I watched this with my wife, my four year old and my parents and we all enjoyed it. I'm really not sure how many movies these days can so thoroughly appeal to three generations at once, so good on those sheep detectives.
Not sure I'll ever really understand why everyone is so insistent on saving Peeta. They really don't do a great job of selling what's special about him because I'm not sure anything is special about him.
Unfortunately, there are all kinds of predators in the world. Some seek to exploit children. Some seek to exploit those predators for entertainment under the banner of righteousness. Some witness the (self-)righteousness and feed on its open-ended catharsis. Of course, not all these predations are equal in their inherent malevolence, but most things exist on a spectrum and it's up to us whether we're going to allow ourselves to exist on that spectrum. Predators calls all of the above into question and may even exist on that spectrum itself, but it's at least seemingly aware of its place in it and does a deft job of navigating its way to a point of acknowledgement.
My daughter asked to watch this. We'd started it at least a couple of times before, but this was her first time being able to hang with it until the end.
Nearly twenty years since it came out and I last saw it, it's still frustratingly surface level and episodic. The lack of any real exploration of Curtis as a person with any sort of an inner life seems to be a choice, but it's a bad one.
From my perspective, the allegory doesn't seem nearly as tidy and impressive as I Saw the TV Glow's. Yet everything about it still feels so intensely specific that I trust that has more to do with 1) my own lack of expertise in the genre(s) it's riffing on and 2) my relative tourism as a cis-het male who can never fully know the experience of trans/queer women. But one of my favorite things about movies is their ability to help me understand other folks' experiences even just a little bit more than I did before. And not only does this move the needle in that regard, but it's such an obviously rich text containing so many breathtaking moments that I think, much like ISTTVG, I'll gladly be revisiting it and seeing that needle move even further as I re-experience it.
We watched this after Dolly passed away and, while both she and Shirley MacLaine are pretty damn great in it, I'm sorry to say the movie just isn't very good overall. There were truly moments where I thought Olympia Dukakis was giving one of the worst screen performances I've ever seen.
an asterisk (*) indicates a new addition since last month
Best Lead Female Actor: - Inde Navarrette, Obsession - Rachel McAdams, Send Help - Olivia Wilde, The Invite - Anne Hathaway, Mother Mary - Michaela Coel, Mother Mary - Keke Palmer, I Love Boosters
Best Lead Male Actor: - Ralph Fiennes, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - Ryan Gosling, Project Hail Mary - Seth Rogen, The Invite - Matt Damon, The Odyssey - Dylan O'Brien, Send Help - Bill Skarsgård, Dead Man's Wire
Best Supporting Female Actor: - Sandra Hüller, Project Hail Mary - Penélope Cruz, The Invite - Gillian Anderson, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma* - Samantha Morton, The Odyssey - Erin Kellyman, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - Charlize Theron, The Odyssey
Best Supporting Male Actor: - James Ortiz, Project Hail Mary - Jack O’Connell, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple - John Leguizamo, The Odyssey - Edward Norton, The Invite - Robert Pattinson, The Odyssey - Jay McCarrol, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Current Favorite First Watches of 2026
Non-first run movies I saw for the first time this year...
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