Now You See Me: Now You Don’t

Posted on November 13, 2025 at 5:18 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for some strong language, violence and suggestive references
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking, drug reference
Violence/ Scariness:	Peril and violence, character killed, references
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	November 14, 2025

Take this into account: I loved the first film in this series about the magicians who exchange quips as they dazzle audiences and outsmart international law enforcement, and I liked the second one a lot. So when I say that a better title might be: “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t Think Too Hard,” that doesn’t mean I didn’t thoroughly enjoy this third in what is being set up to be a “Mission Impossible” or “Fast and Furious”-style franchise. It does mean that you will be more likely to enjoy yourself thoroughly if you don’t get distracted by questions of logics or physics. You know, like “Mission Impossible” and “Fast and Furious.”

To recap: In the first film, illusionist Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), mentalist/hypnotist
Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), lock-picker/pickpocket/card thrower Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and escape artist Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) teamed up as The Horsemen to return a portion of a billionaire’s ill-gotten gains to some of the people he stole from, and they become members of the most secret, selective, and prestigious magic club in the world, called The Eye. In the second film, the three men are joined by Lula (Lizzy Caplan), replacing Henley, and the villain is the son of the villain from the first film.

The team has separated for many years, but they are reunited when they receive mysterious cards from The Eye, and they are joined by three young magicians who are likely being set-up to lead in episode 4, teased at the end of this film. The newcomers are stage performer Bosco (Dominic Sessa from “The Holdovers”), pickpocket June (Ariana Greenblatt the girl who was too old to play with Barbies in “Barbie”), and Charlie (Justice Smith from “Dungeons and Dragons: No Honor Among Thieves”), a magic nerd deeply immersed in the history of the art and craft of deception for entertainment who prefers to plan the illusions but remain behind the scenes. As with the previous films, the fun comes from the prickly banter, the fun of being fooled and then getting a peek at how the tricks are done, and the satisfaction of outsmarting a villain who deserves it.

And Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike) is every bit as worthy of being outsmarted as we could wish. She is the ruthless head of a South African diamond company, inherited from her father. Her diamonds are involved in laundering money for arms dealers and traffickers, and warlords. “She makes all the worst criminals possible.” (If that sounds like crypto, don’t think that gets left out.) There’s also some mention of the entire premise of the diamond business being based on abusive practices. And someone with a disguised voice keeps calling her about something very bad in her past that she does not want to be made public.

Veronika has a gigantic diamond called The Heart that is the size of a very large potato and she is scheduled to show it off at an exclusive formal gala. The Horsemen infiltrate and pull various tricks to steal The Heart. The Eye cards then lead them to a magnificent castle that is like a museum of magic, with puzzle rooms that include funhouse mirrors and M.C. Escher-style steps. Then there is a final confrontation, with more twists than there are in a family size box of fusilli. That includes some appearances by characters/performers from the previous films. The series is bending toward “Mission Impossible” (the TV series, not the movies) territory with its intricate illusions to triumph over bad guys and toward “Fast and Furious” with it’s “I don’t have friends; I have family” moments, and the globe-hopping of both. Plus Lady Gaga’s very apt “Abracadabra.”

Pike makes an excellent villain. She is a master of the mirthless smile. As she did in “Gone Girl,” she shows us the fiercely feral intelligence that is always clicking toward “winning” even as her face is a mask of civility. The four original Horsemen understand their characters and their chemistry and make the most of both and the new additions show a lot of promise. They tell us up front that everything that disappears, reappears. If indeed Sessa, Smith, and Greenblatt take over the lead roles in the next film, we’ll be happy to be fooled by them again.

Parents should know that this film has some strong language, a drug reference, peril, and violence including attempted murder and a sad death of a character.

Family discussion: What kind of magic do you most enjoy? What should the Horsemen do in the next chapter?

If you like this, try: The first two films, plus “Magic Camp” and the documentary “Make Believe”

Radioactive

Posted on July 23, 2020 at 5:58 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, disturbing images, brief nudity and a scene of sensuality
Profanity:	Mild language and sexual references
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	WWI battle scenes,
Date Released to Theaters:	July 24, 2020

Biopics, even the most sincere, even about the most fascinating real-life characters, even made by directors who are willing to break with the traditional structure, still two things are true. First, the only thing that really matters is the lead performance. Second, there is really no way to get around the basic structure that all lives follow and all biopics follow except those like “Jobs” that focus one or just a few incidents. We see crucial early experiences that either reveal the subject’s special talent or some life-forming experience or both. We see struggle. We see people who foolishly do not believe our subject can succeed. We see our subject succeed.There’s usually a setback or special mid-point challenge. And then we see how it ends.

Marie Curie certainly had a fascinating life and Rosamund Pike gives her considerable best. She is never less than mesmerizing. I particularly enjoyed watching her in the first half of the movie, as we see her struggling to be taken seriously as a scientist when she knows she is better than the men who look down at her because she is a woman, because she is Polish, and because she is not shy about letting them know she is better than they are. It’s almost a proto-“Big Bang Theory,” the way that the same determination, single-mindedness, unstoppable curiosity, and relentless quest for truth that makes her a scientist is what makes it difficult for her to get along with anyone well enough to get her the resources she needs to do her experiments.

And that is when she meets Pierre Curie. He tells her he has read her work and it is brilliant. She tells him she has read his and it is very good. He offers her a space in his lab. Her insight and his ideas about how to prove her theories like two covalent bonds or a double helix. A lot happens very fast as the brilliance of her discoveries is evident when she just 32 when her paper on radium was published. But the movie stops for a dinner party so that Marie can explain her research to a non-scientist friend, and to us.

It then hurtles along, trying to cram in every crisis faced by Marie, from continued gender discrimination to being accused of adultery after Pierre’s death, when her letters to her married lover were made public by his wife. Most interesting, and worth an entire movie of its own, is her service during WWI, when she developed portable X-ray machines that saved thousands of lives and prevented needless surgery. Like the man for whom the most important scientific award in the world is named, Alfred Nobel, Marie Curie’s great achievement was responsible for incalculable benefits (we see an early cancer patient treated with radiation) and unthinkable tragedy (we see a Hiroshima resident looking up to see the Enola Gay, and the ravages of Chernobyl. This makes things a bit muddled, but Pike’s stirring performance makes us believe we get a sense of Marie Curie’s fierce intelligence and even may make us wonder about what discoveries we can make.

Parents should know that this film includes WWI battle scenes and characters who have been wounded, characters who are ill and dying and references to deaths of family members, brief rear nudity, non-explicit sexual situation, and references to adultery.

Family discussion: What do we learn from Marie’s reaction to the death of her mother? Why does this film include glimpses of events long after Marie’s death? What can we do to make sure that what we learn about and invent is used to benefit humankind and not for wars and violence?

If you like this, try: the glow-in-the-dark graphic novel the film is based on and another film about scientists and inventors, The Current War.

A Private War

Posted on February 3, 2019 at 4:33 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for disturbing violent images, language throughout, and brief sexuality/nudity
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking and smoking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Brutal wartime violence, characters injured and killed
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	November 16, 2018
Date Released to DVD:	February 4, 2019

I reviewed A Private War for rogerebert.com. An excerpt:

The dramatic, personal story of Colvin herself is absorbingly told here, largely because of Pike’s dynamic performance, showing us a woman who was courageous enough to risk her life for a story on a daily basis but remained vulnerable enough to make the stories viscerally compelling. That combination took a terrible toll. She used sex and booze to numb her feelings but they could not stop the nightmares. “You’re not going to get anywhere if you acknowledge fear,” she says, but she admits that after the danger is over, she feels it. It is surreal to see her back in London at an elegant gala event, picking up another journalism award in between trips to war zones where she has to maintain enough distance from the carnage all around her to write about it – and keep from becoming part of it. The contrast in perspective and priorities between Colvin and her editor (an excellent Tom Hollander) makes a deeper point about the uneasy and sometimes conflicted relationship between editors trying to sell papers and reporters trying to get the story read.

To the extent we need to know why she had this compulsion and whether she missed having a home and family, those elements are present without being reductive or simplistic.

Hostiles

Posted on January 18, 2018 at 2:41 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for strong violence, and language
Profanity:	Some very strong and racist language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol, smoking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extensive and very graphic violence, many characters injured and killed, rapes
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	January 19, 2018

“Hostiles” is more in conversation with movies about the settlement of the West than it is about or in conversation with the brutal history of the West itself. For decades there were simple stories of brave cowboys and soldiers fighting racist caricatures of Native Americans. White men were heroes and Indians were savages.

Then there were some stories with a little more nuance and some better intentions but pretty much on the side of “civilization” and the more nuanced Native American characters were usually played by actors who were not Native Americans. Westerns went out of vogue in part because of the growing recognition that the stories were too complicated and painful for the “good guys vs. bad guys” cliches of the past. “Hostiles” is a sincere effort from writer/director Scott Cooper at a Western that frankly grapples with the challenge of building a society on the unthinkable carnage and injustice of the past. But there is more formula than drama, with each character specifically designed to represent a place on the spectrum of culpability. With dialogue like “I don’t know what we are going to do with these wretched savages” and “There ain’t enough punishment for his kind” and soldiers with too-symmetrical responses to their own culpability, and unceasing brutality to drive the points home, even the fine acting cannot bring it to life.

Christian Bale plays Captain Joseph Blocker, a man who has witnessed and inflicted horrible brutality in the fight with Indians. When he is ordered to escort an Indian leader and his family to their home, he refuses, until his superior officer threatens to court-martial him and withhold his pension. Blocker despises Chief Yellow Hawk (Wes Studi), who has been in prison for years and is dying of cancer. But the President has ordered that he be allowed to return home to die, and he will need an escort to protect him and his family.

Blocker assembles a group of soldiers and they begin the journey. They come across Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose husband and children have just been killed by Indians, who stole their horses and burned down her home. She is severely traumatized, but Blocker’s respectful treatment helps her begin to accept what has happened, and when Yellow Hawk’s daughter offers her some clothes, she changes out of her blood-stained dress.

Each encounter along the way, most horrifically brutal, is designed to add some variation on the theme, and all boil down to: both white settlers and Native Americans committed atrocities and both have to find some way to reconcile with the past. The film begins with a quote from DH Lawrence: ““The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Perhaps more apt is a quote attributed to Golda Meir, “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Parents should know that this film has extended peril, violence, and rape, with many characters injured and killed, including children and a baby, and many grisly and disturbing images, suicide, racist epithets and comments, and some strong language.

Family discussion: What helped Mrs. Quaid begin to accept her loss? How were Blocker and Wills different? Why did Blocker get on the train?

If you like this, try: “Unforgiven” and “The Searchers”

Trailer: 7 Days in Entebbe

Posted on December 7, 2017 at 6:52 pm

Rosamund Pike, Daniel Brühl, Eddie Marsan, Ben Schnetzer, Lior Ashkenazi, and Denis Ménochet star in “7 Days in Entebbe” from Focus Features, the story of the daring Israeli raid on the plane hijacked to Uganda in 1976. It will be in theaters in March, 2018.

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