While America’s Godzilla/Kong buddy-cop franchise offers heaping helpings of dumb monster fun, substance is virtually nonexistent. And prior to 2016, you could easily argue Japanese studios weren’t handling the iconic kaiju with much more tact. The Showa- and Heisei-era Godzilla films have a nostalgic charm, but beyond 1954’s original, you can only destroy a major metropolitan so many times before it feels inconsequential.

Fortunately, Shin Godzilla’s procedural take on the human drama paired with a grotesque creature design made the stakes feel real again. And with 2023’s Godzilla Minus One, director Takashi Yamazaki brought the most human and emotionally earned story to ever feature the atomic lizard. Despite not quite reaching the highs of its Oscar-winning predecessor, Godzilla Minus Zero comes surprisingly close, even as this series stomps over what feels like more familiar ground.

Two years after Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) and Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka) successfully destroy Godzilla and anchor his, uh, chunks to the bottom of the ocean, another monstrous threat terrorizes central Japan. Noda leads a kaiju response team, working with the recent American occupation of Japan to subsequently test an experimental bomb and an experimental weather-based weapon. Both fail and only empower their target, inspiring Professor Murakami (Min Tanaka), a survivor of the bombing of Hiroshima, to recommend a more drastic and destructive strategy.

While Godzilla Minus Zero does expand on what kinds of narratives can unfold within the franchise, it also feels overly dependent on what Minus One established. Survivor’s guilt and the escalation of war appropriately ring true, but despite what feels like more time spent with Noda and Koichi’s family, the real expansion of the ideas explored in the prior film come through Professor Murakami. Tanaka stands out amid several powerful performances, presenting a decent into vengeful justice that feels unhinged, but not outright hysterical.

Of course, most aren’t hankering for a Godzilla film because they expect a deeply emotion arc. Yeah, it’s a welcome addition, but inevitably, you’ll yearn for a rampage or two. Minus Zero delivers in this department, maybe even more so from a technical perspective than Minus One, but it also feels more subdued. Really, there are only two or three major set pieces and handful of standalone sequences. Granted, they’re all executed exceptionally well, especially a dog-fighting scene that concludes the first act, but they do feel lighter. It’s like when the human narrative stalls, the kaiju action doesn’t come quite in the nick of time. You’ll welcome it when it shows up, but that misstep in pacing makes it feel a bit less impactful than it could be.

Minus Zero also keeps a strong sense of scale, which is overwhelmingly supported by Naoki Sato returning for another exceptional score. More so than any piece of the sound design, Sato makes the monsters feel a bit more grand, and the quieter moments that are almost less intimate due to the cinematography, still feel tender.

Even if Minus Zero doesn’t quite escape that very tall shadow of Minus One, it’s still a worthy sequel that leaves the future of Godzilla — at least when it’s produced by the Japanese studio Toho — shining bright. Whatever mathematical equation the kaiju winds up in next, the result, like this flick, should be positive. —Daniel Bokemper

Jason David Frank’s 2022 death is a tragedy. For members of Gen Y and beyond, he’ll forever be remembered as the White Ranger of the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers TV series and movies. His posthumously released passion project, Legend of the White Dragon, is doomed to evaporate.

Frank plays Erik Reed, aka superhero White Dragon. (Overlook that his costume is more silver and gold.) Reed’s been in hiding for three years since the day his battle with the squatty demon-faced villain Ashtagor resulted in 1,263 lives lost. So haunted by the toll, Frank has the digits (but not the comma) tattooed on the side of his head. Imagine having to explain that one on the regular: “No, they’re anything but my lucky numbers.”

Ashtagor (David Ramsey, TV’s Arrow) recruits pharma bro Jai to help locate and liquidate Frank. Jai (co-director Aaron Schoenke, resembling an on-markdown Milo Ventimiglia) will stop at nothing to do so, in order to avenge the death of his wife (Power Rangers alum Ciara Hanna) on that fateful day. Jai possesses half of the crystal that fuels White Dragon’s superpowers; Frank, naturally, holds the other. Realistic hand-to-hand combat ensues, as does a Chris Daughtry rock ballad.

Meanwhile, Frank’s wife (Cerina Vincent, also a Rangers vet) sits at home, nervously fiddling with her necklace while watching cable news and wondering if he’ll ever come home.  

Legend of the White Dragon plays like Power Rangers Mid-Life Crisis. In other words, a labor-of-love fan film, the kind that litters Schoenke’s CV, here expanded to a cosplay feature while respecting copyright law so it can be seen outside a convention hall. Highly Marvel-inspired (right down to Easter-egged, sequel-teasing credits), it sports pretty decent effects for a Kickstarter-backed, green-screened endeavor. It’s also flat, dull and sunk from the outset by some dreadful performances.

That doesn’t apply to Michael Madsen (Arena Wars), who cameos as Frank’s imprisoned father, or Mark Dacascos (China Strike Force), who appears as a monk. One of the latter’s lines sums up my feelings for the enterprise as a whole: “Well, that was not necessary.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

This much is true: In 1972, a Benedictine monk named Pellegrino Ernetti wowed the world with news of his invention, the Chronovisor. Developed with the aid of a dozen physicists, this gadget could pull audio and visual memories from the ether — in essence, able to capture any image from history, including the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.

Or so Father Ernetti claimed.

In Jack Auen and Kevin Walker’s debut feature, Chronovisor, a Columbia philosophy professor named Beatrice (Anne Laure Sellier) learns of the device one lonely night at the library. She can’t pull herself away from the rabbit hole of her own research, especially after she reads of the monk’s and machine’s vanishing act, so she follows the breadcrumbs of a conspiracy.

Naturally, she’s obsessed. So, too, will you. 

There’s a reason one of the initial bits of media Beatrice’s eyes consume is a lobotomy. Chronovisor cleverly erases the line between fact and fiction to fashion a one-of-a-kind, genre-bending mindfuck — all to the music of Gustav Holst. (Who knew the year’s best score would be more than a century old?) It’s a picture that rewards patience (not to mention a lot of reading, which they make absorbing), even if the conclusion can’t possibly satisfy half its audience.

Succumb to its considerable spell. The warm, amber glow of the Kodak 16mm film sure as hell helps. —Rod Lott

In theaters; see Grasshopper Film for schedule.

BBC’s Doctor Who program was still in its sophomore season when the not-yet-iconic character leapt to the big screen. Whereas William Hartnell essayed the stuffy title role on the telly, Dr. Who and the Daleks got name value with Peter Cushing. It also gained one other out-of-this-world asset: color!

Dr. Who’s just hanging at the house with granddaughters Susan (Roberta Tovey, The Beast in the Cellar) and Barbara (Jennie Linden, Old Dracula) when the latter’s new beau arrives. His name is Ian (Roy Castle, Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors) and he’s one clumsy suitor. As Dr. Who shows off his Tardis (a fancy term for a garage-cum-time machine) and its hodgepodge of bleep-de-boop machinery to the lad, Ian pratfalls onto the big, red button that sends the foursome to an undetermined point in space.

They emerge on a planet with a petrified forest and loads of radiation. They’re also stuck until Dr. Who can locate enough mercury to refill some sparkle baton on the Tardis wall. Venturing toward the nearest building, which resembles a tribute to geometry, they run afoul of the Daleks. To non-nerds, those are cyborgs on rollers with voices that sound like speaking into an oscillating fan, but only. One. Syllable. At. A. Time.

Our human heroes subdue a Dalek by covering its eyehole with a clump of breakfast pudding. Meanwhile, little Susan’s sent on some godforsaken errand to score drugs. (Yes, to cure radiation sickness, but it’s fun to leave that detail out.) What follows would become part and parcel for a great many sci-fi TV series, like CBS’ short-lived Planet of the Apes: Encountering someone who’ll help you out. In this case, that’s the Thals, a race of humanoids distinguishable for their close-cropped haircuts, costuming you might find in an Andy Milligan production, and eye shadow so heavy and lid-consuming, Sophie Ellis-Bextor would be green-glittered with envy.

Regrettably, aside from those primary colors and the set for the Daleks’ lair, little is cinematic about the doctor’s first of two adventures that kids have to leave the house to catch. Not even genre god Cushing’s stumbling-buffoonery take is worth the trouble. It’s a wholly inoffensive confection, best consumed as Saturday-matinee fare. Just grab your nearest time machine. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Although the zombie craze lie dormant from, go figure, oversaturation, that message never made it to the producers of The Walking Dead (seven separate series, guys?) or overseas. Particularly to South Korea, where Yeon Sang-ho keeps the undead movies alive. Colony marks the gifted director’s fourth such feature, but the first to exist outside his 10-year-old Train to Busan franchise. 

Inside a Seoul skyscraper, disgruntled scientist Dr. Suh Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) commits an act of bioterrorism at his former employer’s annual conference: unleashing a zombie-outbreak virus, and he’s the human vaccine. Rude, but at least the doctor has the courtesy to give 911 a heads-up! 

Like a disaster spectacular in its 1970s heyday, Yeon (The Ugly) throws together a mishmash of personalities — tortured academics, vacationing siblings, millennial scumbags — who must work together to find their way to the roof for rescue. Naturally, teamwork is an alien concept to most, but hey, somebody’s gotta get zom-mobbed.  

Making Colony somewhat unique is our villain’s control over the horde via hive mind or collective intelligence; they share and exchange information through pheromones, requiring a network of mucus. This is why the tower hallways grow so gooey, they look like they harbor a sinus infection. To the movie’s credit, this isn’t some gimmick or MacGuffin. Seriously, name one other movie where slime mold research dictates plotting. 

In conjunction, these zombies evolve as the minutes tick by. They scurry and skitter on all fours like dogs, then graduate to head-butting glass and running, before climbing on one another like ants to form a more formidable foe. Whenever they communicate, their heads amusingly pop up and out, looking like the poster art for Scanners.

Once more, Yeon handles the high-scale, high-stakes action really well. Even with his script concerned with a madman’s desire for a populace reinvention, Colony is, all told, ultimately more conventional than the lightning strike that is the original Busan. This one bolts with a rip-roaring first hour before hitting a wall of repetition. Scenes begin to parrot the one before it, halting an otherwise consistent level of energy. At 122 minutes, it’s almost as if Yeon wanted the running time to match the building’s stories. If that weren’t merely hypothetical, finding a site with 30 fewer floors would rid the bloat and get to the hard-charging vehicular pursuit sequence sooner. 

Just not at the sacrifice of the laboratory’s zombie monkeys, please. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.