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[Get the exclusive video version of these weekly reviews each Friday by becoming a paid subscriber!] My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, October 9th, 2026. 1) THE SOCIAL RECKONING If you've ever wondered exactly how much David Fincher had to do with the greatness of The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin has finally provided us with an answer. Everythi

[Get the exclusive video version of these weekly reviews each Friday by becoming a paid subscriber!] My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, October 2nd, 2026. 1) DIGGER Digger is a very difficult movie to review. Not because I don't know what I think about it. I know exactly what I think about it. I think it is extraordinary. The problem is that abo

With the release of Heart of the Beast, the new survival movie directed by David Ayer (and, more importantly for me, a wonderful dog movie) I thought this would be a perfect time to look back at the career of Brad Pitt. In the film, Pitt plays James Belmont, a former Special Forces soldier stranded in the Alaskan wilderness after a plane crash with his combat dog, Odin, and the movie basically hands the screen over to Pitt, the dog and the wilderness and says, “Okay, go.” And

[Get the exclusive video version of these weekly reviews each Friday by becoming a paid subscriber!] My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review six new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, September 25th, 2026. 1) HEART OF THE BEAST Heart of the Beast is what you might call an absolute crowd pleaser. This is one of those movies that has been constructed almost scientifically to make a theater full

There are moments in an actor's career when everything seems to click. They suddenly hit this stretch where the performances are great, the choices are interesting, the collaborations are exciting, and you start seeing their name in the credits and thinking, "Okay, I'm in." Ethan Hawke is absolutely having one of those moments right now. Actually, he's been having one for quite a while. The latest example is The Weight, the outstanding new movie that's in theaters right now a

The movies have really gone to the dogs in 2026. And I mean that as a compliment. With the release of the new Brad Pitt survival adventure Heart of the Beast, featuring a very memorable dog named Odin, it suddenly occurred to me that this has been an unusually strong year for dogs at the movies. I'm talking about actual dogs, CGI dogs, animated dogs, heroic dogs, vicious dogs, funny dogs and, in a couple of cases, dogs that are easily more interesting than most of the human b