For decades, January was the dumping ground when studios released obvious duds. Flops died quiet, smothered by bigger news cycles: holdover December hits, the Oscar race, Sundance. Now there’s a new trajectory of big January releases. Bad Boys for Life and M3GAN were successes. Last year’s The Beekeeper was exceptional trash. I love 2020’s Underwater, with SCUBA-armored Kristen Stewart dodging sea monsters. People dig the Den of Thieveses, I think? And this January brought Presence and Dog Man — a good date-night horror film, a solid family-morning matinee.
A lot of Hollywood’s output now splits between Prestige and Blockbuster. Those cultures have a way of mummifying movies: the highbrow stuff over-digested between festivals and FYC season, the behemoth IP replicating old highs. The best January releases are unadorned. It’s a return to some lost fundamental possibility of moviegoing. Go to the theater without a plan, roll the dice on something you barely know about.
So could Steven Soderbergh become a King of January? His movies don’t earn awards or big money anymore, yet he keeps cranking out solid entertainments. The trailer for his next film, March’s Black Bag, played before Presence. Other directors from his indie age take years between projects that manifest massiveness: three-hour runtimes, 70 millimeter. Soderbergh grabs his cheap camera or his iPhone, hires stars or nobodies, then gets moving.
Presence is a good movie I would recommend to everyone. It’s funny, scary, surprising, so short there’s no time to complain. Pitch: The camera is the ghost. We move through the rooms of a house, seeing everything from the float-y perspective of a disembodied Something. A family moves in. Lucy Liu is Hotshot Executive Mom. Chris Sullivan plays the nice dad with no discernible employment. Their son’s a brash jock. Their daughter grieves her dead friend. They all drink more than they should. Both teens are up to something.
Screenwriter David Koepp has written half of everything, from Jurassic Park and Spider-Man to the Da Vinci Code sequels to (hell yeah!) The Shadow. Soderbergh’s Kimi was a Koepp script, and so is Black Bag. I think the Soderbergh likes how the straightforward plots — Woman Hears Murder, Man Investigates Wife, Ghost Haunts Family — leave room to experiment. The family in Presence is always a little more eccentric than they need to be. Mom, metallic with colleagues and husband, adores her son while ignoring her daughter. The marriage is endangered, not for any obvious affair-type reasons. Liu and Sullivan are very good, but Soderbergh entrusts the movie to the younger unknowns. As siblings, Eddy Maday and Callina Liang reveal hidden dimensions. The jerky boy is a square. The loner girl is confident, almost swaggering in her self-destruction. And the son’s moody-eyed friend is played by West Mulholland — a name Pynchon would love!
The point-of-view camera conjures a mystery. What is watching? Why? We notice a special interest in the daughter, predatory or protective (or both). Soon, random objects move, and a shelf collapses. The best scene happens when the family witnesses the poltergeist behavior. They cluster outside, scared. Mom lights a cigarette. Dad stares through the window, past our own camera-ghost gaze. We’ve spent long quiet moments with these characters, catching random domestic interactions most thrillers lunge past. They feel, now, like real people reacting honestly.
Then they do what any horror family does: Call a psychic. It’s filmed well — the medium looks at us — but you’ve watched a scene like this a hundred times. After Sinister and Insidious, it’s unacceptable to watch four smart individuals just keep living in their danger house. Surely Lucy Liu can find a good Vrbo?
I want to believe in every new Soderbergh movie. I want a director to be able to make two great movies per year. Quentin Tarantino gives interviews about why he hasn’t gotten around to Movie Ten, and Black Bag is Soderbergh’s tenth feature since he “retired” last decade. Should we worry, though, how nothing has struck lightning like 2015’s Magic Mike XXL? Soderbergh shot and edited the exuberant sequel. His longtime producer Gregory Jacobs directed; because Jacobs directed nothing since, the presumption was that Soderbergh was the real filmmaker. The possibility hangs that XXL worked so well because Soderbergh was the meticulous craftsman following someone else’s simple directorial mandate (Make stripping FUN!!) to an extreme.
“Meticulous Extremity” is a good description of Dog Man. Dav Pilkey’s comic started as a kind of sincere parody. A cop and his dog get exploded, so surgeons stitch the pet’s head onto the man’s body. The canine-human supercop fights a mad-scientist cat. The books inhale tropes from action movies and superhero adventures — daring reporter, crusty boss, archenemies — and infuse them with whimsy, dense character arcs, and solid puns. I can never not laugh at the robot named 80-HD; I just noticed last week that 80-HD wears flip-flops.
Dog Man is a universe. Like, there’s a spin-off series about a young cat superhero teaching 21 baby frogs to make comic books. So the movie accelerates quickly from its origin-story prologue, trusting the kids in the audience came here for The Good Stuff. Of which, I have to say, there is a lot. In chunky-smooth animation that suggests Claymation Nintendo, Dog Man battles evil feline Petey with help from a police chief named Chief and crusading TV journalist Sarah Hatoff. The plot involves Petey ordering a cloning device on the internet but not properly reading the instructions, thus creating an adorable cat-child.
Director Peter Hastings is an old cartoon hand going back to Animaniacs and Darkwing Duck. Dog Man reflects the cute-chaos instincts of the LEGO movies — zany antics, occasional feels — but I’d put it above all those just for sheer weirdness. At one point, Dog Man grieves his past lives as a separate man and dog, which is more RoboCop-ish than I expect from a PG rating. There’s a deadbeat cat grandfather voiced by Stephen Root, a resurrected telekinetic cyberfish voiced by Ricky Gervais. This Pete Davidson skeptic was not excited to hear the Saturday Night Live alum, but casting him as Petey savvily throws the comedian’s trademark whine into the deep end of parenting. Honestly, I’m surprised there hasn’t been a live-action comedy where Pete Davidson discovers his surprise son. It could be a Big Daddy legacy sequel with Davidson as Adam Sandler’s grown-up child; why am I pitching this?
The final smash-up is a full-blown city-leveling kaiju fight. One of my kids was mesmerized, the other kinda sleepy — but the sleepy one loved the end credits, which recreate the comics’ doodly illustrations. Dog Man is another victory for DreamWorks after The Wild Robot, and the winning streak may continue. A long trailer for The Bad Guys 2 thrilled our Dog Man crowd. It comes out in August, by which point various other sequels will have grossed billions of dollars.
This summer, though, I’ll be dreaming of January 2026. Currently on the calendar: Spin-offs of M3GAN and 28 Days Later and a new film from Barbarian director Zach Cregger. I’ve got my eye on something called Mercy. Chris Pratt in a future cop thriller from the guy who made Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? My expectations are low. Which, in January, means very high.