies are just fun, even when they don't make all that much sense.

I will say it felt too long; I thought it might be my favorite of the series, and then it went on for another 45 minutes. 💀 It needed at least one less twist and one less dramatic monologue. I also wish one of the secondary antagonists (Cy, the mixed-race would-be Republican politician) had gotten more development or at least a hint of how he'd become who he'd become, not least because he was one of the funniest characters and stole almost every scene he was in. I have some quibbles about the narrative treatment of one of the female characters as well; I think the movie's heart was in the right place, but the execution didn't quite get there.

This one also tackled some heavier themes than either of the others. The charismatic, abusive, ego-driven church leader making his own little cult felt very familiar, especially after that podcast I listened to about Mars Hill.

Overall: just fun. Solidly entertaining in an era when it feels like mainstream movies really struggle to be that. I hope Rian Johnson makes ten more of these.

And this was the last one on his Netflix contract, so maybe the next one will get a real theater release instead of this bizarre indie-and-tiny-chain-only bullshit. OTOH, because the release has been so limited, I saw it in a completely sold-out theater that laughed throughout and then clapped at the end, and that was pretty fun. Silver linings!

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Hell House LLC: Carmichael Manor (2023). A ghosthunter and her girlfriend investigate a supposedly haunted house near the site of the former Abaddon hotel and soon wish they hadn't.

This is the fourth entry in the Hell House LLC franchise, and for my money it is the scariest. There's not even a close second IMO. It took me almost a year to watch this in fits and starts, because I kept getting too tense. I only finally managed it because an online friend was going to watch it and we had a watch party. Found footage is the scariest horror there is, in my opinion; the fiction of watching raw footage removes a last crucial layer of distance between me and the events. This franchise's greatest strength is that it has a fucking scary clown and it knows how to use it, but there are a number of scenes here without even a threat of clown that are genuinely unnerving and use the found footage mechanic in creatively terrifying ways.

As a movie, this is also far and away the best one since the first. The characters are well-developed and don't get bogged down in the history of the previous movies, unlike movies two and three. I do think the last twenty minutes or so, when it tries to tie the story to the broader lore, is by the far the weakest part of the movie, but so it goes.

Also, I've been pining for more found footage horror focused on women, and it's just a bonus that these are an f/f couple to boot, which goes completely unremarked. Yay, more of this please.

If you're looking for a good scarefest with minimal gore next Halloween, you absolutely should check this out.