Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.6

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. Rocky III: (2017) — 6/10
2. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: (2017) — 9/10
3. Happy S02 (2017) — 7/10
4. No Other Land (2024) — 8/10
5. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985) — 4/10
6. Plane (Absturz im Dschungel) (2023) — 4/10
7. The Holdovers (2023) — 9/10
8. Bastille Day (The Take) (2016) — 7/10
9. Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen (2001) — 7/10
10. Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021) — 5/10

Rocky III: (2017) — 6/10

Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) is the champion. He’s successful. Paulie (Burt Young) feels like he’s not a part of it anymore and descends further into his cups. Rocky pulls him out, gets him back on his feet.

Rocky has been lulled into a false sense of security by having fought good, but defeatable boxers. He fights Hulk Hogan, who goes apeshit, then Rocky goes apeshit, then they’re friends again because it was all for show and for charity. Adrian (Talia Shire) is not amused.

Clubber Lang (Mr. T) is coming up. He’s a hard, brutal, savage man of the streets. He wants a shot. He has no respect. Rocky gives him a shot and is nearly destroyed, losing by knock-out in the second round. Mick (Burgess Meredith) dies of a heart attack immediately after that fight. Rocky had planned to retire after this fight—and he does.

With Mick dead, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) helps Rocky train for a comeback but Rocky has lost “the eye of the tiger.” There is a long-ish sequence of Apollo and Rocky training in a shabby club downtown. Rocky has pretty much given up, though. Apollo and Adrian convince him not to give up because he’s never given up on anything. Cue a classic Rocky montage, complete with Rocky racing Apollo on the beach.

Rocky is ready to take down the loudmouthed, though viciously dangerous Clubber Lang.

As always, the boxing is laughably bad. Rocky uses absolutely no defense but neither does Clubber Lang. Mr. T has no idea how to box. Rocky doesn’t even seem capable of lifting his arms to a defensive position sometimes. In this movie, they pretend that he’s “learned how to box,” but in the end he just goes blow for blow. His new “boxing style” is that he still leads with his forehead but now he ducks sometimes.

So much head trauma. But the movie is rated PG-13 so he doesn’t bleed anymore. Like, not even a little bit. Apollo is making little motions with his hands, as if willing Rocky to do some defense but Rocky might as well have his hands in his pockets.

Rocky has a plan, though. He will tire out Clubber Lang by letting him beat the shit out of him. This is literally how Homer Simpson boxes. I’ll give you three guesses who wins.

The real final is a friendly bout between Apollo and Rocky in Mick’s gym. This probably took place the evening following Rocky’s victory over Clubber Lang, since he didn’t take any damage. Apollo: Ding, ding.

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: (2017) — 9/10

Roald Dahl (Ralph Fiennes) tells the story of how he came to learn the story of Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who’d learned the story of Dr. Chatterjee (Dev Patel), who’d told the story of how he and his colleague Dr. Marshall (Richard Ayode) had made the acquaintance of and learned the story of Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), who’d learned how to see without using his eyes from a yogi (Richard Ayode).

Sugar also became quite gifted in this regard, learning how to see through objects even faster than Khan, honing his powers in order to be able to see through the backs of playing cards so that he could cheat at gambling.

He soon tires of this ignoble pursuit as he’d learned the feat to be able to do something amazing, not to gain filthy lucre. He throws his winnings off of his terrace, showering the people of London with £20 notes.

The police are none too amused and firmly suggest that he find a less chaotic avenue for his charitable pursuits. He establishes orphanages and continues to gamble until his next run-in, which is with the mafioso who runs the Las Vegas casinos that his skills are driving to ruin.

Henry engages a Hollywood make-up artist (Benedict Cumberbatch) to disguise him, and an accountant to help him build an empire of orphanages. He dies twenty years later a happy man, though he is not surprised because he sees his death by pulmonary embolism coming, as he can see through his own skin.

We end up where we came in, with Sugar’s accountant engaging Roald Dahl to write Henry Sugar’s story.

Happy S02 (2017) — 7/10

“Try to do the things you should
Maybe if you’re extra good
He’ll roll lots of Easter eggs your way”

Lyrics to Peter Cottontail by Gene Autry (MusicMatch)

Where the first season was all about the Christmas season, the second season is all about Easter and the Easter Bunny. I’m just kidding, this season is just as wild, weird, and full of child-kidnapping as the first one. As Christmas was in the first season, Easter is just the scaffold on which a metric shit-ton of other stuff is hung.

Lots of characters return from the first season:

• Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni) is driving a cab and trying to stay on the straight and narrow but quickly falls off it, as his former life catches up with and tries to strangle him.
• Happy (Patton Oswalt) still accompanies him as his imaginary friend. Happy gets real happy at one point.
• Blue (Ritchie Coster) is in prison for a while but he—and the demon riding him, Orcus—soon breaks out. With Orcus in the driver’s seat, Blue has a lot of power over people.
• Sonny Shine (Christopher Fitzgerald) is an absolute sociopath who has climbed to the top of the children’s entertainment world and is dead-set on making his name even bigger by “making Easter great again” with an “Eggstacular”
• Merry (Lili Mirojnick) is a on-again/off-again cop who ends up teaming up with Nick to get to the bottom of whatever the hell Sonny is up to.
• Smoothie (Patrick Fischler) kind of/sort of works for Sonny but he’s also got a lot of his own baggage—like a family-size travel set—and has his own disgusting plans.
• Amanda (Medina Senghore) is Nick’s ex-wife and gets sucked into the sordid, sordid goings-on at Sonny’s tower of terror. It’s gross, nasty alien sex and she ends up compensating for the trauma by overeating Easter candy. She is, after all, eating for two.
• Hailey (Bryce Lorenzo) is Amanda and Nick’s daughter and is trying to get her mom to snap out of it, while also trying to form some sort of bond with the nearly fatally broken man who is her father.

So what happens in this 10-episode season? Smoothie’s dressed as an easter-bunny, traveling around with some exploding nuns, all as part of Sonny’s plan to make Easter splash across the front page. At one point, Smoothie has abducted a man, flayed him alive, and then stuffed him into a giant Easter Egg that children are encouraged to crack open during Easter festivities. It is wild.

Sonny gets the Catholic Church on board by telling them that this will be great marketing and will make people forget about the “other stuff”. Fat chance, with Sonny and Smoothie involved, who seem to (also) have an extremely unhealthy obsession with children.

Smoothie starts his “seduction” / grooming of Hailey by insinuating himself into her life once Nick utterly fails as a father once again. Nick had ruined a father/daughter day by getting too excited about how good she was at betting on horses. Don’t ask.

With no hope for reconciliation with his daughter, Nick is a ripe target. He gets blackmailed into trying to harvest a kidney from a live donor but turns the whole thing around on the Hasids who’d hired him, blowing most of them to kingdom come. His next job is to steal a bunch of kompromat video tapes from Sonny’s house, where he meets Sonny’s sloshed and unutterably horny wife Bebe Debarge (Ann-Margret).

Nick and Merry find a lead in the video tapes—Dayglo Doug (Curtis Armstrong)—and hunt him down in an old-age home. Merry is also researching the weird slime that came out of one of the Wishees—the alien beings that have long ago coopted Sonny to their cause—and nearly gets killed by it when she revives it.

Things shift into an even higher gear, with Orcus/Blue’s machinations getting him out of prison, Sonny’s Easter plans coming closer to fruition, Merry getting closer to nailing Sonny with DayGlo Doug’s evidence, Smoothie wrapping Hailey further around his finger, Amanda going even further off the deep end after having been sexually assaulted (raped?) by one or more Wishees, and Nick ingesting just so many hallucinogenic, intoxicating, and quasi-poisonous substances that it’s honestly hard to keep track.

That is the medium gear, though. Because the denouement includes Sonny getting shot at his own Easter Eggstacular, Amanda giving birth to, and then burning, a giant load of Wishee eggs, Smoothie revealing the etymology of his nickname—he’s all “smooth” down there because, as a child, he’d chopped off his own genitals and put them in a jar in order to win a science fair, which is why he needs to pop on a strap-on to rape Nick (did I stutter?)—and the demon Orcus is putting his own plans into high gear.

Despite all the craziness, the show sticks more or less to what you would expect to happen. Nick dies, then comes back, though he’s made a deal with the devil (Orcus) to come back to kill Smoothie, which he does, eventually, on Halloween. Amanda shoots Sonny dead. Happy no longer has a friend, which is kind of sad for him but you gotta grow up sometimes. He’s not a virgin anymore (Oh, Lord, I’d almost forgotten about the colorful scene with Bo Peep (Jaimie Kelton), where his horn factored in considerably).

Look, this is a weird show but it has great characters, great acting, great dialogue, and it’s immensely entertaining. It was based on comics books of the same name. I was sad when it was over.

No Other Land (2024) — 8/10

This was a deeply moving and tragic film that won Best Documentary Feature Film at the 2025 Academy Awards. It was directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, and Hamdan Ballal. Yuval is Israeli while Basel and Hamdan are Palestinian. After winning the award, Hamdan was assaulted and detained in the West Bank. Basel was prevented from returning to his home after a different attack. Yuval stayed nice and safe in Israel, probably to his chagrin, though.

This is a film about the occupation of Gaza, as told by a resistor (Basel) and a young Israeli (Yuval) with whom he’s become friends. They are worlds and worlds apart, though. Many of their deep conversations acknowledge this nearly unbridgeable gap. Yuval is aware that he can return to safety, return to comfort, return to luxury at any time, while his friend cannot. Yuval can travel the world, while Basel can barely leave his village. No-one in Basel’s wonderful family or neighborhood can have peace or comfort, to say nothing of luxury.

The documentary follows life in the West Bank. They are filming the IDF trying to demolish a series of houses to make way for Jewish settlements when the IDF guns down a young man for having gotten in their way, paralyzing him from the neck down. His life is basically over but he’s not dead. We see him lying on a dirt floor in a cave to which his family has had to move because, of course, the Israelis got their way, and the Palestinians had to get out of there. His family not only has one stronger, male provider less now, but has exchanged it for the burden of a patient that would be very difficult to care for in the comparative luxury of Israel.

Luckily for him, he doesn’t last long, and succumbs to his injuries and his family’s inability to care for him properly. As you can imagine, this leaves deep scars on the remaining family members, who, despite the daily tragedy of their lives, are still capable of feeling psychic pain, are still capable of further trauma. The IDF seems to feed on this. They are incredible bastards, just horrible, shallow, miserable, evil people.

There are a lot of conversations about what can be done, how much patience one must have, and how much hope. This was all filmed before the October 7th, 2023 attack, so things have only gotten worse since then. A coda to the film shows that one of Basel’s cousins was killed by the IDF soon after October 7th.

The film won a fuckton of awards from every European country but this is mostly performative because all of those countries continue to supply Israel with the weapons that they use to paralyze innocent people. Now that Gaza is completely gone and the West Bank is swiftly following its path, these countries have made another empty gesture of “recognizing Palestine”. They will watch Palestine be pushed beneath the waves, while breaking their arms congratulating each other for having given an award to a movie about it.

Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985) — 4/10

There’s a new commander Pete Lassard (Howard Hesseman), who’s the brother of Commandant Eric Lassard (George Gaynes), the commander from the first movie. He’s up against a new Lieutenant Mauser (Art Metrano), They’re up against the lawlessness of Zed (Bobcat Goldthwait) and his huge gang.

There are a lot of returning cast members: Hooks (Marion Ramsey), Mahoney (Steve Gutenberg), Winslow (Larvell Jones), Tackleberry (David Graf), and Hightower (Bubba Smith).

Mahoney’s working the beach circuit, on a three-wheeler. Two girls are sunning themselves and sit up quickly because of a giant truck driving by. This would not be otherwise noteworthy, except that they weren’t wearing tops. This, too, would no longer be noteworthy—on my first viewing as a 13-year-old, there was literally no topic in the world more noteworthy—except that their were girls from 1985. They were utterly unenhanced, with normal-sized breasts. They would be considered flat-chested these days, whereas in the mid-80s, they actually got bit parts in a major Hollywood movie.

Tackleberry’s new partner is Kirkland (Colleen Camp), a bad-ass woman who’s more like him than he thinks. They’re having lunch at a hot-dog place when a guy’s order is up. He asks for “an extra portion of ketchup” (in German, because I watched it in German) but there are ketchup and mustard bottles on the table. This is the kind of movie that used to hit it big, before plot-hole experts online ruined everything.

In another scene, they show the cops having a beer in a bar—but they’ve all poured their beers into glasses, with stems. I wasn’t drinking then, so I have no idea whether this is accurate—but this has changed tremendously in the ensuing 40 years. Cop shows and movies now show them drinking straight from the bottles, like real men.

Despite Mauser’s best efforts, the new recruits eventually band together with ex-captain Lassard to take out Zed’s gang in the old zoo. The plot’s not that complicated. The end.

Plane (Absturz im Dschungel) (2023) — 4/10

Brody Torrance (Gerard Butler) is the pilot on a nearly empty flight—there are only 14 passengers. I did not recognize any other actors. They’re headed for Tokyo. They have a prisoner Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter) on board. To absolutely no=one’s surprise, the flight runs into a bad storm. The German title gave it away—it means crash in the jungle.

They give the crash an absolutely inordinate amount of screen time. Actually, the plane does not crash. It lands in a jungle. This is absolutely the cheapest way to make this kind of movie. They just rent a plane interior and have Gerard Butler chew the scenery. It took twenty minutes for the plane to make an emergency landing. Two people died from the turbulence—one of them was the guard for the prisoners. The head flight-attendant Bonnie (Daniella Pineda) takes the keys to the handcuffs.

Back at the command center, Terry Hampton (Paul Ben-Victor) is in charge. I only mention this because Ben-Victor is actually a pretty well-known actor, having played reasonably prominent roles in The Wire, The Irishman, and True Detective.

Finally out of the plane, they can film on a location in California because they’ve supposedly crashed in the Philippines but the site could be anywhere. It’s probably pretty close to Butler’s house, just to keep things simple for him.

Brody takes off through the jungle to get help. He takes Louis with him. There is a long, drawn-out fight that absolutely did not need to be as long as it was, considering it was mostly Brody rolling around on the floor with his assailant. Louis shows up and shoots the prisoner with weapons that he’s picked up somewhere. He’s also managed to contact the head of the supposed rescue operation.

They continue searching the grounds, as the Filipino rebels get wind of them and come in numbers to investigate the passengers on the tarmac. Brody and Louis are on the way back to the tarmac when they hear gunfire.

Now Brody and Louis are trying to rescue the passengers, to absolutely no-one’s surprise. It goes surprisingly well. Sadly, Gerard Butler is really following Steven Seagal’s career arc, although he’s managed to stay fitter.

It turns out that Louis is actually working with the mercenaries sent by the airline to rescue them. It is utterly unclear how an airline is running a military operation. There is a ton of gunfire, with the passengers stuck in the middle, as Brody tries to take off again, with the plane seemingly having been made ready to fly with a lot of willpower. Lots of people have been shot, including Brody. Luckily, few people are shooting the plane, although mercenaries have gotten on board and are firing from there.

Because there is a rhythm to these things, we are all utterly unsurprised to see that the Filipinos have an RPG. Were they actually braking with the wheels? I didn’t see any flaps. It sounded like the plane was braking like a car. It will come as no surprise that they escaped and managed to land with all passengers intact. Brody sits in the plane, after everyone else has left, eyes tearing up. It’s almost like Butler is mourning his shattered career.

Why does a movie like Sisu work so well, when this movie is obvious trash? If you watch both of them, I’m almost certain that you’ll agree with me that Sisu is a masterpiece while this film is a low-effort, forgettable, carbon copy of so many other, similar films. It offered no surprises. Gerard Butler did his best but even he was doomed to fall short.

I watched it in German.

The Holdovers (2023) — 9/10

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) teaches classics at Barton College, a private high school in Massachusetts. He is not popular there. He is intelligent. He is darkly funny. He is exacting. And he loves to teach. His fellow teachers do not like him. His students do not like him. He is at odds with the school’s rector, a former student.

A lovely scene in class introduces us to most of the characters in the first act.

Teddy Kountze: Sir, I don’t understand.
Paul Hunham: That’s glaringly apparent.
Teddy Kountze: No, it’s… I can’t fail this class.
Paul Hunham: Oh, don’t sell yourself short, Mr. Kountze, I truly believe that you can.

Unsurprisingly, he ends up in charge of the “holdovers,” a group of students with nowhere to go over the winter break. Most of the school is closed, including the teacher’s quarters and the student dormitories. They winter in the infirmary. Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) cooks for them. She and Hunham are friends. Her boy Calvin had attended the school but had been drafted into the military and had recently been senselessly killed in Vietnam before he’d even turned 20 years old. She drinks. Paul drinks.

Paul is entrusted with five students but all but one of them is soon whisked away by one of the richer one’s father’s helicopter, leaving just Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa). There are a few other characters but they are not that important.

Tully convinces Paul to take him out for a hamburger as a local dive bar/restaurant, where they meet the lovely and friendly Miss Lydia Crane (Carrie Preston), who also works at Barton but is forced to moonlight during breaks to make ends meet. She invites them to her Christmas Eve party, which Mary insists that Paul attend, taking Tully out for a bit of excitement.

Paul is not a great small-talker,

“Paul Hunham: I guess I thought I could make a difference. I mean, I used to think I could prepare them for the world even a little. Provide standards and grounding like Dr. Greene always drilled into us. But, uh, the world doesn’t make sense anymore. I mean, it’s on fire. The rich don’t give a shit. Poor kids are cannon fodder. Integrity is a punch line. Trust is just a name on a bank.”

As they grow closer, Tully further convinces Hunham to take him to Boston on a field trip, where they visit a museum of ancient art. When Tully wavers, Hunham points out a plate on which a man and a woman are making the beast with one back, with her leaning against a counter and him leaning on her. Tully is delighted though not necessarily lasciviously—just delighted to have had a light go on, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, that light that tells you that the more things change, the more they stay the same, that “and so it goes” (as Vonnegut was so fond of writing).

“Paul Hunham: There’s nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man’s every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”

Tully learns more of Hunman after they run into an old classmate of his, before whom Hunman nearly prostrates himself with lies. But Tully teases out the reason why Hunman is in a semi-dead-end job—he’d been expelled for Harvard because of a slanderous accusation by a legacy student. Hunman had “accidentally” run him over with his car.

Angus slips away to go visit his father, whom Hunman assumes is in a cemetery. He’s alive but still gone—he’s in a mental institution. The visit does not have a satisfying end for anyone, but the boy manages to give his father a gift: a snow globe.

In the ensuing semester, Tully’s parents appear to demand an explanation: why was Tully allowed to see his father? The snow globe had triggered a violent outburst. They demand that Tully be punished and sent to a military school, since his teachers clearly don’t have control over him.

Hunman defends him, claiming that he’d insisted the boy visit his father, and is not unexpectedly fired for his trouble. He leaves with a lovely balance of grace and vengeance, driving off in a car full of his worldly possessions, as well as an expensive bottle of cognac he’d stolen from the headmaster.

Tully watches him go with a rueful, determined, and satisfied look on his face.

Bastille Day (The Take) (2016) — 7/10

Sean Briar (Idris Elba) is an unruly CIA agent who’s just been assigned to Paris. Michael Mason (Richard Madden) is a pickpocket who teams up with a gorgeous young woman in the very first scene, who struts completely naked down stairs in Paris, providing the perfect distraction for him.

He is a professional con man. Soon, we see him steal a bag from a woman who turns out to be Zoe, a protestor (Charlotte Le Bon) whose bag contains explosives. When he takes off with the bag, it ends up exploding somewhere completely different than planned—and he is caught on CCTV. Four people died. He got her wallet and cell phone, though. Sean Briar is put on his tail. There’s a pretty cool chase scene over French rooftops.

Mason eventually drops down to the street, steals a coat, steals some sunglasses, and thinks he’s gotten away from Briar. He steals a motor-scooter but Briar is right there to clothesline him right off of it, pushing a pistol into his open helmet. Let’s not quibble about how a CIA agent can just assault people in the streets of Paris, brandishing a pistol without attracting the attention of the police that we’d just been shown were right there in the market. Idris Elba is too cool for quibbling.

With the fully nude exhibitionist at the beginning and the chase scene, this is shaping up to be an at-least visually interesting movie. The first mano-a-mano fight scene was also really good! Two guys get the drop on Briar and Mason gets away. The cops are hot on their tail now, with tons of SWAT troops chasing Mason and trying to kill him, no questions asked. Briar snatches him off the street just as he’s almost sniped.

Anti-police protests erupt across Paris, reacting to the over-the-top, militaristic fan-out of the police. Briar and Mason are now teamed up, tracking a group that seems to be faking police violence and then starting riots against the police to let people avenge themselves for the act that they’d faked.

The intrigue continues, as Mason and Briar track down Zoe (Charlotte Le Bon), the hapless “terrorist” who’d had the bag with the bomb in the first place. She was just a dupe, whose lover and revolutionary inspiration turns out to have been in the French secret police. They’re all picked up by other members of the secret police. The fistfight in the back of the police van is pretty epic. It really looks like Idris Elba is doing his own stunts—either he’s that good or the film-editing is that good.

Briar infiltrates the building to take out the horde of fake cops, showcasing his ass-kicking skills and working his way up the building, taking out everyone right up to the top cop. Top cop flips his wig and calls the crooked right-wing politician for whom he’s been organizing this fake revolution and calls it off. He goes down to the bank, among the protestors and then finds Zoe, even though they’re all masked the same. It’s a face-off between Mason and the crooked police commander. Briar gets the USB stick with the $500M on it, thanks to Mason.

Mason is in the wind but he ends up meeting with the crooked politician, who offers him a passport in exchange for the USB stick. It’s all a setup, though, with the politician trying to kill Mason but Mason leading him into a trap laid by Briar and the French police.

This is a reasonably tight action movie with some good visual language.

I watched it in German.

Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen (2001) — 7/10

We begin with Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) being delivered, as a baby, to his aunt and uncle’s home on Privet Drive by Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris), Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith), and Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane). A dozen years later, we see Harry speak parseltongue with a snake at the zoo. Soon after, Hogwarts sends an endless number of letters inviting him to attend school there. His aunt and uncle try to avoid it but Hagrid tracks them down and absconds with Harry.

Next stop: Diagon Alley. I spied Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan) from Malcolm in the Middle looking at a broom in a shop window. No lines. Harry meets Professor Quirrell (Ian Hart), who stutters his way through a greeting. At Gringot’s, we learn that Harry’s loaded. A goblin (Warwick Davis) shows him to a room with a giant pile of gold doubloons. Another goblin (Verne Troyer) named Griphook shows up later. Next up is Ollivander’s (John Hurt), where he picks out a wand. While he’s in the shop, Hagrid shows up with Hedwig as a birthday present.

Hagrid tells Harry the story of Voldemort (Richard Bremmer), the evil wizard who’d killed his parents. Afterward, he takes Harry to the train station with a carriage positively loaded with goods. Harry gets a ticket for a train on track 9¾. He needs to run his cart straight into a brick column to get there. There he meets Ron (Rupert Grint). Harry buys the entire cart of candy, keeping it all for themselves. This is why Harry’s a brat. He doesn’t care that nobody else on the train is going to get any candy. Hermione (Emma Watson) floats in to show off—oh my God, she’s twice as insufferable in German—and then leaves after having repaired Harry’s glasses with a spell.

They switch from the train to small boats, floating their way across the lake to the castle/fortress/stronghold of Hogwarts. It’s time for the sorting hat. Gryffindor for all of the usual suspects. Slytherin for others. At dinner, they meet Nearly Headless Nick (John Cleese), a ghost that haunts Hogwarts.

Harry is introduced to Quidditch and this is pretty much the entire middle part of the movie. He gets a fancy broom. He wins the first match by catching the snitch in his gob.

It’s time for Christmas break. Hermione is off but Ron is staying on campus with Harry—Harry’s not going “home” and Ron’s parents are in Romania, visiting his older brother Charlie. They celebrate Christmas together with some cool presents, among them the cloak of invisibility that his father had owned.

Harry searches the library for information about Nicholas Flammel, then sees Snape (Alan Rickman) confront Quirrell but he almost certainly draws the wrong conclusion. He discovers the mirror of Erised, which shows his deepest desire—Hermione. Nah, just kidding, it’s to be with his mom and dad again.

Dumbledore appears to tell him not to get lost in the mirror. Hermione returns and they learn that Nicholas Flammel was the only person known to have created the philosopher’s stone.

The children are caught out at night and given a punishment to go into the woods. Harry and Draco come upon a hooded figure feeding on a dead unicorn. A centaur rescues Harry from the figure, revealing that it was the homunculus of Voldemort.

The kids realize that Voldemort has figured out how to get to the philosopher’s stone and will soon try. They sneak out again—with Neville (Matthew Lewis) trying and failing to stop them—but quickly discover that someone has arrived before them. The dog Fluffy is already sleeping, lulled by a self-playing harp. They get past the dog, even after the harp stops playing, then fall into a giant strangler vine. They escape this with wits and magic—naturally—to get into a room full of flying keys. They find the right key and continue to the next room, where a giant wizard’s chessboard blocks their way.

It’s Ron’s time to shine, having played far more wizard’s chess than he’d studied that semester. Shit gets real, with a ton of exploding pieces and lots of overly theatrical shrinking back by Hermione. Ron sacrifices himself—on a knight—in order to get Harry through. They still think Snape is trying to steal the stone.

Harry makes it to the final room, where Quirrell is waiting in front of the mirror, trying to figure out how to get the stone. Quirrell forces him to look in the mirror and the stone appears in Harry’s pocket. Voldemort reveals himself on the back of Quirrell’s head.

“Es gibt kein Gut und Böse. Es gibt nur Macht, und jene, die zu schwach sind um danach zu streben.”

Harry defeats Quirrell with the power of the philosopher’s stone, condemning Voldemort once again to an incorporeal existence.

Harry wakes in the hospital. Basically, the end.

I watched it in German.

Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021) — 5/10

This two-part, ten-episode series isn’t nearly as bad as Masters of the Universe: Revolution, which followed it in 2024. It’s also not very good. The dialogue and voice-acting are very wooden and the script is at-once utterly predictable and pedantically explained.

On the tin, the cast is decent, with man-at-arms Teela (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Evil-Lyn (Lena Headey), Skeletor (Mark Hamill), Duncan (Liam Cunningham), Cringer (Stephen Root), King Randor (Diedrich Bader), Tri-Klops (Henry Rollins), Roboto (Justin Long), Queen Marlena (Alicia Silverstone) just being the ones I recognize.

It’s perhaps a bit suspicious that both Adam (Chris Wood) and Andra (Tiffany Smith) have this cartoon listed as one of the credits for which they’re “known.” It’s also a bit weird that Andra’s character looks pretty much exactly like the actress who gives her voice.

That’s all I have to say about it. I’m sure it’s OK for what it is, but it’s not for me. I couldn’t make myself finish watching it. I have other fish to fry.