The Long Walk Is Excellent, The Conjuring: Last Rites Is Barely Fine & Other Reviews

Kevin Winter. Getty Images.

The Long Walk is, by far, the highlight of this week's reviews but I also have mixed-to-bad reviews in this blog for The Conjuring: Last Rites, The Roses and Light Of The World. If you're looking for something to see this week, the 2nd best movie of the year (Weapons), 3rd best (Caught Stealing) and 4th best (The Long Walk) are all in theaters.

The Long Walk manages to be equally optimistic and pessimistic about humanity. This only works if you have a strong screenplay and very good actors delivering the message. Luckily, this movie has all of those things and winds up being one of the better movies I’ve seen this year.

Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson are exceptional in the movie with a very strong cast of some really talented young actors. The exception here is Mark Hamill who is woefully miscast.

I’ve loved this book for over 30 years and have been waiting for it to become a movie. I was concerned a movie about people walking might not work on the big screen but director Francis Lawrence did as good a job telling this story as someone could. It’s about friendship, desperation, why we live and what we do to each other. That’s a lot to put on the screen and The Long Walk pulls it off.

The Long Walk: A-

Movies either exist in the deep part of the pool or the shallow end. The ones that are near the diving board give you plenty to think about and challenge how we look at the world. The Conjuring: Last Rites barely has water that goes above your knees.

This is the kind of movie that you won’t think about again in a week or two. But, it’s mildly entertaining and I didn’t regret the time I spent watching it. For those reasons, I give this the mildest of recommendations.

If you love this franchise, then go see Conjuring: Last Rites. It has moderately fine performances with moderately fine scares. 

But, there are much better options that tell similar stories. Skip this and go watch the original Poltergeist. It’s 40 years old but is much more relatable and terrifying than anything in this movie.

The Conjuring: Last Rites: C+

The Roses starts off as sitcom-level quality for the first 50 or so minutes. The pacing is slow and the jokes are stale. But in the last 40 minutes, when the gloves come off, this is a funny and unusual movie. Because of that, I think I have to recommend this.

It feels like there are guardrails up for so much of this movie. Because of that, you don’t really get to see Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman really act. Why hire two such talented actors if you are going to have such a generic movie for so long?

The craziest thing is the very good (and nasty) last act of this feels rushed. This could have been so much more of the movie. The other thing is I never really believed Cumberbatch and Colman loved each other but I did believe it when they hated each other.

The supporting cast does no one any favors. Andy Samberg is neutered and Kate McKinnon is acting like she’s in an especially bad SNL sketch about something entirely different than this movie.

If you can get past most of this movie, the ending does make it worth it. But that might be asking too much.

The Roses: C+

Light Of The World tells the story of Jesus with some of the worst animation you’ll see on the big screen this century. It’s the kind of cartoon where the characters move but nothing in the background does. Somehow, that’s not the laziest thing about this movie.

That falls on the character of the apostle John, who is drawn (and behaves) like a child, yet sometimes is treated like an adult at times. It’s not explained because the script doesn’t seem to care.

There’s been a bunch of Jesus-related movies to hit theaters this year. The best of this has been The Chosen, which was an Amazon Prime TV season broken up into a three parts for the big screen. That was made with care. It’s all telling the same story but that proved there can be a new way to tell it.

This just seemed lazy and half-ass to me. I have to imagine there is a better way to get kids to care about religion than a cartoon that looks like it was made in 1983.

Light Of The World: D

2025 

1)Sinners

2)Weapons

3)Caught Stealing

4)THE LONG WALK

5)Presence

6)The Life Of Chuck

7)Black Bag

8)The Ballad Of Wallis Island

9)Warfare

10)Friendship

11)Superman

12)Mission Impossible 8

13)28 Years Later

14)Novocaine

15)Fantastic Four

16)The Naked Gun

17)Final Destination 6

18)The Amateur

19)Drop

20)Dangerous Animals

21)Together

22)Death Of A Unicorn

23)The Accountant 2

24)The Damned

25)One Of Them Days

26)Materialists

27)Lilo & Stitch

28)Paddington 3

29)Thunderbolts

30)F1

31)Clown In A Cornfield

32)Bring Her Back

33)Hell Of A Summer

34)Karate Kid 6

35)Fight Or Flight

36)Valiant One

37)Sketch

38)THE ROSES

39)How To Train Your Dragon

40)Elio

41)Rule Breakers

42)Heart Eyes

43)THE CONJURING: LAST RITES

44)Mickey17

45)The Surfer

46)Relay

47)Last Breath

48)Flight Risk

49)Minecraft

50)Den Of Thieves 2

51)Dogman

52)Companion

53)Eddington

54)Jurassic World Rebirth

55)KPop Demon Hunters

56)The Toxic Avenger

57)Ballerina

58)A Working Man

59)The Last Rodeo

60)Shadow Force

61)The Alto Knights

62)Honey Don’t

63)The Bad Guys 2

64)The Penguin Lessons

65)The Chosen Part 2

66)Looney Tunes

67)Opus

68)M3GAN 2

69)Becoming Led Zeppelin

70)Captain America: BNW

71)I Know What You Did Last Summer

72)Until Dawn

73)Ne Zha 2

74)The Chosen Part 1

75)Riff Raff

76)The Home

77)Freakier Friday

78)Inheritance

79)Nobody 2

80)The Chosen Part 3

81)The Wedding Banquet

82)Smurfs

83)The Legend Of Ochi

84)Night Of The Zoopocalypse

85)The Phoenician Scheme

86)Sneaks

87)Ash

88)Jujutsu Kaisen

89)The King Of Kings

90)The Friend

91)Dan Da Dan 2

92)LIGHT OF THE WORLD

93)Snow White

94)The Unbreakable Boy

95)Brave The Dark

96)Wolf Man

97)Hurry Up Tomorrow

98)The Monkey

99)Love Hurts

100)The Last Supper

101)Woman In The Yard

102)Bride Hard

103)Juliet & Romeo

104)In The Lost Lands