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Harold Ramis is one of the nicest people I've met in the movie business, and I'm so sorry "Year One" happened to him. I'm sure he had the best intentions. In trying to explain why the movie was produced, I have a theory. Ramis is the top-billed of the film's three writers, and he is so funny that when he read some of these lines, they sounded hilarious. Pity he didn't play one of the leads in his own film.

As always, I carefully avoided any of the film's trailers, but I couldn't avoid the posters or the ads. "Meet Your Ancestors," they said, with big photos of Jack Black and Michael Cera . I assumed it was about Adam and Eve. Cera has smooth, delicate features, and with curly locks falling below his shoulders, I thought: Michael Cera in drag. I wonder where Harold will take that?

But no, even though Cera is sometimes mistaken for a woman, he's all primitive man, banging women on the head. Then he and Black eat of the forbidden apple and make a leap from tribal "hunter-gatherers" (a term they enjoy) to royal security guards. Everyone throughout the film talks like anyone else in a Judd Apatow comedy, somewhere between stoned and crafty.

It must be said that Jack Black and Michael Cera were not born to be co-stars. Black was fresh and funny once, a reason then to welcome him in a movie, but here he forgets to act and simply announces his lines. Cera plays shy and uncertain, but then he always does, and responds to Black as if Jack were Juno and a source of intimidating wit.

Another leading role is taken by Oliver Platt , as an extremely hairy high priest, who orders Cera to massage his chest with oil. The closeup of Cera kneading his matted chest foliage is singularly unappetizing. There are several good-looking babes in the city (did I mention it is Sodom?), who as required in such films all find the heroes inexplicably attractive. Cera and Juno Temple as Eema have a good exchange. She plays a slave. "When do you get off?" he asks. "Never."

That and several other of the film's better moments are in the trailer, of which it can be said, if they were removed from the film, it would be nearly bereft of better moments. The movie takes place in the land now known as Israel, although no one does much with that. The Sodomites include in their number Abraham, Cain and Abel; it's surprising to find them still in action in the Year One, since Genesis places them -- well, before the time of Genesis. Sodomy is not very evident in Sodom, perhaps as a result of the movie being shaved down from an R to a PG-13.

The film has shaggy crowds that mill about like outtakes from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," and human sacrifice in which virgins are pitched into the blazing mouth of a stone ox, and a cheerful turn when the gods more appreciate a high priest than a virgin. But "Year One" is a dreary experience, and all the ending accomplishes is to bring it to a close. Even in the credit cookies, you don't sense the actors having much fun.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Year One (2009)

Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual content throughout, brief strong language and comic violence

Jack Black as Zed

Michael Cera as Oh

Oliver Platt as High Priest

David Cross as Cain

Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Isaac

Hank Azaria as Abraham

Produced by

• Harold Ramis
• Judd Apatow
• Gene Stupnitsky
• Lee Eisenberg

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G enerations old and new meet in this funny stone-age comedy produced by Judd Apatow, and directed and co-written by veteran gagmeister Harold Ramis - and inspired by Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and Monty Python's Life of Brian. Jack Black and Michael Cera are a couple of fur-wearing tribe-dwellers cast out of the group for failing to hunt or gather satisfactorily. Cera plays a prickly, nerdy guy incensed at the effeminate associations of his preferred activity: "gathering" wild berries as opposed to hunting wild boars. There is a definite dip in the laugh-rating when our two cavemen run into Cain and Abel, a temporarily unfunny moment during which we have to readjust to the fact that it is, in fact, going to be specifically a biblical spoof film. (Sodom, incidentally, seems to be populated by people with British accents. Ahem.) But no matter: Ramis delivers reliable laughs.

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Someone really ought to tell Harold Ramis that it’s 2009. His latest directorial effort, Year One feels like leftovers from the Mel Brooks movies of the 80s. It’s History of the World Part II only the world has moved on and while we may revere the comedic efforts of that time, Year One is proof that they wouldn’t work today. Today we want more. Today we expect a story, and perhaps more importantly, should a story be attempted it must go somewhere. This one does not and though the movie may get a few giggles throughout its running time, it’s a pointless endeavor which eventually ends in a relatively half-hearted meander off screen.

The thing is, Ramis knows better. This is the guy who made Groundhog Day , Vacation , and Analyze That . He was a goddamn Ghostbuster! Comedy in the context of good story should be second nature to the man yet for whatever reason, it never quite happens in Year One , a movie that feels like it was written only after the fact.

It stars the debatable comedic talents of Jack Black and Michael Cera who, while they spend the movie dressed as cave men, are still playing Jack Black and Michael Cera. In itself, that’s actually pretty funny… for about five minutes. Black is a hunter named Zed and Cera is Oh, a gatherer living in a primitive tribe of hunter gatherers. Zed, since he’s played by Jack Black, gets them into trouble and they’re soon thrown out of the tribe and forced to walk over the mountains where they assume, they’ll surely fall off the edge of the Earth once they reach the other side. They don’t.

Instead they soon become embroiled in a Biblical re-enactment in which they meet Caine ( David Cross ) right before he kills his brother Abel ( Paul Rudd ), encounter Abraham (Hank Azaria) as he realizes that it might be kind of cool to cut off his foreskin, and wander into the Sodom half of Sodom and Gomorrah, pre-destruction but post sodomy. Oliver Platt is deliciously ridiculous as Sodom’s pedophile high-priest and Azaria is weirdly hilarious as the way too into his god and probably crazy Hebrew patriarch Abraham.

Actually most of the supporting characters work and maybe they could have had a movie here if they’d structured it like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead with Black and Cera wandering around aimlessly obsessing over the mundane and incredulously watching from afar as various Biblical notables play out the Old Testament’s greatest hits in front of the camera. Better no story at all than the failed, listless attempt at one.

Instead Year One tries to be both a comedy and an adventure movie, except the adventure is so lame that it saps all the energy right out of the comedy. Cera’s meandering, mumbled asides go on far too long, Jack Black’s sword fights are far too uninteresting and who the hell really cares whether or not it rains in Sodom? Isn’t it going to be blown to smithereens by Abraham’s God anyway? What’s the point? It’s Sodom. Bring on the whores!

Year One has no point, no purpose really other than stick Jack Black and Michael Cera in loincloths so they can wander around in front of the camera. I like both Black and Cera when used in the right circumstances but neither actor is capable of carrying such a loosely structured, poorly plotted out movie. Then again, who is? You’ll find a few laughs in Year One . A scene in which Jack and Michael ride on their first ever wheeled conveyance as if it’s a roller coaster is clever and sure to get laughs as are most of Platt’s half-whispered, high-pitched monologues. It’s just not enough.

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Year One Review

26 Jun 2009

Harold Ramis has been honest about the influences on his Old Testament road-trip comedy Year One. Firstly, an improvisation he himself staged more than three decades ago, in which Bill Murray played Cro-Magnon man and John Belushi Neanderthal man. Secondly, Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man skit. Two things are clear from the result. One, that this film is certainly more Mel Brooks (specifically The History Of The World, Part I) than another obvious influence, Monty Python’s Life Of Brian. Two, that Jack Black and Michael Cera are no Murray and Belushi.

As rubbish hunter-gatherers, the pair are required only to riff on personae they’ve long since worn out: Black’s eyebrow-jiggling, horny loudmouth, and Cera’s querulous, knowing naïf. Which wouldn’t be so problematic if they’d been energised by a decent script. Instead, they’re required to respectively bug out and nervously pigeon-step through a series of sub-SNL sketches that deny the guest stars (Paul Rudd, David Cross, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Hank Azaria…) as many laughs as themselves, relying more on gross-out humour than any alleged religious satire.

So we have Black licking poo; Cera sharing a bed with a flatulent manchild; Cera oiling up a fat, hairy, grotesque-gay-stereotype priest (Oliver Platt); and Cera pissing copiously on his own face. There’s also an embarrassing vein of limp sex-comedy, which, like every Carry On, is obsessed with the pursuit of coitus but shies away from presenting the act itself.

Where, then, is the satirical bite? If you’re going to locate your comedy at the birth of the Abrahamic religions, you should try to do better than a circumcision gag. But Ramis’ script is toothless, mustering up little more than a vague ‘religion (at least the kind that involves burning virgins) is bad, go do your own thing’ message. Ramis should have concerned himself with the film’s continuity and internal logic. Here’s a good one: what happened to the snake, which one moment is constricting Cera and the next has disappeared, never to be mentioned again? Answers on a stone tablet, please.

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Review by Brian Eggert June 23, 2009

Year One contains a lot of funny. There’s the funny concept, lifted ever-so-slightly from Monty Python’s Life of Brian , about modern humor in ancient times. Funny actors like Jack Black, Michael Cera, David Cross, and others populate the cast. Harold Ramis, the funny director of funny movies such as Caddyshack and Groundhog Day , takes the helm. Writers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, who work on the funny television show The Office , co-scripted the film with Ramis. And producer Judd Apatow, who helped make every funny movie in the last several years, oversaw the production.

So why is the result so painfully  un funny? The potential spoofs on history are enormous, as explored by Mel Brooks and the aforementioned British troupe in some detail. But  Year One  limits its scope to a rather small expanse of time; beginning with a hunter-gatherer tribe, it barely gets passed Sodom and Gomorrah. Does the title refer to the first year in recorded history? If so, aren’t we coming in a little late in the game? Or perhaps we’re coming in too early, and the title refers to the first year on the Christian calendar, in which case we question, where’s Jesus? Don’t bother thinking about the timeline. There’s not a cohesive one to speak of.

Black and Cera star as two tribal primitives, complete with loincloths, shaggy hair, and pelts for clothes. There’s no point in telling you their characters’ names because the actors aren’t even trying to dodge their typecast onscreen personas. Black is just Black, still a rock-n-roller who blurts his lines with blind confidence. The witty Cera is seemingly present only to further punctuate the film’s barefaced irony, no different than any of his roles since Arrested Development . Will Cera still be playing the awkward man-boy when he’s thirtysomething? Probably. Meanwhile, Black feels right at home in caveman attire. Cera only feels at home in his signature hoodie, as seen on Juno , Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist , Superbad , and should I go on?

After eating the forbidden fruit and mistakenly burning down their village, Black and Cera leave their forest people to see what lies beyond the mountains, finding that the world does not abruptly end as their people imagined. An array of Biblical (allegorical) characters awaits them, including the murderous Caine (Cross) and his brother Able (Paul Rudd), and the circumcision-obsessed Abraham (Hank Azaria) with his would-be sacrificial son Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). When Black and Cera wind up in prehistory’s Las Vegas (i.e., Sodom), they attempt to set free their tribal sweethearts (June Diane Raphael and Juno Temple) who were captured and sold into slavery.

Once they reach Sodom, it becomes clear that the movie was cut down from an R-rating to PG-13, undoubtedly to appeal to teen crowds. This is not only true because no sodomy is depicted in Sodom, but because the editing seems choppy and several scenes look clumsily abbreviated. Perhaps Ramis dealt with some nasty studio influence over at Columbia Pictures, who insisted that he keep his base humor down and instead insert thumpin’ hip-hop beats into the soundtrack (yes, I’m serious). By contrast, it’s strange that the studio left in the ending’s message about religion being a farce and finding your own destiny.

Winking at the audience to no end, Year One tries desperately to be sardonic and tongue-in-cheek about historical and Biblical parables. Though, the audience gets the joke, and thus all of the jokes throughout, in the first few minutes. The human sacrifices and prophesying through pigs’ guts are all very clever, in that Can you see that I’m being clever? way. The gags don’t change or incite much laughter beyond the occasional chortle, which is really unfortunate for the amount of talent amassed here. What Ramis doesn’t do is surprise us. Not with his casting, not with the rethreaded variety of humor, not with his big-budget presentation or elaborate set designs. What we’re left with is a dreary, groan-inducing comedy that fails to be funny or entertaining under even the most lenient terms.

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Year One Reviews

A dreary, groan-inducing comedy that fails to be funny or entertaining under even the most lenient terms.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 4, 2023

It may go slightly beyond the blueprints for a formulaic parody movie, but it has all the same symptoms.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | Nov 29, 2020

Year One relies almost solely upon bawdy, sophomoric humor.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.0/4.0 | Aug 31, 2020

Year One buckles at the first bad gag and it's downhill from there.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Oct 30, 2019

Unfortunately, all the talent doesn't translate on the screen. Sure, there are a few mildly amusing moments (most coming courtesy of Cera), but for the most part Year One was one big dud.

Full Review | Original Score: D | May 16, 2019

Considering Year One is likely to flop, there's little point in giving it the benefit of controversy by protesting too much.

Full Review | Mar 3, 2019

All in all, this is a sloppy, unoriginal, brain-dead mess that can't even be bothered to get itself out of trouble.

Full Review | Aug 29, 2018

In the beginning there was light, which was closely followed by the fart joke.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 21, 2014

Stretched painfully thin to feature length, it's a concept that's gestated for 34 years but hasn't evolved a microbe. It also proves that the Harold Ramis of '09 has nothing on the Harold Ramis of '75.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Sep 29, 2012

Full Review | Original Score: C | Apr 21, 2012

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Dudley Moore once made a pretty forgettable comedy giving various well-worn bible stories a light irony wash by reacting to them with the skepticism and confusion a person of today might. Year One is basically that, but dumber.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Dec 28, 2010

From its ill-concieved concept to its timing-free chemistry and embarrassingly-bad characterisations, Year One is a major misfire in every respect.

Full Review | Aug 9, 2010

a lazy excrescence of a film. Crude, sloppy, flat, and singularly uninspired, its only redeeming virtue is proving that Michael Cera is capable of rising above even this abominable material

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jul 4, 2010

Only big fans of Cera and Black need catch this film, and even then, it's far from a must-see.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 15, 2010

What's even more depressing than the never-ending stream of sub-sixth-grade toilet humor is the sad fact that Year One is helmed and co-produced by two of the best laughmeisters in the business.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/5 | Jan 5, 2010

Not everything Judd Apatow touches is gold.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Jan 5, 2010

Creatively it's a giant step backwards, with Jack Black and Michael Cera playing to the kids as inept hunter-gatherers who stumble across various Old Testament characters.

Full Review | Jan 5, 2010

The problem is not the historicity, or lack thereof, in a comedy, but the uneven pace of the humor.

Full Review | Original Score: D+ | Dec 6, 2009

Producer Judd Apatow has gone from comedy gourmand to McDonald-izing in four years. And when in doubt, director Harold Ramis makes Jack Black eat his own feces and Michael Cera pee in his own mouth. Yes, this is at the level of YouTube monkey comedy.

Full Review | Original Score: .5/4 | Dec 3, 2009

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• DVD & Streaming

Content Caution

In Theaters

• June 19, 2009
• Jack Black as Zed; Michael Cera as Oh; Oliver Platt as High Priest; David Cross as Cain; Olivia Wilde as Princess Inanna; Juno Temple as Eema; June Diane Raphael as Maya

Home Release Date

• October 6, 2009
• Harold Ramis

Distributor

• Columbia Pictures

Movie Review

It’s tempting, in our cell phone-drenched society, to pine for simpler days—a time when Twitter was what you heard in the trees, Blackberrys were what you picked from the bushes and blogs were the noises your stomach made when it was hungry.

Best buds Zed and Oh, though, are fed up with those simpler days. Zed’s an inept hunter. Oh’s an underappreciated gatherer. And when those are the only two jobs available in a hunter-gatherer society, it leads to workplace angst.

But Zed wants bigger, better things for himself. On a whim, he picks a glowing apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and takes a bite.

“It has sort of a knowledgey taste,” he informs Oh.

Alas, eating the forbidden fruit is, well, forbidden, and his tribe kicks poor Zed out of the village. Oh tags along—primarily because Zed accidentally burns down Oh’s hut, freeing him from both the responsibilities of home ownership and his daunting prehistoric mortgage. Why not take a little vacation? To, say, Sodom?

And so begins history’s first would-be road trip adventure (if there were any roads) or its first buddy comedy (if there were any laughs). As it is, so begins 97 minutes of blasphemous stone age inanity that left me looking for stray rocks upon which to bang my head.

Positive Elements

Despite some bumpy moments, Oh and Zed develop a genuine affection for one another. They rescue old friends from slavery along the way. And the film says human sacrifice is bad.

Spiritual Elements

Zed and Oh meander through a bizarre, pseudo-biblical narrative that spoofs scenes from Genesis while lampooning those characters’ religious beliefs. We’ll talk more about the implications of that in the conclusion, but let’s go over some specific examples here:

The Garden of Eden: After Zed eats some forbidden fruit, a snake shows up and nearly constricts Oh. Throughout the film, Zed brags about his new knowledge when it’s pretty clear he hasn’t been enlightened much at all.

Cain and Abel: Zed and Oh watch Cain repeatedly clock Abel in the head with a rock, eventually killing him. After the murder, Cain “encourages” the travelers to have dinner with his family, where we meet Adam, Seth and a daughter named Lilith (a character who originates from Mesopotamian sources and, in medieval Jewish mysticism, was said to be Adam’s first wife). Adam instructs Zed to lay with Lilith, to obey God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.” But Lilith isn’t interested because, she says, “I like girls.”

When Cain’s evil deed is discovered, He escapes Adam’s grasp by ox cart and taunts, “Who’s in God’s favor now?!” A lightning bolt immediately strikes Cain in the forehead, scarring him. Cain then sells Zed and Oh into slavery and, later, meets up with them again as a guard in the city of Sodom.

Abraham and Isaac: Zed and Oh stumble upon Abraham just as he’s about to sacrifice Isaac. Zed and Oh convince the father not to kill his son. Abraham invites the pair back to his tent and, later, encourages them to be circumcised. After Zed and Oh leave Abraham’s outpost, they hear a bloodcurdling scream—apparently from Isaac as he’s being circumcised.

Sodom: Despite Abraham’s warnings that God is about to smite Sodom for its sinfulness, Zed and Oh travel there (accompanied by Isaac, who says he sneaks off to the city now and then to party on weekends). Sodom’s citizens worship a pantheon of gods, including the god Molech, sacrificing virginal victims by tossing them into a pit of fire via the mouth of a gigantic bull. The purpose of such sacrifices? To bring rain. The Sodomites also have a room they call the “holy of holies,” a place where they believe the gods hang out (and a reference to Judaism’s own “Holy of Holies,” where the Ark of the Covenant was kept). They believe anyone who enters the room (except for the high priest) will immediately die—a belief challenged when both Zed and Oh spend time in the chamber without ill effects. Also worth noting here: Sodom doesn’t get destroyed by God, as in the biblical account, though Abraham does show up with a small army to fight and collect foreskins.

Elsewhere, a tribal shaman refers to an Iroquois creation myth, in which the world is perched on the back of a giant turtle. A character wonders why we should assume that God is a man. Zed believes he was chosen by God for special things. Oh challenges this belief, expressing his doubts about whether God exists at all. Later, however, Oh prays to an unnamed god, asking that the girl he likes would fall in love with him. In the end, Zed—whom the Sodomites are prepared to worship as “the chosen one”—tells the populace that they should all consider themselves chosen. Rain immediately begins to fall—perhaps a sign of blessing as Zed apparently renounces the tempting notion that he is, in fact, a messiah.

Sexual Content

While Year One steers clear of nudity, the film is as raunchy and debauched a PG-13 movie as I’ve ever seen. Cain tells Zed and Oh that the best thing about Sodom is “the sodomy.” When the buddies first arrive, they’re nearly abused thusly by a guard with a large studded stick. Sodom’s high priest is apparently a homosexual (in priestly drag), and he takes a shine to Oh at a palace orgy. Oh rubs oil on the man’s chest while the priest talks dirty. Dialogue later on hints that Oh experienced much more at the hands of the high priest.

We hear scads of references to sodomy, homosexuality and bestiality. Circumcision, foreskin and penis jokes are constant. Two characters lose their virginity (off camera). Others writhe suggestively in revealing togas during an orgy and indulge in sexualized pantomime involving bananas, spears and pieces of meat. Conversations are dotted with references to anatomical parts, sexual acts and states of arousal.

A princess is said to have a venereal disease. Oh suggests that Zed masturbates. Zed intimates that he had sex with his mother (joking about how what seemed like a good idea was really awkward the morning after). A eunuch carries his testicles in a pouch around his neck, and he eventually hurls them at Zed and Oh. One woman gets poked in the breast. Oh accidentally breaks an exaggerated stone phallus off an idol.

And that’s just the short summary.

Violent Content

Year One was indeed a violent year. As Isaac tells Zed and Oh, “We’re at war with someone every other day!” Audiences see folks punched, kicked, grabbed, pinched, speared, flipped, whipped, bashed with rocks, partially stoned, smacked with sticks, crushed by scaffolding, thrown off tower walls and tossed into fiery pits. One soldier loses his head in battle, and we watch it bounce and roll through the dirt.

And it’s all supposed to be funny. Cain’s murder of Abel is played as dark comedy. Even scenes in which people are mercilessly whipped are played for laughs.

When Abraham drops his sacrificial knife, it stabs his foot. We hear that one character’s parents were torn apart by wild dogs and that Zed got into the orphan’s good graces by making fun of the whole incident. After all, what could be funnier than reliving the dismemberment of your family?

Crude or Profane Language

One f-word and about 10 s-words. We hear quite a few other vulgarities as well, including “d–n,” “h—” and the British profanity “bloody.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Zed smokes a pipe. A few women drink something—drugged wine, perhaps?—from a goblet so they “won’t feel a thing” when they’re thrown into the pit of fire. We hear references to hemp, and Isaac says that he “drinks wine and smokes herb” when he visits Sodom. Orgy attendees imbibe as well.

Other Negative Elements

Zed sniffs, licks and nibbles bear feces. While hanging upside down, Oh urinates on his own face. He also spends a “sleepover” of sorts in a bed with young Seth, who’s deeply infatuated with his own flatulence. Zed and Oh are betrayed regularly by people they run into (including biblical good-guy Isaac), and the pair vomits while riding a cart. Priests try to divine the future by reading goopy animal innards.

Year One is a spiritual muddle. On one hand, it mostly focuses on stripping religious stories of their subtle, powerful subtext while mining them for cheap, deeply profane laughs. It belittles belief and mocks religious tradition, taking shots at both the biblical narrative and the practices of pagans, arguably suggesting that there’s little difference between the two.

And yet, the movie isn’t really an exercise in atheism, either. Year One ‘s god—whoever that deity may be, and the movie never really tells us for sure—marks Cain for his murder, sends down much-needed rain and, indirectly, answers prayer and validates some characters’ faith.

Of these conflicting spiritual themes, director Harold Ramis told CNN, “I wanted to do a film that kind of addressed these fundamental beliefs and urged people to take personal responsibility, no matter what they believe God is or isn’t. It’s still up to us in the final analysis.”

Personal responsibility is a good thing—something the Bible itself teaches. But ironically, the folks behind Year One show little responsibility themselves in their storytelling. They’ve ignored the spiritual depth behind the stories they lampooned, instead using the pages of Genesis to make paper boats—flimsy, temporary things to be used, discarded or crushed at leisure.

These stories haven’t been with us for thousands of years by accident. And even many people who don’t consider themselves believers would nonetheless acknowledge that biblical narratives have influenced art, law, literature, culture and history in profound ways. These stories have earned the right to be respected.

But really, delving that deeply into the film’s philosophical underpinnings—or lack thereof—gives it way too much credit. Year One is not just profane. It’s a gross, tawdry mess that elicited more “ewwws” than “ha-ha’s” from the audience. In fact, it was so unpleasant and unfunny to sit through that, after it was over, the woman beside me turned and said, “This was the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

Ditto, lady. Ditto.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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‘Year One: A Political Odyssey’ Review: Biden by the Numbers

Despite the insider access, a documentary about the president’s first year in office is short on intriguing tidbits.

By Nicolas Rapold

With the even keel of an official chronicle, the documentary “Year One: A Political Odyssey,” by the director John Maggio, sets down an account of diplomacy during President Biden’s first 365-plus days in office. The selective overview is mostly recounted by administration officials, with the New York Times correspondent David E. Sanger acting as a valuable guide throughout.

Underlining Biden’s international, alliance-building outlook, the focus is on efforts to reckon responsibly with the power plays of Russia, China and Afghanistan. Key figures including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary (but not Biden), sit down for sober interviews that feel like a well-sourced recap. Some crises are less frequently referenced now (the SolarWinds hack); others still loom (Russia’s war on Ukraine).

We’re reminded that Biden took office in the still-shellshocked aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, promising a vital return to normalcy and democracy after the presidency of Donald Trump. His Covid vaccination achievement was followed that summer by a one-two punch: the rise of coronavirus variants and the fall of Afghanistan. But the chaotic unfolding of events in Afghanistan yielded lessons for responding to the run-up of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Yet the movie is quiet on domestic policy apart from the pandemic, while covering several international summits. And despite the insider access, intriguing tidbits — like how leaks kept Sanger informed about U.S. intelligence on Russia — will be few to anyone who has been reading the news. The film’s skimping on economic and social issues echoes one description of Biden’s own messaging by some pundits: low-key to the point of obscuring the full picture of his efforts.

Year One: A Political Odyssey Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on HBO Max .

Year One (2009)

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2009, PG-13, 97 min. Directed by Harold Ramis. Starring Jack Black, Michael Cera, Oliver Platt, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, David Cross, Olivia Wilde, Hank Azaria, Juno Temple, Vinnie Jones.

Reviewed by marc savlov , fri., june 26, 2009.

Slayer was right: God hates us all. How else to explain this blasphemously asinine and crudely scatological buddy pic so obsessed with bodily discharge that it makes Pasolini's Salò look like an episode of Full House ? What's even more depressing than the never-ending stream of sub-sixth-grade toilet humor is the sad fact that Year One is helmed and co-produced by two of the best laughmeisters in the business. Director Ramis has bona fide classics Caddyshack , Stripes , and Groundhog Day to his credit, and producer Judd Apatow would still be a legend even if he had abandoned comedy for the priesthood following Freaks and Geeks . Year One reimagines the Book of Genesis as a warped Hope and Crosby comic travelogue – The Road to Sodom – minus the class and Dorothy Lamour and with Black and Cera playing to type in pre-Darwinian variations of their respective obnoxious oaf and wide-eyed naif roles. Zed (Black) and Oh (Cera), predictably inept hunter-gatherers, are banished from their tribe after Zed dines on the proverbial forbidden fruit and takes it on the lam, trudging through prehistory from one biblical high point (Cain and Abel's filial tiff) to another (Azaria's Abraham, in the film's only truly inspired bit). Black's Zed is little more than a horn-dog riff on Ringo Starr's turn in 1981's Caveman , while Cera barely registers throughout. Read literally, the Old Testament is, of course, notoriously X-rated. Awash in bestiality, rape, pedophilia, murder, and overall seaminess, the whole sordid tale has proved to be a blast with religions worldwide, but Year One co-scribes Ramis, Gene Stupnitsky, and Lee Eisenberg somehow manage to leech all the inherently subversive fun out of the whole thing. The end result has you pining for the days when the Catholic Church could be offended enough to declare war on both Monty Python's Life of Brian and Jean-Luc Godard's Hail Mary . The only people who should be peeved enough to raise hell about Year One are the viewers who had to pay to sit through it.

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Marjorie Baumgarten, Nov. 25, 2005

Marc Savlov, Dec. 13, 2002

Aug. 7, 2022

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Year One , Harold Ramis , Jack Black , Michael Cera , Oliver Platt , Christopher Mintz-Plasse , David Cross , Olivia Wilde , Hank Azaria , Juno Temple , Vinnie Jones

‘Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire' Review: A Godzilla Spectacle Minus One Thing: a Reason to Exist

Watching "Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire," I realized that the movie, a standard overly busy and mediocre blockbuster with a pretty awesome wow of a clash-of-the-titans climax, was demonstrating one of the essential principles of Hollywood movie culture today. Namely: All blockbuster movies are now connected!

Kong, living in the Hollow Earth, where most of the film is set (the Hollow Earth is a place I've never much liked the idea of, since it seems like Earth's version of a storage basement), is supposedly the last of his kind, but he discovers a child ape who actually looks like an homage to the cuddly creature in the 1967 Japanese film "Son of Godzilla." This kid gorilla leads Kong to a tribe of scraggly hostile apes who are living in a slave society presided over by the Skar King, an evil ape with blotchy red hair who's as tall as Kong and wields a skeletal bone whip that looks like it was fashioned out of the spine of a sea serpent. He also commands, as a kind of personal weapon of mass destruction, a gigantoid creature who's like a stegosaurus who got left in the freezer - and, in fact, his main power is a breath ray that can turn anything, including the mighty Kong, to ice.

In other words, Kong is facing a force who's exactly like the villain in "Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire"!

Then there's Godzilla. He spends the film preparing for an apocalyptic showdown by traveling from one place to the next and absorbing radiation, first from a nuclear facility, then from an undersea battle with a flower-headed monster so radioactive it's iridescent. By the time Godzilla is done with all this, his very being has been suffused with radioactive power, to the point that he literally turns pink .

In other words, he looks like he's having his "Barbie" moment.

And then there's the essential way that "Godzilla x Kong," the fifth entry in the MonsterVerse, is a lot like the umpteenth installment of a superhero franchise. The movie is punctuated with occasional creature battles, but for the first 90 minutes it's more devoted than not to coloring in the backstory of its world-building. (I know that prospect is already exciting you.) Godzilla and Kong each have a complicated relationship with their place in the earthly cosmos, and the story jumps through major hoops to transform them from foes to comrades.

The film's central character, Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall), while she's busy charting all this, is most invested in the fate of Jia (Kaylee Hottle), the adoptive daughter she rescued after the Iwi people of Skull Island were destroyed. As it happens, the Hollow Earth is home to another tribe of Iwi (there's a lot going on in that basement), who Jia can communicate with telepathically. And she turns out to be a kind of chosen one, since Jia will prove the key figure in activating Mothra (now reimagined in shimmery designer gold), Godzilla's old nemesis-turned-ally, who will be instrumental in the outcome of the final clash…

The thing that connects "Godzilla x Kong" to last year's run of superhero films - the ones that everybody complained about - is that, just like them, the movie can make your head hurt. But not because it's too convoluted to follow. It's because the real convolution is: Why are we supposed to care? About any of this?

The fact that we might not makes "Godzilla x Kong" feel like one of those "Jurassic Park" sequels where everyone is huffing and puffing about the fate of the world and "relevant" issues of genetic engineering - but we're just there for the ride, which now feels like it has a study sheet attached. I guess this is the part of the review where I'm supposed to say that Brian Tyree Henry, as the wide-eyed tech-whistleblower-turned-conspiracy-blogger Bernie Hayes, and Dan Stevens, as the snarky British veterinarian Trapper, are a riot, but it felt to me like the two actors were mostly filling space. Rebecca Hall, in a no-nonsense haircut, uses her avid severity well, and Kaylee Hottle, as Jia, has a luminous presence, but I'm sorry, every time the film summons a human dimension it feels like boilerplate.  

You could say that the qualifier, the one that's always there in a Godzilla movie, is that in the kaiju films of Japan the stories don't matter either; they are often nonsense. But not always. The original "Godzilla," in 1954, was schlock with a fairy-tale sci-fi gravity; that was true, as well, of the other two standouts of the early kaiju films, "Mothra" (1961) and "Destroy All Monsters" (1968). And it may turn out to be a stroke of karmic bad luck that "Godzilla x Kong" is coming out right on the heels of "Godzilla Minus One," the movie that rocked the world of monster cinema. It had the lyrical majesty of those earlier films, as well as a story, rooted in Japan's World War II trauma, that was actually linear and moving. It reminded you that these creatures could carry an emotional grandeur.

"Godzilla x Kong," by contrast, is product, though it would be foolish to pretend that the best parts of it don't "deliver." The director, Adam Wingard (who made "Godzilla vs. Kong"), knows how to choreograph a beastie battle so that it does maximum damage in a way that appeals to your inner toy-smashing seven-year-old. In an early sequence where Godzilla ravages Rome (before curling up and going to sleep in the Colosseum), I actually winced at the image of all those gorgeous old buildings - all that history - reduced to rubble. Yet there's a part of me that wishes that Godzilla, and the rest of the movie, would continue to stomp the real world. When these monsters are trashing recognizable cities, their mayhem is relatable, and the spectacle of it literally looks more real. When they square off against a backdrop of the craggy mountains and vistas of the Hollow Earth, you're much more aware of the CGI-ness of it all.

Kong unfreezes himself, and proves once again to be the fiercest primate around. And Godzilla outradiates his foes, even as he's now so defined by that pink glow that it's almost as if he's being set up as a new kind of allegorical monster: not a metaphor for the bomb, but a metaphor for…the return of responsible nuclear energy? Stay tuned for the next eye-popping and meaningless sequel.                

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Late Night with the Devil is the best horror movie of the year so far

Don't miss it in cinemas now.

Sydney Sweeney's religious horror Immaculate has been unleashed in cinemas, while Australian chiller You'll Never Find Me is now available to stream on Shudder . The best of the trio of strong releases though is found-footage horror Late Night with the Devil .

We know what you're thinking. Found footage has had its day and there's not really anything you can do with it anymore. Yet Late Night with the Devil puts a Ghostwatch spin on the genre to deliver something original, compelling and terrifying.

Late Night with the Devil opens with a mockumentary sequence about late-night talk show host Jack Delroy ( David Dastmalchian ). Once a rising star in the early 1970s, Jack's career has stalled following his wife's death and Night Owls with Jack Delroy is on life support.

In 1977, faced with the end of his career, Jack decided to go all-out with a Halloween special that featured a psychic and a former magician-turned-skeptic. His most controversial guest though is a parapsychologist and the subject of her latest book: young teenager Lilly who is the sole survivor of a Satanic church's mass suicide.

Unknown to anybody but Jack and his producer, Jack intended to use Lilly to summon a demon live on TV to save his show and his career. It went about as well as you'd expect, and Late Night with the Devil presents the complete unedited master tape of that fateful episode.

Of course, Night Owls with Jack Delroy was never a real show and there wasn't a live broadcast of a possession on Halloween night in 1977. The genius of Late Night with the Devil is that it'll often make you question if you're genuinely watching something real.

The retro production design is exceptional – it's worth noting there has been an online backlash to AI being used in the show's artwork though – and the tone of the 'show' is spot-on for this era of late-night chat shows.

David Dastmalchian – an actor who revels in weird roles – might seem like an odd fit for a clean-cut late-night host, but he pitches the performance with the right amount of charisma and cheese.

Unsurprisingly, we know that Jack is far from the persona he projects on his show. During the ad breaks, Late Night with the Devil cuts to black-and-white to show what happened behind-the-scenes, allowing Dastmalchian to let Jack's sinister side slip through and portray the desperation behind the façade.

It's one of Dastmalchian's strongest movie performances, but even he's outshone by talented newcomer Ingrid Torelli as Lilly. As you're lulled into believing you're watching a late-night show, Torelli can completely unsettle you by just staring directly into the camera as though she's looking into your soul.

Writers/directors Colin and Cameron Cairnes – the duo behind riotous horror-comedy 100 Bloody Acres – largely keep the gore and ick factor to a minimum. Bar one brilliantly gross sequence involving worms (that also becomes a fun meta gag), the focus is on creeping unease and a sense of dread.

But they do let loose in a finale that could prove divisive as it's tonally distinct to the rest of the movie. All pretences that this was a real show go out the window as things get weird and bloody, Jack's demons truly coming home to roost in spectacular fashion.

It's a fittingly unique ending to Late Night with the Devil , one of the most inventive takes on found footage in years. Jack Delroy might not have been real, but the scares definitely are.

Late Night with the Devil is in cinemas now and arrives on Shudder on April 19.

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Movies Editor, Digital Spy  Ian has more than 10 years of movies journalism experience as a writer and editor.  Starting out as an intern at trade bible Screen International, he was promoted to report and analyse UK box-office results, as well as carving his own niche with horror movies , attending genre festivals around the world.   After moving to Digital Spy , initially as a TV writer, he was nominated for New Digital Talent of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards. He became Movies Editor in 2019, in which role he has interviewed 100s of stars, including Chris Hemsworth, Florence Pugh, Keanu Reeves, Idris Elba and Olivia Colman, become a human encyclopedia for Marvel and appeared as an expert guest on BBC News and on-stage at MCM Comic-Con. Where he can, he continues to push his horror agenda – whether his editor likes it or not.  

.css-15yqwdi:before{top:0;width:100%;height:0.25rem;content:'';position:absolute;background-image:linear-gradient(to right,#51B3E0,#51B3E0 2.5rem,#E5ADAE 2.5rem,#E5ADAE 5rem,#E5E54F 5rem,#E5E54F 7.5rem,black 7.5rem,black);} Movie Reviews

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Screen Rant

Christopher nolan’s next movie challenges an interesting 24-year career trend.

Christopher Nolan's next movie may require the director to step outside his comfort zone for the first time since 2002 when it comes to one issue.

• Nolan's rumored remake of The Prisoner may challenge his usual style of neatly tying up loose ends in his films.
• The success of Nolan's movies is often attributed to his ability to explain complex themes, unlike the intentionally ambiguous Prisoner series.
• Some critics believe Nolan's upcoming project, influenced by The Prisoner, may signal a shift towards embracing ambiguity over clarity.

Although Christopher Nolan ’s movies often offer answers to their many mysteries, his next project could challenge this longstanding tradition. Almost all of Christopher Nolan’s movies have an array of instantly identifiable trademarks. Most of Nolan’s work features non-linear storytelling, an approach that facilitates a lot of unexpected twists and turns. A lot of Nolan’s movies feature colder color palettes defined by blue and grey tones, and many of his projects utilize practical effects over CGI where possible. However, Nolan’s rumored next movie could upend some of these conventions and challenge the director to broaden his horizons.

Although rumor persisted that Nolan had been attached to Bond 26 for years, the director’s next project is now said to be a remake of the seminal ‘60s TV show The Prisoner . A trippy sci-fi miniseries, The Prisoner followed Number 2, a spy who wakes up to find himself held hostage by an organization. Stranded on a seemingly idyllic island, Number 2 spends the entire miniseries attempting to work out who captured him and what their motives are. Infamously, the show ends with a psychedelic sequence that doesn't answer either question but raises many more unanswered mysteries.

Christopher Nolan’s Take On The Prisoner Could Over-Explain

The cult series is infamous for its impenetrable, ambiguous finale.

A remake of The Prisoner would live or die based on its ambiguity , but leaving enigmas unexplained is hardly a hallmark of Nolan’s famously clinical storytelling style. The director’s movies run like clockwork, often outlining their complicated plots between breathless action set-pieces. While it has been a while since Nolan made a straightforward remake , even his most complicated and cerebral movies can’t be faulted for not explaining their stories. Where directors like David Lynch and Richard Kelly intentionally leave many story strands unexplained, Nolan’s movies neatly tie together any loose ends as their stories unfold.

From Inception to Interstellar , Nolan’s movies have dealt with topics as complicated as dreams within dreams and the very fabric of space-time itself. However, even 2020’s knotty time-jump thriller Tenet did explain most of its world and the rules involved in its trippy story. In contrast, The Prisoner is influential, iconic, and famous mostly because of how vague, ambiguous, and unclear it was. The miniseries offered no easy answers to viewers , instead taking them on a psychedelic journey that left audiences lost. Even Nolan’s most out-of-order movies have never attempted this risky feat.

Nolan’s Movies (Successfully) Explain Everything

The prestige, interstellar, and inception made complicated premises accessible.

The fact that Nolan’s movies always explain themselves isn’t a bad thing. On the contrary, Nolan’s movies have made heavy themes digestible by explaining their stories, and it is tough to think of many other directors who could clarify the plots of Inception or Memento . That said, Nolan’s approach isn’t necessarily a good fit for his upcoming remake. The Prisoner ’s trippy visuals did influence some of Oppenheimer ’s more ambitiously weird sequences, so it is clear that Nolan has a lot of love for the series. This doesn’t change the fact that its bizarre story is antithetical to his logic-driven storytelling style.

Nolan’s movies make sense despite their complexity , whereas The Prisoner was inscrutable despite its apparent simplicity. On its face, the miniseries was a show about a man stuck on an island who tries to escape and unmask his captors. However, the reason that Nolan’s remake of The Prisoner could fail is that the show was so much more than that. Critics could read The Prisoner as a condemnation of collectivist ideology, a satire of government overreach, a Cold War parable, a hallucination brought on by imperial guilt, or a parody of spy media precisely because the miniseries never explained itself.

One Divisive Nolan Movie Makes The Prisoner’s Challenge Harder

Tenet’s mixed reviews cited nolan’s under-explanation as a flaw.

Some critics of Nolan’s 2020 thriller Tenet said that the movie’s metaphysical elements should have been explained more thoroughly, but that’s the opposite of what the enigmatic, cryptic The Prisoner calls for. As such, if Nolan can loosen his grip on rational storytelling The Prisoner could succeed and usher in a new era for him in the process. Already, Tenet and Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer succeeded by taking on a more hallucinatory, trippy style than his earlier work. The Prisoner may see Nolan double down on this approach, proving that he can create a story without clear answers.

If The Prisoner is to succeed, it will be because Nolan has let go of the logic that anchors most of his work. The Prisoner ’s success was rooted in the daring decision to never offer a clear explanation of the world of the miniseries and the events that Number Two experienced. Nolan has already proven that he has the stylistic chops to direct a remake of the series, but only Tenet and Oppenheimer have hinted at his ability to leave big plot questions unanswered. As such, Christopher Nolan ’s next movie will be a major challenge for the director.

‘One of the Good Ones’ Review: Pasadena Playhouse’s Cross-Cultural Comedy Brings a Norman Lear Sensibility to the Stage

By Chris Willman

Chris Willman

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Or should that be Latinx , or Latine , or…? That question of contemporary usage and semantics is one of about a hundred things that will come to be debated over the course of an hour-and-a-half comedy that finds its laughs largely in exploring racial and/or generational differences. By the time this (mostly) four-character piece has gotten to the issue of what suffix best follows “Latin-,” it’s relaxed into something that feels more like a witty conversation than a farcical argument, which is when “One of the Good Ones” is at its best. The setup feels forced, even contrived, at this late date. Yet there’s no denying that the creakiness of the premise provides some basic building blocks for a show that gets more pleasurable as it goes along, once everyone stops being forced to pretend that we can’t all just get along. Even after it’s established that we can, there’s still a lot to talk about.

Parrilla, as the mom,gets to succumb to reason faster, thanks to the emotional shortcut that her tight maternal connection with their daughter provides. But her character is also the most theatrically hyperactive of this lot, having been saddled with menopausal hot flashes and a deep insecurity complex over never having learned Spanish, despite her Mexican family heritage. Illana borders in the early scenes on seeming unduly flighty for someone that we’re told has built her own business empire. Eventually, though, Calderón Kellett’s script gives her some of its starkest and boldest lines — including the biggest applause line of the night, about how her native California used to be part of Mexico. (It comes close to being this show’s “Barbie speech,” if we can call that a thing now.) The sympathy Parrilla engenders in a theatrical setting will be a nice reset for any attendees who have her Evil Queen turn on TV’s “Once Upon a Time” villainously burned into their brains. Here, she just gets to be queen.

As their daughter, Yoli, Isabella Gomez doesn’t get quite as much to do comedically as the rest of the cast; she’s the straightwoman, for the most part, gradually dribbling out the revelations that make others blow gaskets. There are some inconsistencies to Yoli: She insists on bragging to her parents about how good her new guy is in the sack (that might cause an “Ew” from the audience, as well as dad), but then she acts disgusted when they joke about their own marital horniness. And she’s supposed to be a successful influencer, in her own post-collegiate right, yet this professional over-sharer has never sent a photo of her caucasian steady to her folks, or they’ve just never peeked at her account. She’s portrayed as too candid and fearless to have ever withheld his race for any reason other than sheer forgetfulness, which doesn’t quite track for a perfect daughter, either. But Gomez (who worked with the playwright on “One Day at a Time”) shines through even these gaps in characterization — it’s no chore to be rooting for her to find love outside the nest.

To say that a new play betrays a sitcom sensibility probably sounds a little pejorative, under most circumstances. Amend that to Norman Lear sitcom sensibility, though, and the interest level rises, at least if you’re a sucker for the kind of comedy that means to humor us with humanism.  Calderón Kellett is very much a graduate of the Lear school, having been the co-creator and co-showrunner of “One Day at a Time,” in its Lear-derived, Latina-focused reboot for a few successful seasons. In the best Lear tradition, all the characters kind of trade off being the smart and noble or ridiculous ones in any given argument. That doesn’t always make for the most consistent characterizations, but it does feel deeply fair in the way that both sitcoms and life should be, where everybody in a culture clash is ultimately well-motivated and no one gets to win the rap battle every time.

Despite going for some pretty broad tropes in the setup, Calderón Kellett is proving herself worthy of carrying the late master’s torch into the realm of theater. And for all its aspirations to inspire, this is a show that will rise or fall on its provocation of laughs. “One of the Good Ones” has more than enough good, conscientious ones to enjoy a life beyond the San Gabriel Valley. That will likely continue at least for as long as a production has a director as good as efficient as maintaining an unflagging energy as Kimberly Senior, who finds an effortless fluidity in navigating the play’s serious and silly moments.

Speaking of how the play will or won’t travel, there’s one very homegrown, or at least location-based, ingredient that works especially well at the Pasadena Playhouse: the fact that it’s set in Pasadena, in the kind of grand, wood-filled house that seems too neo-Craftsman-y to call a mansion, but which counts as one nonetheless. If you live in Northeast L.A., it’s the kind of house you always wish you’d be invited over to but never are, so 80 minutes or so spent in Tanya Orellana’s crafty facsimile might be the next best thing.

But it’s not the living room that is going to make the time spent go by in a breeze. It’s the talk, which feels honestly conversational once the manufactured chaos simmers down to a mere boil. That’s not to say it ever stops avoiding punchlines — and there are some very good ones, like: “Come on, Marcos. Colonize that pinata.” (You’ll have to see the play to see how it gets there.) Yes, it feels like an elevated sitcom, and one that could stand some tweaks to ground it a bit more in the realm of the stage. But the key question is: if “One of the Good Ones” were the pilot for a series, would you want to come back and hang with these folks next week? More likely than not, the answer will be yes.

• Production:  A Pasadena Playhouse production.
• Crew:  Director: Kimberly Senior. Playwright: Gloria Calderón Kellett. Scenic design: Tanya Orellana. Costume design: Denitsa Bliznakova. Lighting design: Jaymi Lee Smith. Sound design: Jeff Gardner, Andrea Allmond. Stage manager: David S. Franklin. Fight and intimacy coordinator: Rachel Lee Flesher. Casting: Ryan Bernard Tymensky. Assistant stage manager: Miriam E. Mendoza.
• Cast:  Lana Parrilla, Carlos Gomez, Isabella Gomez, Nico Greetham, Santino Jiminez.

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

• Sam Taylor-Johnson
• Matt Greenhalgh
• Marisa Abela
• Eddie Marsan
• Jack O'Connell
• 1 Critic review

• Amy Winehouse

• Mitch Winehouse

• Blake Fielder-Civil

• Cynthia Winehouse

• Janis Winehouse

• Raye Cosbert

• Aunt Melody

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• Runtime 2 hours 2 minutes

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