Force Five

The V/H/S franchise is back with its ninth installment, and this time music and sound are doing most of the damage. V/H/S/Mixtape features four main horror segments directed by Renee Zhan, David Moreau, Ernest Dickerson and RZA, along with music-video interludes from Flying Lotus and Ghost’s Tobias Forge. GWAR also shows up to host the whole thing like an MTV broadcast from Hell. In this episode o...

Robert De Niro, Ed Harris and Kathy Baker star in Jacknife, a 1989 drama that deserves another look. This week on Force Five, I'm giving you five reasons you might want to watch this overlooked movie, including De Niro's surprisingly lovable performance, the small-scale storytelling, an awkward grown-up romance and an unforgettable emotional meltdown from Ed Harris. I also talk about two potential...

Matchbox: The Movie takes a toy line with virtually no characters or mythology and turns it into a full-blown action adventure starring John Cena, Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Teyonah Parris and Arturo Castro. In this episode of Force Five, Jason breaks down five reasons you might want to give the movie a shot. 5. It finds a clever way to make a movie out of Matchbox cars 4. The cast understands...

Kat brought cupcakes. This week on Force Five, Jason gives five reasons you might want to watch Penny Lane Is Dead, Mia’Kate Russell’s vicious Australian horror film about a beach-house celebration that turns into a blood-soaked fight for survival. Topics include: • The movie’s Ozploitation roots • Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn’s chaotic performance as Kat • Why the beach-house setting works as a horro...

MC Kung Fu has entered the building. This week on Force Five, Jason gives five reasons you might want to experience City Dragon , the wonderfully strange 1995 combination of martial arts, hip-hop, sex comedy and relationship drama. Topics include MC Kung Fu speaking almost entirely in rhyme, the movie's surprisingly good music, its untouched mid-'90s personality, an accidental detour into work and...

Primetime turns To Catch a Predator into something much stranger than a straightforward true-crime dramatization. Robert Pattinson stars as Chris Hansen in Lance Oppenheim's nightmarish 2026 film about the rise of one of the most controversial television phenomena of the 2000s and the increasingly blurry line between exposing wrongdoing and turning public humiliation into entertainment. In this ep...

Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall has an awkward title but it’s one of the most faithful DC animated adaptations in years. In this Force Five video, I give you five reasons you might want to watch Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall Buy Batman: Knightfall Part 1: Knightfall to support me: https://amzn.to/3UXBqoN Buy a shirt: https://www.teepublic.com/user/forcefive Other helpful links: Lette...

The Whisper Man feels like Netflix pulled a mid-budget serial-killer thriller straight out of the ’90s (and I mean that as a compliment). Based on Alex North’s bestselling novel, The Whisper Man stars Adam Scott as Tom Kennedy, a widowed crime writer who moves back to the town where he grew up with his eight-year-old son Jake. Unfortunately, the town has a horrifying history involving a child murd...

Lemonade Blessing is Chris Merola’s feature directorial debut, a painfully funny coming-of-age comedy about Catholic guilt, teenage romance, divorced parents, religious expectations and the horrifying experience of being fifteen years old. John is a teenager sent to a private Catholic high school by his extremely devout mother. Then he meets Lilith, an atheist classmate who begins testing exactly...

Ghost in the Cell is Joko Anwar’s 2026 Indonesian horror film about corruption, prison violence, supernatural terror, elaborate gore and what happens when a group of hardened criminals discovers that staying positive might literally save their lives. Investigative journalist Dimas is sent to a brutal Indonesian prison after being accused of a grotesque murder. Inside, he falls in with a group of i...

Onslaught is Adam Wingard’s 2026 A24 action-horror movie starring Adria Arjona as a former Army sniper forced to protect her daughter when three genetically engineered super-soldiers escape from a secret military facility. Basically, what if Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees had military training? In this episode, I give you five reasons you might want to watch Onslaught. Buy a shirt: https://www.te...

Hope is Na Hong-jin’s massive 2026 Korean creature feature starring Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung and Squid Game’s Hoyeon, with Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton also joining the cast. The movie begins in the remote coastal village of Hope Harbor, where police chief Bum-seok investigates a brutally killed animal and quickly discovers that whatever did it has alre...

The End of Oak Street is David Robert Mitchell’s 2026 dinosaur survival movie starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, and Christian Convery, and it may be one of my favorite dinosaur movies ever made. Set in 1982, the film follows the Platt family after a mysterious cosmic event transports their ordinary Michigan neighborhood roughly 200 million years into the past. Suddenly, suburbia...

Wings of Dread is a compact 2026 Chinese action thriller starring Ashton Chen and The Raid’s Iko Uwais, taking martial arts mayhem 30,000 feet into the air. Air police officer Gu Chaoyang finds himself aboard a flight carrying a dangerous prisoner when a group of hijackers led by Iko Uwais’ Paquet attempts to free him. What follows is an sub-90-minute barrage of close-quarters fights in aisles, ca...

SUZUKI=BAKUDAN is a 2025 Japanese crime thriller directed by Akira Nagai and based on Katsuhiro Go’s bestselling novel Bomb. After a seemingly ordinary drunk named Tagosaku Suzuki is arrested for a minor assault, he casually predicts an explosion in Tokyo. When it happens exactly when he said it would, Suzuki announces that more bombs are coming, and the police are forced into a race against time...

Smallfoot is a 2018 animated musical comedy with a ridiculously stacked voice cast, beautiful animation, catchy songs, and some surprisingly ambitious ideas about truth, fear, social media and questioning what you’ve been taught. Channing Tatum voices Migo, a young Yeti whose entire worldview is shaken after he discovers something his community insists does not exist: a human. In this video, I giv...

The Death of Robin Hood is Michael Sarnoski’s dark, brutal reimagining of the legendary outlaw, starring Hugh Jackman as an aging Robin Hood forced to confront the violence behind the heroic stories that have grown around his name. This is not the merry, swashbuckling Robin Hood most audiences know. In this Force Five video, I give you five reasons you might want to watch The Death of Robin Hood....

The End of Oak Street is David Robert Mitchell’s 2026 dinosaur survival movie starring Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, and Christian Convery, and it may be one of my favorite dinosaur movies ever made. Set in 1982, the film follows the Platt family after a mysterious cosmic event transports their ordinary Michigan neighborhood roughly 200 million years into the past. Suddenly, suburbia...

Bang the Drum Slowly (1973) is an overlooked Robert De Niro baseball movie about friendship, terminal illness and the daily life of a professional ballclub. Michael Moriarty stars as Henry Wiggen, the New York Mammoths’ successful pitcher, while De Niro plays Bruce Pearson, his struggling catcher and closest friend. When Henry learns that Bruce is terminally ill, he quietly works to protect his di...

Eden Lake is a brutal 2008 British survival-horror film written and directed by James Watkins and starring Kelly Reilly, Michael Fassbender and Jack O’Connell. Steve and Jenny travel to a secluded lake for a romantic weekend, only to clash with a group of teenagers whose intimidation and cruelty quickly escalate into something much more dangerous. Here are five reasons you might want to watch Eden...

Buy a shirt: https://www.teepublic.com/user/forcefive Motor City is a nearly dialogue-free revenge thriller directed by Potsy Ponciroli and starring Alan Ritchson as John Miller, a man who emerges from prison determined to destroy the gangster who framed him and stole the woman he loved. In this video, I give you five reasons you might want to watch Motor City. The film also stars Shailene Woodley...

Vice Academy is a 1989 low-budget cult comedy written and directed by Rick Sloane and starring Linnea Quigley and Ginger Lynn as two police-academy recruits trying to earn enough arrests to graduate. In this Force Five, I accept a viewer challenge and give you five reasons someone might enjoy Vice Academy. If you enjoy Linnea Quigley, Ginger Lynn, Rick Sloane movies, USA Up All Night, low-budget s...