CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 1-23-26
- 3 days ago
- 19 min read
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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, January 23rd, 2026.
Mercy is the first truly terrible movie of 2026, and that’s saying something because January is traditionally the dumping ground. Every year, studios shovel their weakest projects into theaters right after the holidays, hoping no one notices while audiences are still catching up on awards contenders from December.
There are exceptions. Every once in a while a January release surprises you, but Mercy is not one of them. It belongs squarely in the landfill.
This is a near-future science-fiction action thriller directed by Timur Bekmambetov, a filmmaker with one of the most erratic careers in modern genre cinema.
He’s made a few interesting movies, like Night Watch and Day Watch, and a couple of goofy studio curios like Wanted, but he’s also one of the chief architects of the deeply annoying “screenlife” subgenre. That’s the gimmick here, and it’s a gimmick that strangles this movie from the opening frame.
The premise sounds intriguing on paper. Chris Pratt plays Chris Raven, an LAPD detective accused of murdering his wife. He wakes up strapped to an execution chair in a new AI-run judicial system called the Mercy Program, where trials last 90 minutes, and verdicts are instant.
Judge Maddox, an artificial intelligence played by Rebecca Ferguson, calculates the probability of guilt in real time. If Raven can’t prove his innocence before the clock runs out, the chair executes him.
The entire movie plays out in real time as Raven uses surveillance footage, cloud data, phone records, doorbell cams, and police databases to reconstruct the crime and lower his guilt percentage.
That’s the hook, and it’s not a bad idea. The problem is that the execution is atrocious.
First, the screenlife format is once again a disaster. Everything is presented through floating screens, security feeds, phone footage, and digital interfaces, clearly inspired by Minority Report but without an ounce of Spielberg’s clarity, tension, or imagination.
Bekmambetov seems convinced that throwing dozens of images at your face, especially in IMAX and 3D, automatically makes a movie exciting. It doesn’t. It just makes it loud, busy, and exhausting.
Action scenes are reduced to watching chaos unfold through grainy camera feeds, which completely suffocates any sense of momentum or physicality. Shootouts, chases, and even a climactic truck explosion feel oddly distant and dull because you’re never actually in the scene; you’re watching it through a digital peephole.
Chris Pratt is a major problem here. I haven’t liked him much since Parks and Recreation, and this movie does him no favors. His desperation feels forced, his emotional beats are flat, and his character’s alcoholism subplot is handled with all the nuance of a bad TV procedural.
Addiction is treated like a convenient narrative switch rather than a serious condition, and it’s borderline insulting in how casually it’s used as a plot device. Pratt has zero charm in this role, and the movie desperately needs him to anchor the whole thing.
Rebecca Ferguson, one of the most expressive and physically commanding actresses working today, is criminally wasted. She’s reduced to playing a polite, vaguely smirking AI face on a screen.
Watching someone this talented be stripped of any real performance opportunity is infuriating. There’s one fleeting moment where she allows a hint of humanity to flicker through her eyes, and it’s the only time the movie feels remotely alive.
The supporting cast fares no better. Annabelle Wallis is barely present as the murdered wife. Kali Reis, a terrific actress, is completely sidelined. Chris Sullivan shows up and does what he can, but everyone feels trapped inside the gimmick.
Kylie Rogers, playing Raven’s daughter, has nothing meaningful to do beyond reacting to screens and deadlines.
Every twist is telegraphed miles in advance. The fake-outs, betrayals, and revelations land with a thud because you can see them coming from the moment the movie starts.
The film wants to comment on AI justice, surveillance culture, capital punishment, and the erosion of privacy, but it has absolutely nothing insightful to say about any of it. These are rich, fertile ideas that great science fiction has explored brilliantly for decades.
Mercy reduces them to shallow gestures and tech jargon.
The real irony is that the movie positions AI as both villain and savior, without ever committing to either. It wants to be a cautionary tale while also reassuring us that maybe the algorithm is the good guy after all. The result is muddled, cowardly, and dramatically inert.
The best thing I can say about Mercy is that it runs in real time, so when the clock appears on screen, you know exactly how much longer you have to endure it. Every time the AI judge referenced the countdown, I found myself thinking, “Oh, good, only 35 minutes left.” That’s not suspense. That’s survival.
This is a loud, flashy, aggressively dumb movie that mistakes activity for excitement and technology for storytelling. No amount of IMAX screens, 3D effects, or flying graphics can save a terrible screenplay, wooden performances, and a suffocating visual gimmick.
Rebecca Ferguson can’t save it. The concept can’t save it. Nothing can.
Mercy is a complete misfire and an early contender for worst film of the year. A bleak, joyless, obnoxious January dump that should be avoided at all costs. - ⭐️
I should probably begin by making something very, very clear right up front, because context matters here. I am not a gamer. I don’t play video games. I never really have.
The last video game I played with any regularity was Galaga in the early ’80s when I was in high school, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that the only video game system I have ever owned in my entire life was Pong. That’s it. No Atari. No Nintendo. No PlayStation.
So whenever I sit down to watch a movie based on a video game, I’m already coming at it from the outside, slightly baffled, and usually prepared for disappointment.
And historically, that preparation has been justified. Movies based on video games are almost always terrible. They’re clumsy, dumb, poorly structured, and weirdly lifeless. And here’s the thing: even gamers will tell you that.
I’ve talked to plenty of people who actually love video games, who play them religiously, and they’ll admit that most video game movies are garbage. There are a few exceptions that people will argue about.
Some folks like the original Mortal Kombat. I found it mildly amusing. But by and large, the translation from game to cinema just doesn’t work. Video games and movies are completely different art forms.
They tell stories differently. Games are interactive, fragmented, and conditional. Movies are linear. You can’t just transplant one into the other and expect it to make sense. And most of the time, it really doesn’t.
Which is why it surprised the hell out of me when I genuinely liked Silent Hill back in 2006.
That film, directed and co-written by Christophe Gans, hit me in a way that almost no other video game adaptation ever has.
Not because I understood it. I absolutely did not. I had no idea what the hell was going on for most of that movie. I didn’t understand the mythology, the character motivations, the rules of the world, or how any of it fit together.
But I didn’t care. Because it was moody, weird, deeply atmospheric, and beautifully made. It was scary in a way that felt tactile and unsettling. It was surreal and oppressive and genuinely creepy. It felt like someone had actually made a horror movie, not just a piece of branded content.
Christophe Gans is one of those filmmakers who doesn’t work nearly enough, which is a shame. He’s a gifted visual stylist with a vivid imagination and a real feel for tone. He made Brotherhood of the Wolf in 2001, which remains a terrific, singular film, and his version of Beauty and the Beast in 2014 was far better than it had any right to be.
He specializes in horror and fantasy, and when he’s locked in, he creates worlds that feel immersive and strange and dangerous. So when I heard that he was returning, twenty years later, to the Silent Hill universe with Return to Silent Hill, I was genuinely curious.
And watching it, I had almost the exact same reaction I had in 2006.
Return to Silent Hill is based on the video game Silent Hill 2, which I have never played and know nothing about beyond what I’ve read. The story, at least on paper, is fairly straightforward. James Sunderland, played by Jeremy Irvine, is a broken man grieving the death of his wife, Mary, played by Hannah Emily Anderson.
He receives a mysterious letter from her, beckoning him back to the fog-shrouded town of Silent Hill, a place tied to their past. When he arrives, the town has been transformed into a nightmarish landscape shaped by some unknown malevolent force.
As James wanders deeper into this twisted version of reality, he encounters grotesque creatures, familiar yet distorted figures, and manifestations of his own guilt and repression, all while questioning his sanity and the nature of reality itself.
That’s the premise. And honestly, that’s about as much as you need to know, because the plot details aren’t really the point here.
Once again, I didn’t always know who was who. I couldn’t always tell one character from another. I couldn’t tell you how closely the movie follows the video game, whether the performances are faithful adaptations, or whether hardcore fans will be satisfied.
I can’t even tell you that the narrative makes a whole lot of sense in a traditional way. But I can tell you that this movie is absolutely sumptuous to look at. It’s creepy as hell. It sustains an oppressive, unsettling mood from beginning to end. It feels like a fully realized nightmare, and Gans knows exactly how to pull you into it.
There are images in this movie that will stick with me for a long time. The fog, the decaying architecture, the sudden violence, the sense that something horrible is always lurking just out of sight.
And yes, Pyramid Head is here, one of the most iconic and visually striking creations to come out of the Silent Hill universe. Even without understanding the symbolism on a granular level, the presence of these figures is disturbing and effective.
They feel purposeful. They feel wrong. And that’s exactly what they’re supposed to feel like.
There is some genuine psychological weight beneath the surface, dealing with grief, guilt, loss, denial, and self-punishment.
You can feel that the town itself is meant to be a reflection of James’s fractured mind, a manifestation of repressed trauma and unspeakable acts. But Gans never spoon-feeds any of this. He lets the imagery and the atmosphere do the work. This isn’t a movie that explains itself. It throws you headfirst and dares you to keep up.
And I loved that.
It reminded me of how I first saw the original Silent Hill, which was under some pretty unusual circumstances. I caught it at Brew & View at the Vic Theatre here in Chicago, a second-run double-feature situation where you drank cheap beer, yelled at the screen, and generally expected garbage.
I went in assuming it would be terrible, and instead I was completely mesmerized. I watched it again. And again. Every time, I was struck by how confidently strange and unsettling it was, even if I never fully understood it.
Return to Silent Hill gave me that same feeling. It’s not about clarity. It’s about immersion. It’s about mood. It’s about technical craftsmanship in horror filmmaking. The sound design, the pacing, the visuals, the way suspense is sustained and released. Gans has a real talent for making you feel uneasy, for keeping you off balance, for making you afraid of what might happen next.
Is it going to change the world? No. Is it going to convert non-horror fans or suddenly make video game movies respectable? Probably not.
Will everyone who sees it have a good time? I honestly have no idea. Maybe the gamers will love it. Maybe some audiences will be frustrated by its opacity.
But speaking purely as someone who hasn’t touched a video game since Galaga in 1982, I can say this with confidence: Return to Silent Hill is a pretty terrific movie.
It makes no sense. And I liked almost every frame of it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
There are times when reviewing a movie stops being just a professional exercise and turns into something more personal, complicated, and, honestly, more difficult. H Is for Hawk is one of those films for me.
This is not just another biographical drama that I can neatly break down, critique, and move on from. This one hit me at a very specific moment, for very specific reasons, and I can’t pretend otherwise.
On paper, H Is for Hawk is a straightforward adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s beloved 2014 memoir. Directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and written by Emma Donoghue, the film stars Claire Foy as Helen, a Cambridge academic whose life is upended by the sudden death of her father, Alisdair, played with warmth and quiet charm by Brendan Gleeson.
In the aftermath of his death, Helen spirals inward, withdrawing from friends, work, and the world, and becomes obsessively focused on training a wild goshawk named Mabel. The process of training the bird becomes her way of processing grief, exerting control, and surviving a loss she doesn’t know how to articulate.
That’s the movie. But that description barely scratches the surface of what it’s actually doing.
This was a very difficult movie for me to watch, and an even harder one to review for personal reasons. I recently lost a dear friend, the extraordinary Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick.
Tony was working-class Chicago through and through, a brilliant, soulful, endlessly curious artist who worked in collage, drawing, painting, and assemblage. One of the great obsessions of his life and his art was birds.
Birds weren’t just a subject for Tony; they were a language. They were a way of dealing with death, trauma, memory, and love. His "Secret Birds" series is extraordinary, and throughout his career, birds appeared again and again as symbols of joy, mourning, reverence, and survival.
Tony’s fascination with birds went all the way back to childhood, when his grandmother instilled in him a sense of wonder and reverence for them. She once told him, “For the price of a crust of bread, you can hear God sing.” That stayed with him forever.
Tony sketched birds, kept birds, trained birds, and found solace in them. As our friendship deepened, my own fascination with birds grew through him. I learned what they meant to him, how central they were to his way of processing the world, including grief.
So then comes H Is for Hawk, a film entirely about grief, loss, and finding a way through mourning by forming an intense, consuming relationship with a bird. The timing could not have been more emotionally loaded for me if it tried.
Claire Foy plays Helen Macdonald, and she is magnificent. I am a massive fan of Claire Foy; she is one of the best actresses working today. She can do anything.
From The Crown to Unsane to The Girl in the Spider’s Web, comedy, drama, prestige television, indie film, she is always compelling. Here, she carries nearly the entire film on her shoulders, often alone, often silent, often sharing the frame only with a bird. That is not easy, and she makes it riveting.
The film is long, very long. It runs over two hours, and there are extended sequences of Helen and Mabel that feel almost like a nature documentary. I completely understand why some viewers will find this boring, indulgent, or in desperate need of editing.
There are scenes upon scenes of training, observation, waiting, walking, flying, and feeding. The narrative momentum slows to a crawl. But here’s the thing: grief does that. Grief is repetitive. Grief is isolating. Grief is obsessive. Grief makes you disappear into routines that feel safe because they’re controlled and wordless.
Helen ignores her friends. She neglects her academic responsibilities. She withdraws from human connection and pours everything into this hawk, a predator that offers no affection, no reassurance, no comfort. That contradiction is the point. The hawk doesn’t care about her grief, and that’s exactly why it helps her survive it.
Brendan Gleeson appears mostly in flashbacks, and while he is, as always, wonderful, the film stumbles in how those flashbacks are handled. Lowthorpe employs strange stylistic choices — blinding light, soft focus, and surreal transitions — that give these moments an oddly artificial, almost sci-fi or fantasy quality. It doesn’t work.
These scenes should feel grounded and intimate, but instead, they feel oddly abstract. It’s unfortunate because the scenes themselves, when allowed to play, are beautiful. Foy and Gleeson have terrific chemistry, and you believe completely in their bond.
What works, profoundly, are the sequences between Claire Foy and the hawk. I found them mesmerizing, moving, and deeply emotional. Watching Helen learn to read Mabel’s body language, anticipate her movements, respect her wildness, and eventually let her fly free is quietly devastating.
It’s about control and surrender at the same time. It’s about loving something that cannot love you back in the way you want. It’s about finding meaning without words.
And because of Tony Fitzpatrick, because of birds, because of grief, because of timing, this movie wrecked me. I cried. I was overwhelmed. I could not separate what the film was doing from what I was feeling.
This is one of those rare instances where being a critic becomes secondary to being a human being sitting in a dark room with too many thoughts.
That doesn’t mean the movie is perfect. It isn’t. It’s too long. The flashbacks don’t work. The pacing will test patience.
But it is solid, thoughtful, beautifully acted, and deeply sincere. It treats grief not as something to conquer but something to live alongside. It suggests that solace can come from unexpected places, even from something as wild and indifferent as a bird.
H Is for Hawk made me want to read the memoir it’s based on, which is always a good sign. It made me think about my friend. It made me think about birds. It made me think about how people survive loss in their own strange, private ways.
I can’t take my personal feelings out of this review, and I don’t want to. This movie hit me exactly where I live right now. Even if it hadn’t, I still think it’s a worthwhile, well-crafted film anchored by a tremendous performance from Claire Foy. But because of where I am, because of who I’ve lost, it landed much harder.
I recommend H Is for Hawk. Just know that it’s quiet, patient, emotionally demanding, and very honest about grief. And sometimes, that honesty can knock the wind out of you. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
In Cold Light is one of those movies that you can almost feel trying to distract you from itself, and for a while, it actually succeeds.
This is Maxime Giroux’s first English-language film after working in French Canada, and it plays like a grab bag of every gritty crime-thriller cliché you can imagine, thrown at the screen at such a relentless pace that it takes a while to realize just how familiar and hollow the whole thing really is. It’s loud, fast, violent, beautifully shot, and almost completely empty at its core.
The setup is pure boilerplate neo-noir. Ava, played by Maika Monroe, is an ex-con just out of prison who wants to go straight, or at least that’s what she tells herself. She’s pulled right back into the criminal underworld when she witnesses the brutal murder of her twin brother, is immediately framed for the crime, and finds herself on the run from corrupt cops, drug dealers, and a shadowy crime boss.
Along the way, she’s saddled with her brother’s orphaned baby, which adds a ticking clock and a supposed emotional layer to the nonstop chase through a bleak, neon-lit Alberta cityscape. It’s all very familiar territory, and the movie never pretends otherwise.
Giroux moves the story at a breakneck pace, and that’s honestly the film’s biggest weapon. The opening sequence is sharp and effective, and for a while, the movie barrels forward so quickly that you don’t have time to stop and think about how many times you’ve seen this exact story play out in better movies.
Witness a murder. Wrongly accused. On the run. Corrupt cops. Ruthless crime boss. Estranged parent. Redemption through responsibility. It’s all here, and it’s all handled in the most surface-level way imaginable. Patrick Whistler’s script never digs beneath the clichés, never surprises, and never gives the characters anything resembling depth.
What keeps the movie watchable for a long stretch is Maika Monroe. She’s a terrific genre actress who has proven herself over and over again in films like It Follows and the criminally underseen Watcher, where she delivered one of the smartest, most suspenseful performances in recent thriller history.
Here, she’s not given nearly that much to work with, but she still carries the movie on sheer presence and commitment. Even when the script fails her, she makes you want to keep watching.
She runs well, screams well, bleeds convincingly, and sells the physical exhaustion of being hunted from all sides. There’s a toughness to her that feels earned, even when the emotional beats are underwritten.
The supporting elements are far shakier. Troy Kotsur, who won an Oscar for CODA, plays Ava’s estranged father, a former rodeo star who communicates through sign language. On paper, this relationship should be the emotional anchor of the film, but it never rises above the most basic sketch of regret, disappointment, and unresolved trauma.
The scenes are fine, but they never land with any real weight. You’re told what these characters mean to each other, but you never really feel it.
Technically, the movie is far better than it deserves to be. Cinematographer Sara Mishara does genuinely beautiful work here, bathing the Alberta locations in moody light and texture. The film looks terrific. The action is staged cleanly, the editing keeps everything moving, and there are moments of real visual flair.
There’s a particularly effective sequence where Ava is forced to change a baby’s diaper in the middle of a supermarket while being hunted, and that collision of maternal responsibility and imminent violence is one of the few moments where the movie briefly finds something resembling a fresh idea.
Unfortunately, whatever goodwill the film builds evaporates completely when the main villain finally shows up. Helen Hunt (yes, that Helen Hunt, from Mad About You and As Good As It Gets) plays the ruthless crime boss pulling the strings, and the casting is so wildly off that it’s almost shocking.
She appears late in the film, in essentially one long scene, and completely derails the tone. Her performance is forced, misjudged, and unintentionally funny, and it’s impossible to take her seriously as a criminal mastermind.
It’s one of the most baffling pieces of miscasting I’ve seen in a long time, and it undercuts the entire climax. Whatever tension the movie has worked to maintain collapses the moment she enters the frame.
By the end, In Cold Light is a frustrating experience. It’s slick, fast, and competently made, and it benefits enormously from Maika Monroe’s commitment and Mishara’s cinematography.
But it’s also dumb, derivative, emotionally hollow, and anchored to a laughably bad villain. The pace keeps it from becoming boring, but it can’t disguise the fact that there’s nothing new or meaningful going on underneath the surface.
I can’t fully recommend it. There are things here I admired, moments I enjoyed, and a lead performance that deserves better material.
But when the dust settles, this is a generic thriller that mistakes speed and style for substance, and no amount of slick execution can save a movie that has so little to say. - ⭐️⭐️1/2
If you’re not familiar with the work of The Adams Family (and no, I don’t mean the cartoon, the TV show, or the movies with Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston), I’m talking about the real-life Adams Family, one of the most fascinating and genuinely original DIY filmmaking collectives working in horror today.
John Adams, Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu (collectively known as Wonder Wheel Productions) have been making deeply personal, strange, unsettling, and often beautiful horror films together for years now.
They write them, direct them, shoot them, edit them, star in them, score them, and probably cook the meals on set, too. Movies like The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender announced them as voices to watch, but Mother of Flies is easily the most confident, disturbing, and emotionally resonant film they’ve made so far.
At its core, Mother of Flies is about desperation, illness, grief, and the terrifying hope that sometimes comes with refusing to accept death. Zelda Adams plays Mickey, a young woman whose cancer has returned after a brief remission.
Conventional medicine has failed her, and she refuses to go quietly. Along with her father, Jake, played by John Adams, she travels deep into the woods to seek help from a reclusive witch named Solveig, played by Toby Poser, who is known (whispered about, really) as the Mother of Flies.
Solveig offers a cure, but it’s not clean, it’s not safe, and it is absolutely not free, even if she pretends it is at first. What follows is a three-day ritual that involves death, magic, rot, blood, animals, decay, and transformation, and the slow, creeping realization that every miracle has a price.
What makes this movie so powerful is how personal it feels. The Adams Family has openly discussed their own experiences with cancer, and you feel that lived-in pain in every frame.
This isn’t exploitation horror. This isn’t just “look how gross this is” body horror. It’s horror rooted in fear, grief, anger, and autonomy. Mickey isn’t passive here. She wants this. She chooses this.
Even as the rituals become more disturbing, with maggots, snakes, blood, bones, rotting flesh, and more, there’s an undeniable sense of agency in her decisions, and that tension between choice and consequence is what drives the movie.
Toby Poser is extraordinary as Solveig. She doesn’t play her as a cackling, scenery-chewing witch. She’s quiet, watchful, weary, and deeply connected to death in a way that feels earned rather than performative.
There’s real sadness in her, real history, and when the film begins to reveal her past and her relationship to the land and the people who once trusted her, it lands with a kind of tragic inevitability.
John Adams, meanwhile, is heartbreaking as the father who wants to protect his daughter but knows he’s powerless. His skepticism never turns him into a villain, and that restraint makes their relationship feel painfully real.
Visually, this movie is stunning. Shot by John and Zelda Adams, it has that “biophilic decay” aesthetic they’ve perfected: nature as both womb and tomb. Moss, roots, blood, insects, bones, mud, and shadow all blend together into something that feels ancient and alive.
The influence of Dario Argento is unmistakable, particularly his Three Mothers trilogy, right down to the title itself. There are moments that feel like twisted fairy tales, moments that drift into surrealism, and moments that snap back into brutal physical reality.
You can also feel Darren Aronofsky’s influence here, especially The Wrestler and mother!, with that sense of bodily suffering as spiritual reckoning, of obsession pushing characters past the point of no return.
The score by H6LLB6ND6R, the family’s band, is raw, abrasive, and perfectly matched to the film’s tone. It doesn’t guide your emotions so much as drag them through the mud with you.
This is not a comforting movie. It’s not meant to be. But it is deeply affecting. There are moments of dark humor, moments of beauty, and moments that are genuinely hard to watch, not because they’re shocking for shock’s sake, but because they feel honest.
Mother of Flies is folk horror in the truest sense. It’s about the land, about ritual, about inherited pain, and about the stories we tell ourselves to survive unbearable truths. It’s also one of the most striking and fully realized horror films you’re likely to see this year.
The Adams Family continues to prove that you don’t need studio money, massive crews, or corporate oversight to make something powerful. You need vision, commitment, and the courage to dig into your own wounds.
If you’re a horror fan, especially if you love witchcraft stories, body horror, folk horror, and films that aren’t afraid to be weird, personal, and uncompromising, Mother of Flies is a gift.
It’s creepy, gory, sad, surreal, and beautifully made. One of the strongest Shudder originals in a long time, and the best work yet from a family of filmmakers who just keep getting better. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
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