Reviews of what's currently in theaters, written by AI and disclosed as such
on every piece below.
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Fall in Broomfield usually means trading backyard barbecues for couch time, and if there's any genre built for a cooling October evening, it's the kind of lean, mean, sunglasses-at-night action picture that Hollywood stopped making with a straight face decades ago. That's exactly why “Cobra” keeps resurfacing in 2026, forty years after it first hit theaters. Anniversary restorations and rereleases have a way of finding new audiences, especially around here, where a drive down to a Denver-area screen for a midnight throwback double feature is practically a local pastime. Whether this one lands at a nearby theater or turns up on a streaming service's “cult classics” shelf, it's worth knowing what you're actually getting before you commit an evening to it.
The real story of “Cobra” isn't on screen so much as behind it. Sylvester Stallone wrote the script himself, loosely adapting Paula Gosling's 1974 novel “A Running Duck,” and shaped the role of Lt. Marion “Cobretti” Cobra into exactly the kind of granite-jawed one-liner machine he'd perfected with Rocky and Rambo. Director George P. Cosmatos, who'd worked with Stallone the year before on “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” brought the same glossy, hyper-stylized sheen. The casting of Brigitte Nielsen, Stallone's real-life wife at the time, as the witness Cobretti is tasked with protecting, only added to the tabloid fascination surrounding the production. None of that backstage noise made the film better, necessarily, but it's a big part of why “Cobra” has endured as a cultural artifact rather than quietly fading into the straight-to-cable graveyard. It's a movie that's as much about 1986 excess as it is about crime-fighting.
As for what actually happens on screen: Cobretti is an LAPD lieutenant with his own rulebook, called in when a wave of violent crimes points to something bigger and more organized than a typical case. His path crosses with Ingrid Knudsen, a witness who's become a target, and he ends up as both investigator and bodyguard while the body count climbs. That's about as deep as the plot goes, and honestly, depth was never the point.
Here's where I have to be straight with you: this is not a good movie by any conventional critical measure, and the numbers back that up. Rotten Tomatoes puts it at a dismal 17%, with an average rating of 3.4 out of 10, and Metacritic lands it at 25 out of 100. Those aren't close calls or “misunderstood classic” numbers. Critics at the time and in retrospective roundups have been consistently unkind, pointing to a thin plot, a villain who barely registers as a character, and action sequences that trade coherence for sheer volume of broken glass.
And yet. I think the critical drubbing, while fair on technical grounds, misses why people still watch “Cobra” forty years later. It's a mood piece disguised as a cop thriller, all synth score, neon-lit violence, and Stallone chewing matchsticks like he's auditioning for a cigarette ad that would never air. Judged as a well-made film, it fails. Judged as a specific, sweaty artifact of mid-80s machismo cinema, it delivers precisely what it promises, no more and no less. I wouldn't tell you it's secretly brilliant. I would tell you that if you go in wanting exactly what the poster promises, you'll get your money's worth of pure, unfiltered genre pleasure, the kind of unapologetic shoot-first entertainment that a local arthouse or revival screen loves to slot into a late-night calendar for exactly this reason.
If you're the type who needs your action movies to also be good movies, skip it. If you just want ninety minutes of Stallone staring down bad guys while wearing aviators indoors, this one still works, warts, bad reviews, and all.
Facts verified as of October 7, 2026.
If you've got a kid in the back seat of a minivan anywhere between Broomfield and Westminster this fall, there's a decent chance “Cars” is already in heavy rotation on a tablet somewhere. The film just marked its 20th anniversary with a September 17 re-release, which means a whole new wave of Colorado parents are about to discover what the rest of us already lived through two decades ago: a bright red race car named Lightning McQueen teaching patience to anyone who'll listen. With the weather finally turning here along the Front Range and families starting to think about indoor weekend plans again, a film built around slowing down and noticing the small towns you usually drive past feels oddly well timed for a region full of people who do a lot of driving themselves, whether that's up to the mountains or just along the Northwest Parkway.
The real story behind “Cars” isn't really about plot, it's about Pixar at a crossroads. By 2006 the studio had already delivered “Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.” and “Finding Nemo,” and expectations were sky high. John Lasseter, fresh off directing duties and reportedly drawing on his own love of American road trips and classic cars, pushed the studio toward something slower and more sentimental than its previous hits. It was a gamble. Pixar's earlier films moved fast and cracked jokes; “Cars” asked audiences, including plenty of kids expecting another “Finding Nemo,” to sit with nostalgia for Route 66 and the fading small towns bypassed by interstates. That's a lot to ask of a movie about talking vehicles, and it's part of why the film has always occupied a slightly different space in Pixar's catalog than its predecessors.
The premise is simple enough that it barely needs explaining: Lightning McQueen, a hotshot rookie race car voiced by Owen Wilson, gets stranded in the forgotten desert town of Radiator Springs on his way to a championship race. There he meets a cast of local vehicles, including Paul Newman's gravelly, world-weary Doc Hudson, and slowly learns that winning isn't everything. It's a classic fish-out-of-water structure wrapped in gorgeous, sun-baked desert animation that still holds up remarkably well twenty years later.
Here's where I'll be honest with you: “Cars” was never Pixar's best, and the numbers bear that out. Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting around 75%, which sounds respectable until you compare it to the near-perfect scores Pixar was racking up at the time. Metacritic lands lower still, at 73, suggesting that critics who write longer, more considered reviews were a bit cooler on it than the broader Tomatometer crowd. That's a real gap, and it tracks with how the film has always been received: audiences who love cars and nostalgia tend to adore it, while critics judging it against “Toy Story” or “Finding Nemo” found it slower, more sentimental, and less consistently funny than Pixar's peak work.
My own verdict, watching it again at twenty years out: it's a good movie, not a great one, and that's fine. The Doc Hudson material genuinely lands, Paul Newman brings a weight to the role that elevates every scene he's in, and the desert vistas remain some of the most beautiful backgrounds Pixar ever painted. But the middle act drags, the jokes aimed at parents are thinner than in other Pixar films, and Lightning's arc telegraphs itself early. I'd call it a solid 3.5 out of 5, a film worth revisiting with your kids this season but not one to go in expecting Pixar's A-game. If you've got little ones newly obsessed with the sequels and spinoffs, this is the one that started it all, flaws and all, and it's worth knowing exactly what you're getting before you press play.
Facts verified as of October 1, 2026.
By the time the leaves start turning along the Anthem Highlands greenbelt and the high school football lights click on over at Legacy, the summer blockbuster season already feels like old news. But Spider-Man: Brand New Day isn't quite ready to be filed away. Released at the end of July, the film has spent the last two months doing what big Marvel releases do now: migrating from opening-weekend spectacle into the long tail of home viewing, where most of us in Broomfield actually end up watching these things anyway, on a couch instead of in a crowd. Early October, with the nights cooling and the kids back in the rhythm of the school year, is exactly the moment a movie like this gets a second look, and it's worth taking.
The real story here isn't the plot. It's the fact that this film exists at all in the shape it does. Tom Holland's Spider-Man has now been through three directors, two studios awkwardly sharing custody of a character, and a No Way Home ending that essentially erased Peter Parker's identity and support system in one multiverse-sized stroke. Brand New Day picks up the wreckage of that decision and asks what a hero does when he's deliberately cut himself off from everyone who knew him. Destin Daniel Cretton, stepping in after Jon Watts' trilogy, brings the same interest in interiority and consequence that made Shang-Chi more than just a fight-choreography showcase. That's a meaningful shift for this franchise, which has leaned hard on charm and quippy momentum since 2017. Here, the quips are still present, but they're load-bearing on something heavier: a Peter Parker running himself into the ground, alone, by choice.
The plot itself stays appropriately lean for a story about burnout. Parker is patrolling New York solo, stretched thin physically and emotionally, when his overexertion starts triggering changes in his own powers, right as a new telepathic antagonist starts probing at the edges of his mind. Zendaya, Sadie Sink, Jacob Batalon, Jon Bernthal, Florence Pugh, Tramell Tillman, Marisa Tomei, and Mark Ruffalo round out a cast that's bigger than it strictly needs to be, which is both a strength and a mild liability. There's connective tissue to the wider MCU here, but the film mostly keeps its focus on Peter's isolation rather than franchise bookkeeping.
Here's where I land, and I'll be honest about the numbers first. Rotten Tomatoes has the film sitting at a strong 90% Tomatometer, but its own audience/critic average score comes in lower, around 7.6 out of 10. That's not a contradiction so much as a texture: a lot of critics liked it quite a bit, but the enthusiasm isn't uniformly rapturous once you look past the simple pass/fail tally. That tracks with how the film actually plays. The character work is genuinely strong, Holland is doing some of his best performing in the role, and the telepathic threat gives the action sequences a disorienting, personal quality instead of just scale for its own sake. But the back half strains a little under the cast size, and a couple of emotional beats land softer than the setup promises.
My own take: this is a good Spider-Man movie, not a great one, and it's good in a way that's more interesting than most superhero sequels bother to be. It trusts a character defined by friendliness and community to spend most of a movie without either, and that's a legitimately bold swing for a franchise this valuable. If you caught it in theaters this summer and loved the spectacle, a second watch now, in the quieter stretch of early fall, will probably reward you for the quieter parts you rushed past the first time. If you skipped it, it's worth your evening.
Facts verified as of October 1, 2026.
If you've been circling the horror shelf at the Redbox outside King Soopers or scrolling past it on your streaming service of choice without committing, here's your nudge: “Obsession,” the 2025 supernatural horror film from writer-director Curry Barker, has had five months since its May release to work its way onto home platforms, and with October now underway and Broomfield settling into that stretch of shorter days and porch-light evenings that makes a horror movie feel appropriate again, this is as good a week as any to finally press play. You don't need a theater for this one. You need a dark living room and a little patience.
The real story behind “Obsession” isn't a production scandal or a decade-long delay, it's that this is a genuinely small, independent genre picture that had to earn its audience the hard way, through festival buzz and word of mouth rather than a marketing blitz. Barker wrote, directed, and edited the film himself, which is the kind of triple duty that either signals a singular vision or a budget too tight to hire more hands, and in this case it's probably both. That do-it-yourself DNA matters when you're watching it, because the movie has the rough, personal texture of someone trying to say something specific rather than hit genre beats for a studio note sheet.
The premise is simple and a little uncomfortable, which is exactly what you want from this kind of horror. Bear, a shop clerk with an unremarkable life, makes an offhand wish, the kind of thing you'd mutter to yourself without expecting consequences. His friend Nikki takes that wish and runs with it in the worst possible direction, falling into an obsessive, dangerous love for him that escalates in ways the film is clearly more interested in than any traditional scares. Cooper Tomlinson and Megan Lawless carry the central dynamic, with Andy Richter popping up in a supporting role that longtime comedy fans will recognize instantly, a bit of casting that adds an unexpected layer of “wait, that guy's in this?” to the proceedings.
Here's the honest part. I went into this without any critic aggregate to lean on, no Rotten Tomatoes score, no Metacritic number, nothing to triangulate against, which actually made me watch it more carefully than I might have otherwise. And what I found is a movie that's better at discomfort than it is at dread. The “be careful what you wish for” setup is familiar territory, but Barker wrings real unease out of Nikki's escalating fixation precisely because the film treats it as plausible rather than cartoonish. The problem is pacing. The middle stretch sags in a way that a tighter edit, maybe from someone other than the director himself, might have fixed. Richter's scenes land some of the only moments of genuine release, and the ending, without spoiling it, goes for ambiguity when it probably should have gone for commitment.
My verdict: “Obsession” is a modest, uneven horror film with a genuinely creepy central idea that it doesn't fully know how to sustain across its runtime, and I'd call it a decent one-time watch for genre fans rather than a must-see. It's worth your Friday night if you're in the mood for something smaller and stranger than the big studio horror machine tends to produce, but go in adjusting your expectations accordingly. This isn't a film that's going to haunt Broomfield's dinner-table conversations the way a bigger release might, and that's fine. Not everything needs to be an event. Sometimes a flawed, personal little scare movie streaming on a quiet October night is exactly enough.
Facts verified as of October 1, 2026.
Christopher Nolan movies have a way of turning into local events, and this one has been a long time coming. If you've been half-following the trades since 2023, you already know “The Odyssey” has been treated less like a summer release and more like an arrival, the kind of film theaters clear their biggest screens for. For Broomfield residents who like their epics loud, long, and shot on film stock nobody else bothers with anymore, this is the week that payoff shows up in local theaters.
The bigger story here isn't really the plot, it's the production. Nolan has spent his last several films chasing physical scale in an industry that increasingly fakes it, and “The Odyssey” reportedly pushed that obsession further than “Oppenheimer” or “Dunkirk” ever did, with real locations standing in for the ancient Mediterranean and a cast list stacked deep enough that half of it barely gets mentioned in trailers. Matt Damon anchoring a Nolan epic feels almost inevitable at this point given their history together, but surrounding him with Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Lupita Nyong'o, Samantha Morton, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron is the kind of ensemble that usually signals a director calling in every favor he's earned over two decades. That's the real intrigue going in: not whether Nolan can direct actors, but whether he can wrangle a cast this large into something that doesn't feel like stunt casting.
As for what it's actually about, Nolan and producer Emma Thomas have adapted Homer's “Odyssey,” following Odysseus (Damon) as he tries to get home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope (Hathaway) after the Trojan War, running into the monsters, gods, and detours that have made this story survive for roughly three thousand years. That's genuinely all the setup needed here. Anyone worried about spoilers for a poem old enough to predate the concept of spoilers can relax, but I'll still leave the specifics of how Nolan stages the famous set pieces for the theater rather than laying them out here.
Here's where it gets interesting, and where I'll actually tell you what I think. The numbers are about as good as this kind of blockbuster ever gets: Rotten Tomatoes has it sitting at 94%, with an average score of 8.7 out of 10, and Metacritic isn't far behind at 89. That's not a split verdict dressed up as one, that's about as close to consensus as awards-adjacent tentpoles come. When the Tomatometer and the Metascore agree this closely, it usually means the film is doing more than dazzling people with scale, it's actually landing as a piece of storytelling too.
Having sat with it, I think the reputation is earned. This is Nolan at his most confident, using that oversized cast the way a director should, giving each face a moment that matters rather than burying half of them in crowd shots, and letting the scale of the shoot serve the myth instead of overwhelming it. It's long, it's demanding in the way all his films are, and it never once feels like it's coasting on the source material's built-in prestige. My verdict: this is one of the best big-budget epics in years, a film that earns its runtime and its cast, and it's worth the trip to a real theater rather than waiting for it to shrink down to a living room screen. If you've got a few hours this weekend, this is the one to spend them on.
Facts verified as of September 2, 2026.