One of the standout messages in the new movie “Clayface” is that people, especially in the precarious profession of acting, are like the friends and agents who support you when your career is going well, but will run for the hills when your career goes downhill.
Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is an up-and-coming actor, just nominated for an Academy Award, who inadvertently gets involved with Theresa (Ruby Sear), the girlfriend of a powerful, sadistic mob boss, Markos Szabo (David Dencik), who takes revenge on Matt by cutting up his face. After this, Matt’s career as an actor is 100% over.
Then, by a miracle, Matt runs into a genius scientist, Caitlyn Corr (Naomi Ackie), who is on the verge of a fantastic discovery: intelligent cells that can be injected into the human body to fix damaged cells. At first, this solution works, but over time, things start to mutate, and Matt’s face changes into many different forms until he is able to make himself look like any other person. This then becomes an evil superpower.
The last part of this story is all about Matt getting revenge on all of his enemies, and there are many scenes of impressive special effects and an even more impressive ending, many of then extremely violent.
This is a good B movie, with average ratings of about 76%, which I agree with. For fans of the DC Comics that is the source of this screenplay and due to the solid acting and special effects, I do recommend this film.
If the story of Elizabeth Holmes and the company Theranos, which started when Holmes was only 19 years old in 2003, were introduced to the world as a work of fiction, no literary agency or production company would have bought it. The reason is that this entire 15-year story of one young woman with a revolutionary medical breakthrough that never worked, who then became the youngest self-made billionaire, is so insane that it’s too bizarre to make a movie or publish a novel.
Holmes and some scientists she hired into her company believed they could create a machine that could perform any number of complex blood tests using only one drop of blood, no longer needing to wait days for the results. If this was possible, then the two largest blood testing companies in the world, LabCorp (14 billion annual revenue) and Quest Diagnostics (11.4 billion annual revenue), would cease to exist, and medical science would advance by decades. Unfortunately, Holmes and her top employees lied to all of their investors, many of them very wealthy and famous people, tricking them into investing in a machine that never worked as they said it would. The most insane part of this crazy story is why these intelligent, wealthy people did not insist on seeing this machine work throughout the entire process of testing the drop of blood, verifying the results using the latest medical science, and then validating the results with the aid of the federal government.
At its peak, in 2015, Theranos was worth 9 billion dollars, and Elizabeth Holmes was worth 4.5 billion dollars, all based on lies that were maintained for years and cheated investors out of billions of dollars. One year later, the value of Theranos was worthless. Six years later, Holmes was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
The new documentary, “You Can See Everything”, is a film of an interview with director Nathan Fielder during the 34 days that Elizabeth Holmes spent in a small rented San Diego house with her boyfriend, Billy Evans, and her two children, prior to her going to prison for 11 years for her crimes as CEO of Theranos. Unbelievably, Holmes still believes that she did nothing wrong when she was questioned by Fielder about her many crimes. Holmes eyes are large and penetrating, and she seemed close to crying as she pleaded with Nathan Fielder to believe she was innocent. There was an insight into how Holmes mind works when she was shown the Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First”, and she had no understanding of why this famous routine was funny.
Holmes’s fiancé, Billy Evans, also seemed about as insane as Elizabeth while talking with Fielder, with both Fielder and Holmes both still believing in Theranos and actually planning a second release of the company.
When Holmes was in prison, the actress who played her in the Hulu series “The Dropout”, Amanda Seyfried, reprised her Emmy-winning 2022 role, playing Holmes in scenes of Fielder interviewing her in prison. In other scenes, Seyfried was interviewed as herself by Fielder, discussing the accusations about the accuracy of the Hulu series ” The Dropout” and the many difficulties Seyfried had playing that part. This entire documentary had a very dark, slow, and unusual pace, and for that reason is very unique as a documentary. I also thought there was no reason why this movie needed to run almost 3 hours.
The reviews for this documentary are 99-100%, with some critics writing that this movie could win the Oscar for Best Picture. Due to some of the slow and boring parts and the too-long running time, I give this movie a 90% rating and a very strong recommendation.
In August of 2025, Spike Lee released “Highest 2 Lowest”, his fifth collaboration with Denzel Washington. The movie is about a wealthy music executive, played by Denzel Washington, who has his son kidnapped, only to find out later that the kidnappers took the son of his best friend by mistake. The moral question follows: will Danzel’s character still give the kidnappers millions of dollars even though the son they kidnapped is not his child?
Surprisingly, the new Ben Affleck Netflix film, “Animals”, has just about the exact same premise as Highest 2 Lowest. So similar that Ben Affleck delayed the production of his film to avoid the obvious comparisons between the two. It is hard to understand why Affleck, one of the three screenwriters, did not make a major rewrite to avoid what could become a copyright infringement lawsuit, given how alarmingly similar these movies are.
The two main characters, Mark Kimball (Ben Affleck) and David King (Denzel Washington), are both wealthy and having money problems due to debt at the time of the kidnapping. Mark Kimball is running for mayor of Los Angeles, and David King is a well-known music mogul. One main difference is that Kimball hires an expensive kidnapping expert, Dayle Burton (Gillian Anderson), who charges 20% of the ransom to try to solve the kidnapping, with options that include even killing the kidnappers. Kerry Washington plays Kimball’s wife, Abigail Kimball, and has acting scenes with Affleck that were highly emotional and well performed throughout. There are other well-played scenes with Ben Affleck and Gillian Anderson, with large contrasts between a distraught Affleck and an always very calm Anderson.
The ending was well done with original ideas, and a final conclusion that many will question based on several lies that were told to the police to avoid political damage to Kimball’s mayoral campaign.
The Rotten Tomatoes rating of 36% is too low, as this is not a bad movie, aside from the possible plagiarism issues. I rank this movie as a passable 70%, mainly due to the acting of Affleck, Anderson, and Washington.
