Quietly Watching

  When the trailer dropped back in June , all we really had was a family sealed inside their own home and a title that sounded like a warning. Now the film is here, it's the number one movie on Netflix worldwide, and the question everyone is searching is the same one the trailer left hanging: what is actually out there, and how does anyone get out? The short answer is that the thing trapping the Delgado family isn't an army or an alien fleet. It's the rain, and what the rain brings with it. And the escape, when it comes, is stranger than any weapon. The house itself falls apart. Not Aliens, Something Older For most of the movie the threat stays offscreen, which is where director Louis Leterrier keeps it scariest. What we eventually learn is that the rain is the real prison. When it falls, it seals houses shut from the outside, everywhere, all at once, and creatures arrive with it. The surprise is where they come from. Instead of arriving from space, they rose out of the oce...

  Netflix dropped the first trailer for The Last House this week, and the premise alone is the kind that lodges in your head and stays there: a family of four wakes up sealed inside their own home, unable to get out, while the entire world outside falls under the same mysterious lockdown. A day becomes three, then a week, then years. The film arrives August 7, and on paper it is a survival thriller. What makes it worth paying attention to now is the suspicion that the threat outside was never really the point. A Blockbuster Director Locks the Doors The first surprise is who made this. Louis Leterrier built his career on scale, on fast cars and magic heists and comic-book spectacle, with Fast X and the Now You See Me films and a Transporter or two behind him. The Last House is the opposite of all that. It is one house, one family, no exits. A director known for moving the camera through the biggest possible spaces has chosen to trap himself, and us, in the smallest one. That kind of...

  Toy Story 4 ended with a decision that felt, at the time, like a conclusion. Woody chose to stay behind with Bo Peep, giving up his place with Bonnie and the other toys to live as a lost toy — free, unclaimed, no longer defined by a child's need for him. It was a gentle, bittersweet ending for a character who had spent four films learning to let go. Toy Story 5, opening in theaters on June 19, brings him back. And the reason he comes back says a great deal about what this film is actually about. <The Setup> The premise has been described as "Toy meets Tech." Bonnie receives a new tablet device called Lilypad — voiced by Greta Lee — and Lilypad arrives with her own ideas about what is best for the children she serves. The existing toys, Buzz (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack), and the rest of the gang, find their purpose and their place threatened not by a new toy but by something that operates on entirely different logic. Woody, drawn out of his self-imposed exile ...