January 2026 - Ian Thomas Malone

Tuesday

13

January 2026

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Classic Film: Loving Annabelle

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

The past few years have been quite the mixed bag for LGBTQ representation. Queer visibility is greater than ever, but there has been quite the push and pull to see that reflected on screen. In many ways, the early aughts feel like a lifetime ago, especially through the prism of 2006’s Loving Annabelle.

Simone (Diane Gaidry) is a poetry teacher at an all-girls Catholic boarding school, which she also attended. Simone is a reserved teacher, clearly struggling a bit under the repressive confines of her religion, a dynamic not exactly lost on the school priest (Kevin McCarthy). There’s a certain natural sense of claustrophobia at a place like Saint Theresa’s, full of nuns ready to punish any deviation from the norm.

Simone’s life is upended when a new student, Annabelle (Erin Kelly) arrives at the school. Annabelle is a free spirit, quickly earning the ire of Mother Immaculata (Ilene Graff), the school principal, when she refuses to take off her Buddhist beads. Assigned to Simone’s dorm and her classroom, Annabelle quickly takes an interest in the new authority figure in her life.

Initially resistant to Annabelle’s many charms, Simone starts to crack. While watching Annabelle over spring break, Simone takes her student up to her beach house. As Simone’s hard exterior starts to give way, Annabelle learns the source of her teacher and crush’s intense reservations, eventually prompting a relationship between the two.

Director Katerine Brooks’ narrative is quite the problematic story. The dynamic between teacher and underage student creates plenty of power dynamic issues that the film is reluctant to explore. With a runtime of just 76 minutes, there is little space to address any of the themes, an almost nonexistent third act.

Gaidry and Kelly are quite the awkward fit. Annabelle exudes a level of spunk that dances around the idea of maturity, a manic pixie dream type that’s just barely believable within the panopticon of a place like Saint Theresa’s. Kelly does an admirable job with what she was given, but Annabelle is not exactly a three-dimensional character.

Gaidry, on the other hand, brings a tragic lived-in quality to the tortured Simone. Brooks’ messy feature shines brightest when highlighting the cost of Simone’s decades of repression, capturing the zeitgeist of being gay in George Bush’s America. The curtain is never quite pulled back on Simone’s character, but it’s also easy to see how much she gave up of herself just to maintain a semblance of composure in her stuffy world.

The aughts were not a nuanced time for gay people. Plenty of teachers lost their jobs just for being gay, let alone sleeping with a student. Twenty years later, we can understand the twisted thought process that might lead a grown adult to throw out common sense, even if we don’t agree with her abuse of power.

Loving Annabelle is not a great movie. There’s too much left on the table for the pieces to make for a particularly satisfying experience, but Brooks constantly shows her audience how much she understands about these complicated dynamics. We don’t always need to watch upstanding citizens.

Sometimes, the world is better off with messier protagonists like Simone. You don’t need to give her a pass for sleeping with her student to see the tragedy of a life wasted, in service to repression. Simone gave her whole life to a school that would turn its back on her the second she life an authentic life.

The canon of LGBTQ films is similarly messy, full of talented directors forced to adapt their works to the hysteria that’s plagued our nation for longer than anyone could care to admit. How many gay people could really be themselves in 2006, with no consequences to their well-being or their livelihoods? Simone was a woman of faith, with absolutely nothing to show for it.

Plenty in our country want to return to the times of Loving Annabelle. Far too many parts of America never stopped being that oppressive wasteland. Brooks’ work feels like a relic of a bygone era, but for many, it’s still their present. It’s a sad indictment on our reality that this film, and all its imperfections, are still so potent twenty years down the road. We should have moved on by now, but this film still has plenty to teach us all.

Friday

9

January 2026

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‘Marty Supreme’ review: Chalamet’s powerful treatise on ego is not to be misssed

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

Part of the beauty of art is its ability to circumvent the normal rules of society. Who would want to spend an evening with some of the most unpleasant people on the planet? In real life, the thought of such an expenditure would be preposterous. Marty Supreme certainly offers a compelling case for the contrary.

The narrative follows Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), a talented but arrogant table tennis player, trying to make a name for himself in 1952, long before the sport achieved even a semblance of mainstream popularity (Table tennis wasn’t added to the Olympics until 1988). Unfilled with his job as a shoe salesman at his uncle’s store, he robs the safe to fund his travel to London for the British Open.

While in London, Marty lets his ego do most of the talking. He angers the head of the International Table Tennis Association (Pico Iyer) by complaining about the shabby player accommodations, choosing instead to stay in an extravagant suite at the Ritz Hotel. Rather than prepare for the tournament, Marty chases after Kay Stone (Gweneth Paltrow), a retired actress and wife of Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary), a pen tycoon. Rockwell takes an interest in the sport after Marty loses the British Open to a Japanese phenom.

Marty Supreme is director Josh Safdie’s first film without his brother since 2008’s highly underrated The Pleasure of Being Robbed. Safdie’s command of pacing is quite exceptional, building up dramatic tension with the pizazz and precision of a high-octane ping pong match, aided greatly by a synth-heavy score from Daniel Lopatin. Few films that carry a hefty 150-minute runtime flow with such ease.

Safdie strikes gold again with his trademark casting of non-actors. Kevin O’Leary, best known for his appearances on Shark Tank and Fox News, puts forth a compelling effort as Rockwell. O’Leary doesn’t quite disappear his role in the same way as Kevin Garnett in Uncut Gems, but Mr. Wonderful exudes sleaze on just the right level, holding his own against Chalamet and Paltrow.

Chalamet delivers what could very end up being a career-defining performance. Marty is so transparently full of himself, but Chalamet’s charm offensive is quite contagious. The character is most sympathetic when looking out for Rachel (Odessa A’zion), his married childhood friend who became pregnant as a result of their affair, but Safdie never tries to get his audience to feel for Marty. There is nothing admirable about his antics, no reason to root for him beyond the pleasant aroma from the vapors of his charisma.

What’s so delightful about Safdie’s storytelling is the way he presents a man, so consumed by his own greatness, without expecting anyone to buy into his crap. No one took ping pong seriously in 1952. Even today, it’s hardly the kind of sport whose top stars sleep in presidential suites and sit down to dinner with Hollywood A-Listers.

Our world is full of billionaire men who think they can change the world with a snap of a finger. Last year, Elon Musk walked into the federal government with nothing more than a chainsaw. The world’s richest man came with no plan, and left Washington having accomplished nothing besides a colossal headache that will take years to correct.

Marty Mauser has a lot of raw talent. He is quite clever. Somewhere along the way, he became convinced that the Meidas Touch was all that mattered. Talent only takes you so far.

Safdie manages to craft a narrative that provides plenty of thrills, even if you’re not terribly invested in Marty’s fate. He doesn’t quite stick the landing, a bit of an unsatisfying come down after a two and a half hour high. Fans of Uncut Gems may be disappointed by the sheer amount of familiar notes within Marty Supreme’s rhythm.

Egomaniacs rarely contemplate the limits of their own genius. Men like Musk are not solely driven by their bank accounts, but also through the adulation of their admirers. Marty would be a lot better off if he’d spent more time honing his own talent instead of incessantly trying to convince the rest of the world that he’s “Hitler’s worst nightmare.”

He is a nightmare, yes. Safdie’s frantic film plays out a lot like an elite game of ping pong, impressive to those who otherwise couldn’t care less about the sport. That’s the thing about ego. When you’re completely high on yourself, you think you’re all that matters, even while the rest of the world laughs at you and your silly sport.

Monday

5

January 2026

2

COMMENTS

‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ review: Cameron finally proves his critics right with this dull slop

Written by Ian Thomas Malone, Posted in Blog, Movie Reviews, Pop Culture

The Avatar franchise is often referred to as the most culturally irrelevant billion-dollar franchise. James Cameron directed three of the four highest-grossing movies of all time. Does it really matter if you don’t see tons of kids trick-or-treating as forgettable scantily clad blue aliens?

Cinema-obsessed philosophers can pontificate what it means for society that billion billion-dollar film contains a bunch of characters with forgettable names, a plot that resembles the love child of Ferngully and Dances With Wolves, and draws out little emotion from its audience when the credits roll besides relief that they can finally use the bathroom. None of that really has to matter. All we should really care about concerning Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third film in the franchise, is one simple question. Is this film any good?

Fire and Ash picks up right where The Way of Water left off. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri (Zoë Saldana) are still mourning their son’s death. Jake grows worried that Spider (Jake Campion), the human son of Quadritch (Stephen Lang), who was human in the first film before being resurrected as a Na’vi Recombinant, can’t survive in their environment without his breathing mask. An effort to bring Spider to other humans is disrupted by the Mangkwan, a clan of exiled volcano-dwelling Na’Vi. The Mangkwan leader Varang (Oona Chaplin) allies with Lang and his human handlers, still after whale brain juice and colonizing the planet, to terrorize Sully and his family once again.

The Way of Water premiered thirteen years after its predecessor. Cameron’s second film on Pandora had a lot of natural goodwill going for it, the lengthy gap between installments serving as a natural palate cleanser. The Way of Water was chock-full of technological breakthroughs. Whatever shortcomings existed in its narrative were easily washed over by the breathtaking nature of the cinematography, underwater special effects that had never been done before.

Fire and Ash comes just three years after The Way of Water. Pandora is still a beautiful place, with some of the best special effects in the industry, but it’s not a new place. We’ve been here before.

Complicating matters even worse is the fact that we’ve seen this story before. Fire and Ash is essentially a mash-up of the first two movies. Viewers are once again treated to a giant battle over colonization.

Fire and Ash struggles to overcome the clunky child custody case at the core of its narrative, a story otherwise content with playing a medley of Pandora’s greatest hits. Spider’s arc follows a lot of the same beats as Sully’s journey in the original Avatar. He’s a human who wants to be Na’Vi, caught between a biological father who is now a Na’Vi, and an adoptive Na’Vi father who was once human. To complicate matters worse, Cameron throws in a parallel to the Binding of Issac that seriously undercuts Sully as a character.

The Way of Water spent a lot of time building out Sully’s family, and the water-based Metkayina people. Putting aside the cliches, their family and their world felt alive, something worth the three-hour-plus investment that these films ask of their audiences. Fire and Ash doesn’t really care much about any of that development. The ball isn’t moved forward so much as it’s punted into the ocean.

Instead, we get a lot of repetitive scenes and clunky exposition. The idea of the Mangkwan is mildly interesting, but Cameron does nothing with them. Varang is a one-dimensional secondary villain in a film content to reuse the same big bad for the third movie in a row.

Aside from the heavy emphasis on Spider, the kids play second fiddle this time around. Lo’ak (Britain Dalton), Jake’s surviving son, gets barely any arc. Kiri (Sigourney Weaver) is still weird, a dynamic that isn’t exactly helped by having a 76-year-old woman play a teenager. Avatar has a lot of characters with confusing names, but Fire and Ash doesn’t give many reasons to care about a single one of them.

James Cameron has made at least two of the greatest sequels of all time, in Aliens and Terminator 2. The Way of Water defied all the naysayers who looked to the whole franchise with a collective shrug. Sadly, that appears to be the very same energy Cameron brought with him into Fire and Ash.

197 minutes is quite a long time for most audiences to stay engaged. Fire and Ash’s similarly long predecessor managed to circumvent this dilemma quite well with its strong pacing that still found time to embrace the quiet moments of its narrative. Here, Cameron hasn’t done enough legwork to keep things running smoothly. It’s too easy for the mind to wander amidst a film that’s largely running on autopilot.

Fire and Ash isn’t a terrible film, though easily Cameron’s worst since Piranha 2, his directorial debut that he mostly disavows. In some ways, it’s something worse, a validation of everything that’s been said about the Avatar franchise. Not every movie needs to be a cultural behemoth. Our society is essentially moving on from any strand of a collective consciousness as it is.

But a movie does need to give its viewers some semblance of satisfaction for having made the investment. A lot of time and money went into making this complete bore. For decades, Cameron’s films have wowed audiences around the globe. Sadly, there’s nothing new here.