CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 1-2-26

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review three new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, January 2nd, 2026.

1) THE PLAGUE

The Plague is one hell of a directorial debut. Charlie Polinger writes and directs this thing with a confidence and control you don’t usually see from first-time filmmakers. Even though the subject matter is familiar, the execution is sharp enough, uncomfortable enough, and emotionally honest enough that it gets under your skin and stays there.

The setup is deceptively simple. The movie takes place at an all-boys water polo camp in the early 2000s, right in that pre-social-media sweet spot when bullying was everywhere but still largely ignored, minimized, or written off as “boys being boys.”

Everett Blunck plays Ben, a socially anxious twelve-year-old kid who desperately wants to fit in. He’s awkward, a little nervous, clearly uncomfortable in his own skin, and terrified of becoming the next target.

At the camp, the social hierarchy is brutal and clearly defined. The kids at the top, led by the charismatic and cruel Jake, played by Kayo Martin, single out another boy, Eli, who has a skin condition that becomes an excuse for labeling him as having “the plague.”

What starts as a cruel joke quickly escalates into something far more vicious, and Ben finds himself caught in the middle, torn between his secret friendship with Eli and his overwhelming fear of being ostracized himself.

Movies about bullying are nothing new. We’ve seen this territory explored many times before, in films like Carrie, Elephant, Let the Right One In, Lord of the Flies, and countless coming-of-age dramas that revolve around cruelty, conformity, and survival.

Polinger isn’t reinventing the wheel here, and he’s clearly aware of the cinematic lineage he’s working within. But what he does exceptionally well is place the story in a very specific environment and age group, and then squeeze every ounce of tension and dread out of that setting.

The choice to set the film at a water polo camp is inspired. There’s something inherently aggressive and physical about the sport, and Polinger uses that beautifully. The constant imagery of kids treading water, legs kicking beneath the surface, struggling to stay afloat while pretending everything is fine above water, becomes a clear metaphor for what the movie is really about.

Survival. Blending in. Not drowning. The underwater shots are particularly effective, and at times the film genuinely feels like it’s slipping into horror territory, even though it’s technically a psychological drama.

Everett Blunck is terrific as Ben. This is a deeply internal performance, full of fear, guilt, confusion, and quiet desperation. You can see every bad decision forming on his face before he makes it, and you understand precisely why he makes them, even when they’re painful to watch.

Kayo Martin, though, is the real standout here. His Jake is not a mustache-twirling villain. He’s charming, confident, funny, and absolutely terrifying in his casual cruelty. It’s a remarkably complex performance for a young actor, and if this kid doesn’t have a serious career ahead of him, I’ll be shocked. He understands power, manipulation, and menace in a way that feels disturbingly real.

Joel Edgerton shows up as the camp coach, Daddy Wags, and he’s solid, as he always is. What makes his performance effective is how frustrating it is. He’s not a monster. He’s not overtly abusive. He’s just willfully blind, offering weak platitudes and half-hearted discipline while clearly choosing not to see what’s actually happening.

That indifference is one of the most upsetting aspects of the movie, because it feels so accurate. Authority figures who look the other way are often just as responsible as the bullies themselves.

Polinger’s direction leans heavily into discomfort. There are extreme close-ups, especially of skin, faces, and physical imperfections, that feel invasive and almost body-horror-adjacent. The movie builds unease rather than jump scares, and there are moments where the tension is so thick it’s nearly unbearable.

At times, it really does feel like a horror movie, even though the monsters here are just kids following groupthink to its ugliest conclusion.

The film isn’t perfect. Some of the dialogue feels a little overwritten, and there are moments where Polinger pushes the intensity just a bit too hard. But those are minor complaints in a movie that is this focused and this emotionally effective.

The early-2000s setting helps contextualize the behavior without excusing it, and it makes the silence of the adults feel sadly authentic.

What really makes The Plague work is how universal it feels. Almost everyone has been Ben, Eli, or Jake at some point in their childhood. The fear of being singled out. The pressure to conform. The terrible choices made out of self-preservation.

It’s not a pleasant movie to watch, but it’s a powerful one, and it lingers long after it’s over. I found it disturbing in the best possible way, and I kept thinking about it for a long time afterward.

This isn’t a groundbreaking reinvention of the bullying narrative, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s well shot, well acted, tense, and emotionally honest, and it understands exactly how frightening adolescence can be.

As a first feature, it’s an impressive piece of work, and it makes me very curious to see what Charlie Polinger does next. The Plague is a tough sit, but it’s an effective one, and it earns its impact honestly. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️

2) THE DUTCHMAN

The Dutchman is a fascinating, frustrating, and ultimately uneven attempt to modernize one of the most volatile and incendiary American plays ever written.

Directed by Andre Gaines, who co-wrote the script with Qasim Basir, this 2025 adaptation takes Amiri Baraka’s 1964 one-act play and tries to stretch it, expand it, and retrofit it for a contemporary audience. Sometimes that ambition pays off. Other times, it works directly against the very thing that made the original play so powerful in the first place.

Baraka’s Dutchman was written at a very specific moment, born out of rage, confrontation, and a cultural shift away from integrationist ideals toward something far more confrontational and uncompromising.

The original play is short, brutal, and claustrophobic. It traps a Black man and a white woman in a subway car and lets language, sexuality, provocation, and violence do all the work. There is no escape, no relief, no release.

The 1966 film version, directed by Anthony Harvey and starring Al Freeman Jr. and Shirley Knight, understood that. It leaned into the surrealism, the menace, and the confinement, and it remains a potent and disturbing piece of work.

Gaines’ version opens things up almost immediately. We meet Clay, played solidly by André Holland, in couples therapy with his wife Kaya, played by the great Zazie Beetz. The sessions, overseen by the unsettling Dr. Amiri, portrayed by Stephen McKinley Henderson, frame Clay as a man emotionally blocked, wounded by infidelity, and struggling with the weight of assimilation, ambition, and identity.

These scenes are interesting on paper, and they add psychological context that the original play never bothered with, but they also begin the film’s central problem. The Dutchman works best when it is compressed, intense, and confrontational. The more it explains itself, the weaker it becomes.

The core of the story still revolves around Clay’s encounter with Lula, played by Kate Mara, on a subway train. Mara is very good here. She’s seductive, unsettling, playful, cruel, and oddly magnetic, and she understands that Lula should feel like both a fantasy and a threat at the same time.

Her performance carries real menace, and when the movie locks into the verbal sparring between her and Holland, it finds some of the electricity that made Baraka’s original work so dangerous.

But then the film steps off the train, literally and metaphorically, and that’s where it begins to lose its edge. The decision to move the story above ground, to bring Lula into Clay’s professional and social world, including a high-profile fundraiser populated by Black elites, dilutes the raw power of the confrontation.

What was once mythic and symbolic becomes oddly literal. Subtext turns into text. Tension becomes explanation. The film starts telling you what it’s about instead of forcing you to feel it.

There are moments where Gaines’ expansion works. The fundraiser sequence, in particular, has flashes of genuine discomfort as Lula toys with Clay’s public persona and threatens to expose the fragile balance he’s constructed for himself.

These scenes capture something real about double consciousness and the strain of code-switching. But there are also extended conversations with Dr. Amiri that feel like footnotes being read aloud. The mystery evaporates. The audience is no longer invited to wrestle with meaning; it’s handed answers.

The performances across the board are strong. Holland is reliable and grounded, Beetz brings emotional weight to a role that could easily feel underwritten, and Henderson is quietly unnerving.

The film is handsomely shot and professionally mounted, and Gaines clearly understands the historical importance of what he’s adapting. The problem isn’t a lack of respect or intelligence. The problem is scale.

The Dutchman is, at its core, a two-hander. It’s about proximity, entrapment, and verbal violence. The more space you give it, the more oxygen it loses. The original play’s ending is devastating because it is sudden, inevitable, and horrifying.

This version’s conclusion, while thematically ambitious, lacks that same punch. It feels softer, more mediated, and less dangerous.

I admire the swing Andre Gaines takes here. There is real thought behind the choices, and the desire to make Baraka’s ideas resonate in 2025 is understandable and commendable.

But in trying to make the story bigger, the film makes it less effective. The intensity gets spread too thin, and the symbolism becomes overworked.

So this one lands as a mixed bag for me. It’s not a failure, but it’s not a success either. If you’re unfamiliar with Baraka’s play, this might spark your curiosity, which is no small thing.

But if you really want to experience The Dutchman at its most potent, read the original play or seek out the 1966 film with Shirley Knight and Al Freeman Jr. Those versions are leaner, nastier, and far more unforgettable.

This new adaptation is interesting as a curiosity, occasionally compelling, often frustrating, and ultimately not as powerful as the work it’s trying to honor. - ⭐️⭐️1/2

3) WE BURY THE DEAD

We Bury the Dead is exactly the kind of zombie movie that reminds me why I still love this genre, why I still show up for these movies, and why I’m also so brutally hard on them when they don’t work.

I am, and always have been, a full-on, card-carrying worshipper at the altar of George A. Romero.

That’s my church. Those are the rules. People die, then they come back. As a result, they are zombies. They are slow. They rot. They evolve. They reflect us. Romero laid down the law, and I didn’t make it up. I just live by it.

So I went into We Bury the Dead with cautious optimism at best. We’ve all seen a million zombie movies. The genre is oversaturated, bloated, and often lazy. But Zak Hilditch’s film does something genuinely interesting.

It respects the past while bending the rules just enough to feel fresh, unsettling, and emotionally devastating. And it works.

The setup is smart and grim. After a catastrophic military experiment off the coast of Australia unleashes a massive EMP that effectively shuts down the brains of hundreds of thousands of people, the dead begin to pile up.

Daisy Ridley plays Ava Newman, an American woman stranded in the aftermath, desperately searching for her missing husband. To get access to restricted zones, she joins a military-run body retrieval unit, tasked with collecting and burying week-old corpses. The twist, and it’s a chilling one, is that some of these bodies aren’t exactly finished yet.

These are not your typical zombies. At first, they’re docile, blank, and almost peaceful. They stand. They grind their teeth. They exist. And then, slowly, horrifyingly, they begin to change.

What Hilditch does here that I absolutely loved is allow the zombies to evolve within the running time of a single movie. Romero took years, even decades, within his fictional universe to show that evolution. Here, it happens rapidly, and somehow it feels earned.

The undead become faster, angrier, more dangerous, more aware. You get slow zombies, fast zombies, and something in between, and instead of feeling like a cheat, it feels like a terrifying biological progression.

But the thing that really elevates We Bury the Dead isn’t the gore, although the gore is excellent. It isn’t the scares, although the movie is genuinely creepy and often flat-out scary.

It’s the grief. This is a sad movie. A deeply sad movie. This is a zombie film soaked in mourning, unfinished business, and emotional wreckage. It’s about death, yes, but it’s even more about what happens to the living when they don’t get closure.

Daisy Ridley is the soul of this movie. She is phenomenal here. I’ve liked her before, but this is on another level. She carries the film completely, and she does it without sentimentality or melodrama.

Her Ava is exhausted, haunted, stubborn, and barely holding herself together. She can handle the physical demands of the role—swinging axes, running, screaming, surviving—but what makes the performance extraordinary is the emotional honesty.

This is a woman drowning in grief, and you feel every ounce of it. It is early in the year, barely into 2026, and I can already tell you this is going to be one of my favorite performances of the year.

The supporting cast is strong across the board. Mark Coles Smith and Brenton Thwaites add texture and humanity, particularly in how the film explores moral exhaustion and bureaucratic cruelty.

The military’s cold efficiency, the way execution becomes procedure, adds a quiet but potent layer of horror. There’s some social commentary here, but this isn’t a Romero-style political screed. It’s more intimate than that. This is about personal loss, not societal collapse.

Visually, the movie is beautifully shot. The Australian locations are eerie and desolate, the atmosphere thick with dread. The makeup and effects are top-notch, and the pacing of the zombie transformations is meticulous and frightening. Hilditch directs the hell out of this movie, balancing tension, horror, and heartbreak with real confidence.

What really impressed me is how the film finds room to be both terrifying and moving. That’s not easy to pull off. The sadness never overwhelms the suspense, and the horror never cheapens the emotion.

Everything feeds into everything else. By the time the movie reaches its ambiguous, emotionally loaded final act, it has earned it completely.

If you think you’re burned out on zombie movies, I get it. I really do. But We Bury the Dead is the kind of film that justifies the genre’s continued existence. It brings new ideas, genuine feelings, and authentic craftsmanship to familiar territory. It respects Romero’s legacy while carving out its own identity.

This is a terrific zombie movie, a strong horror film, and an unexpectedly heartbreaking meditation on grief and loss. Daisy Ridley is spectacular. Zak Hilditch brings real vision to the genre.

And We Bury the Dead absolutely earns its place among the better modern entries in the undead canon. It’s scary, sad, smart, and very much worth your time. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

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