Quick Hits: March 2026

Over the past few years, my March has always been busy. This year, even more so, as in addition to attending the Boston Underground Film Festival and spending an extra long weekend at a board game convention, I spent another weekend away with friends to close out the month. These were all wonderful times, but did interrupt my pace of review writing a bit. Interestingly, despite that, if you were to remove the BUFF films, the length of this list would still roughly match the previous two entries in this series.

Note that although I didn't write a full review of Obsession or Buffet Infinity, they are still omitted here because they were covered in my BUFF wrap-up.

Slanted

After playing Chris's sister in coming-of-age masterpiece Dìdi (弟弟), Shirley Chen gets to helm her own, albeit one more in the vein of Bottoms. Everything is heightened and melodramatic, and the social commentary is blunt enough to knock you out cold. Also, its premise means it's only half Chen's movie; after she elects (without her parents' knowledge) to undergo an extreme, experimental form of ethnic modification surgery to become white, Mckenna Grace leads the rest of the film. Which may be meant as a statement itself, but if so, it falls as flat as the rest of the movie, a try-hard, fairly unfunny (although still somewhat charming) story that still plays out all the expected beats.

Hoppers

The original Pixar movie best received by both critics and audiences since Coco nearly a decade ago, Hoppers is an absolute delight from start to finish. Unlike Elio, a film which basically requires you to be enamored with space for it to land, this goofy sci-fi adventure is broad enough to appeal to a wide audience, but specific and clever enough to reward those who insist on quality from their children's films. It's wickedly funny, and succeeds at hitting a resonant emotional register far more strongly than they have in a while.

GOAT

"The Steph Curry animated basketball movie" is how this has been sold, and yeah, that's pretty spot on. The allegorical contrast between a small, scrappy guy who's constantly had to prove himself to silence the haters, and the more established, washed up, former superstar whose arrogance gets in the way of propelling their team to the championship despite still being heralded as the GOAT could hardly be more clear. Unfortunately, this results in a super simple story that hits all the same beats this type of sports story always does, and sends the same message. At least the animation is excellent.

I Swear

The biggest irony of the mess caused by the BAFTA's negligence at their 2026 awards ceremony is how directly the response to it laid bare people's failure to absorb the point of I Swear.

Robert Aramayo won Best Actor for his portrayal of John Davidson, a man who developed Tourette syndrome as a teenager, and eventually used his own experiences as the foundation of a push to educate people about this poorly understood condition, starting with parents of those who have it, and eventually the broader public. While director Kirk Jones landed on an excellent and under discussed topic, and executes it with some super sharp humor, the plot unfolds in such a rote, familiar way that you almost forget to care. Additionally, in a world where RFK Jr.'s influence is being felt the world over, it's hard not to feel queasy about the movie's emphasis on the improvement of John's condition once he stopped taking his pills, only paying passing lip service to the value of medication near the end.

Normal

The opening night movie of the Boston Underground Film Festival, this action-comedy starring Bob Odenkirk just did not work for me. It's too self-serious for the absurdist humor to land, and too absurdist for the sincere emotional beats and darker tone to work. The opening chunk, where it's a Hot Fuzz-like riff on a small town where everything is slightly off is quite well done, but once it slips into convoluted crime movie, every moment of Odenkirk's performance feels so forced and unnatural. The plot is incredibly contrived, and its ninety minutes drag on forever. Some of the kills are pretty sweet, but even then, they're mostly not as over the top nor creative as I would have liked.

Sugar Rot

This is a solid concept, and that its production design is this elaborate and outstanding despite being made on a shoestring budget is absurdly impressive.

But the narrative is quite thin, hitting its points about the objectification of women and disregard for their well-being over and over and over, with little variation in their execution. A handful of its plot points are introduced murkily and only gain clarity much later on. And it never lets up, a miserabilist, candy-coated lamentation whose twisted humor never quite works.

Also, even for a low-budget movie, the ADR and audio quality were distractingly awful, and rarely consistent across characters, making their failure all the more confounding.

The Hedonist

I really wanted to like this, as it's wickedly funny and confidently executed. While I didn't hate it by any stretch, it just left me feeling empty. The idea of a lonely, obliviously awkward and cringeworthy dude hiring a sex worker to live with him for a week, mostly just for companionship (although also for attempted sex) while his parents are out of town definitely has potential. But the unflinchingly deadpan style it employs works against it whenever it wants to hit a dramatic beat, and even some of the comedic ones. So in the end, it all just feels too slight and disjointed to really land.

Cramps! A Period Piece

What saves this from disaster is how unabashedly over the top and insane and campy and hilarious it is from start to finish, while also addressing a young woman's struggles against her body's revolting against her (specifically, endometriosis). But it blows past camp to feel stilted, with lighting and performances and dialog and staging and camerawork that combine to make it feel more like a college theater production than a movie. And the script's irreverent humor causes the plot to flirt with incoherence despite its cliched simplicity.

Boorman and the Devil

I went off a bit in my Letterboxd review of this one, so you should read that. The short version is that rather than an illuminating exploration of what went wrong with Exorcist II: The Heretic, it spends nearly two hours repeating the same claims people have been making about it for years.

CAMP

Atmospherically, this was possibly the best thing I saw at BUFF 2026. It's like dark wave was made into a movie: all fog and backlit forests and lace-draped twenty-something witches and lovely shots of the night sky. But the narrative was incredibly thin, while its wonderful visual poetry often rendered the events opaque. Which may have been fine, if its runtime wasn't pushing two hours. At that point, it just starts to drag, especially because while its underlying story is interesting (and has some similarities with Forbidden Fruits), the plotting is pretty murky at times. That said, it shows a lot of talent on the part of writer-director Avalon Fast, so I hope she gets the chance to tackle another project soon.

Saccharine

This is a fantastic idea, wonderfully executed for ninety minutes. Too bad the movie is nearly 120.

I'm especially fond of the use of reflections, obviously but effectively playing into the theme of body image. All the nuances around what it means to be healthy and societal acceptance and where the line is and more are outstanding. But it forgets to include a scene where Hana tries to break free of her curse, but the consequences of doing so cause her to acquiesce. Without it, we never understand her fear about giving Bertha what she wants, drastically weakening the metaphor and the literal narrative.

Even if you can get past that, the ending sucks. Its meaning is a mystery to me, and it comes out of nowhere, so it reads as shock at the cost of story, which is never a trade-off I enjoy.

The Furious

The action in this film is insane, in the best way. It's super creative and kinetic, and you can tell that a lot of it was done for real, although there's plenty of CGI used to augment the stunts. The plot starts simple, so there isn't much need for heavy dialog to move things forward, although Navin (Joe Taslim) joining our protagonist does provide a welcome change of pace. Where it stumbles is the instinct to complicate things at the end, introducing a brand new bad guy whose presence was not felt before then, bloating what had been a propulsive film. Granted, it allows for more awesome fights, but the fake out ending caused me to react to that revelation more with exhaustion than excitement. It doesn't ruin the movie, but it did temper my enjoyment.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come

I wasn't a huge fan of the first Ready or Not. A solid idea, but it it leaned too heavily into its comedy to undermine anything serious or otherwise dramatic. The incompetence of the killers was entertaining, but so much of the execution felt contrived, and Grace (Samara Weaving) gets few moments of true badassdom. But I was curious what a sequel could possibly be, and intrigued by the addition of Kathryn Newton to the cast as Grace's sister.

Unfortunately, it's just a soft remake.

Sure, there are extra bells and whistles built on top of what came before. Most involve new lore, so much that we pick up Elijah Wood as its adjudicator, and the only character who consistently delights the audience. Other than that, its humor is weirdly muted, and rehashing the joys of the first leave what should be slam dunks bland and unsatisfying. And the attempts at drama between the sisters fall painfully flat.

If you want a flick that covers similar themes but is way more creative in its violence while having a ton more fun and a few simple but effective character beats, go check out They Will Kill You.