CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 10-16-26
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review seven new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, October 16th, 2026.
There is something wonderfully insane about the fact that one of the most interesting new theatrical releases of the week is a 55-year-old movie that was censored, butchered, banned, condemned by the Vatican and given zero stars by Roger Ebert.
And now The Devils is playing at multiplexes.
Ken Russell's completely batshit crazy 1971 masterpiece has been restored and is returning to theaters in a version that includes some of the notorious material that was removed over the years.
This thing is getting an NC-17 release in 2026, and I cannot adequately express how much I love the idea that somebody wandering through a suburban shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon can buy a ticket, grab a bucket of popcorn and casually walk into Ken Russell's vision of sexually crazed nuns desecrating religious iconography.
Good luck with that.
I first saw The Devils when I was much too young to see The Devils. I caught it on ON TV, the subscription television service that existed back in the late '70s and early '80s, and later tracked it down on VHS.
I was in my early teens and going through that wonderful period when I was discovering every strange British movie I could possibly find. This was around the same time I was seeing A Clockwork Orange and diving into filmmakers like Nicolas Roeg, Pete Walker, Robert Fuest, Derek Jarman and eventually anybody from England who seemed remotely interested in making something weird, transgressive or horrifying.
My obsession with British cinema really began even earlier with Hammer horror. Those movies opened up the horror genre for me at a very young age, and Peter Cushing (Dr. Frankenstein, Van Helsing and one of the greatest genre actors who ever lived) became one of my heroes. He remains one of my favorite actors of all time. So once Hammer opened that door, I naturally started wandering into the considerably stranger rooms of British cinema.
And eventually you get to Ken Russell.
Russell was one of a kind. Absolutely fearless, flamboyant, excessive and incapable of subtlety, he could take composers, artists, religion, sexuality, history and politics and filter all of it through this completely demented personal sensibility.
He made Women in Love, The Music Lovers, Tommy, Lisztomania, Altered States, Crimes of Passion, Gothic and The Lair of the White Worm. His movies could be beautiful, ridiculous, profound, offensive, hilarious and completely insane, sometimes within the same five minutes.
And The Devils may be his masterpiece.
The movie is based partly on Aldous Huxley's 1952 nonfiction book The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting's subsequent play, drawing from the infamous events in 17th-century Loudun, France.
Oliver Reed plays Urbain Grandier, a Catholic priest who is arrogant, charismatic, politically troublesome and, particularly during the early portion of the movie, very fond of women.
Vanessa Redgrave plays Sister Jeanne des Anges, the physically disabled Mother Superior of an Ursuline convent who becomes sexually obsessed with Grandier despite barely knowing him.
Meanwhile, Cardinal Richelieu is attempting to centralize political power by destroying the fortified walls surrounding French cities. Loudun stands in the way. When Grandier opposes the destruction of his city, the machinery of government, church, sexual repression and mass hysteria begins turning against him.
Sister Jeanne claims Grandier has bewitched her. Soon other nuns are supposedly possessed. A professional witch hunter named Father Barre, played with glorious insanity by Michael Gothard, arrives looking like some long-haired hippie exorcist who wandered in from another movie.
Exorcisms become public spectacles. Religious ritual turns into sexual theater. Accusations become evidence simply because enough people repeat them. And the whole thing explodes.
On the surface, Russell is telling a story about religious hysteria, but The Devils is really about power. Political power. Religious power. Sexual power. The power of institutions to manufacture enemies and then convince everybody that destroying those enemies is righteous.
It is about repression, hypocrisy and what happens when human desire is denied until it mutates into something grotesque. This is an angry movie.
Russell himself considered it his political film, and you can see why. Government and church discover that their interests overlap, so they exploit hysteria to eliminate somebody inconvenient.
Grandier isn't destroyed because he is possessed by the Devil. He's destroyed because powerful people need him gone, and religious panic gives them the perfect excuse. The irony is that Grandier is hardly some spotless saint.
During the first third of the movie, Oliver Reed plays him as arrogant, sexually voracious and morally questionable. He sleeps around, abuses his position and behaves like a man who believes the rules don't entirely apply to him. But as the political and religious machinery begins closing around him, he gradually becomes the moral center of the film.
Reed is magnificent.
There is enormous physical power in his performance, but also intelligence and eventually tremendous dignity. The movie begins by asking us to question Grandier and ends by turning him into a martyr.
His final ordeal (including one of the most horrifying and emotionally powerful burnings at the stake ever put on film) is devastating precisely because Russell has never pretended this man was perfect.
Vanessa Redgrave is equally extraordinary. Glenda Jackson was originally supposed to play Sister Jeanne but turned the role down, and Redgrave stepped in and created one of the strangest performances of her career.
She has this bizarre little cackling laugh. Her body is constantly folded and compressed by Jeanne's physical condition and psychological torment. Russell repeatedly shows her squeezed into spaces, peering through barred openings at Grandier as he walks through town while her sexual obsession transforms him into this impossible fantasy figure.
Watching Redgrave physically contort herself through this performance is astonishing. Jeanne is repressed desire given human form, and eventually that desire becomes useful to people with considerably larger agendas.
And visually, the movie is unbelievable.
Derek Jarman designed Loudun as this enormous, blindingly white environment that looks simultaneously ancient and futuristic. The whiteness is crucial. Instead of giving us the muddy brown historical world you might expect, Russell and Jarman surround these people with gigantic expanses of sterile white stone, making the blood, flesh, black clothing and religious imagery practically explode off the screen.
The production design is extraordinary. The costumes are extraordinary. Peter Maxwell Davies' score is extraordinary. The photography is extraordinary. Everything works toward the same singular vision of a world that appears pristine on the surface while underneath it everybody is consumed by lust, violence, corruption and madness.
And Russell establishes the insanity immediately.
The movie opens with King Louis XIII participating in this wildly theatrical spectacle filled with color, costumes, drag and aristocratic decadence. Later, the King casually shoots men dressed like birds while conducting political business. From the opening moments Russell announces that this is not going to be a restrained historical drama.
There isn't one restrained frame in The Devils.
There are moments that are also outrageously funny. Watching the movie again, I was struck by how much of its grotesque historical comedy seems to anticipate Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The plague victims, the bodies being hauled around, the ridiculous pseudo-medical tests, the absurdity of authority figures confidently performing nonsense, it is difficult not to think of Python. There is even a wonderfully bizarre moment involving an alligator being thrown out a window during one of the supposed tests for demonic possession.
Then Russell moves from comedy into horror, pornography, political satire, religious imagery and genuine tragedy without asking permission.
Which brings us to the scene everybody talks about.
The restored version includes the infamous sequence generally known as the “Rape of Christ,” in which the supposedly possessed nuns descend into a gigantic naked religious-sexual frenzy, pull down a crucifix and sexually violate the figure of Christ. Another notorious restored moment involves Sister Jeanne and Grandier's charred femur after his execution.
These sequences were among the material removed as The Devils was chopped apart by censors and Warner Bros. over the decades. Different countries saw different cuts. The United States received shortened versions. An R-rated version circulated.
The film became one of those legendary movies where simply determining which version you had actually seen could become an entire conversation.
And that censorship history is inseparable from the movie's reputation. The Devils was attacked as pornographic, blasphemous and disgusting. It was banned in numerous places.
The Vatican condemned it. Critics absolutely demolished it. Roger Ebert gave it zero stars. Pauline Kael famously complained that Russell didn't merely depict hysteria, he marketed it. Well, yes. That's part of what makes the movie work.
Russell doesn't want you observing hysteria politely from a safe distance. He wants you trapped inside it. He wants religion, sex, violence, repression, politics and spectacle crashing into each other until you understand how intoxicating collective madness can become.
This movie assaults you. But I think it assaults you brilliantly.
One of my favorite descriptions of The Devils came from Chicago critic Dave Kehr, who essentially described it as a David Lean remake of Pink Flamingos, which is about as perfect a description as you could possibly come up with.
It has the enormous visual scale and historical grandeur of an epic combined with the confrontational vulgarity of something designed to get thrown out of respectable society.
That contradiction is Ken Russell.
Some people will call it camp. Some will call it pretentious. Some will call it offensive garbage. Others will simply walk out. I think it's art.
Because underneath all the excess, Russell is completely sincere. That's what separates The Devils from something that is merely trying to shock you. He isn't tossing blasphemous imagery onto the screen because he thinks it's naughty.
He has something furious to say about institutions that manipulate faith, politicians who exploit fear, religious authorities who weaponize repression and human beings who can be convinced to participate in almost anything once they've been told they're acting on behalf of something righteous.
For a movie made 55 years ago, none of that feels particularly ancient.
And for all the nudity, screaming, masturbation, torture, exorcisms, blood, sacrilege and outrageous performances, the final stretch becomes genuinely moving. Grandier's torture and execution are brutal.
Reed strips away the swagger and gives the character an extraordinary humanity. The destruction of Loudun becomes inseparable from the destruction of the man who tried to protect it.
Then Russell gives us a final image that I won't describe for anyone seeing the movie for the first time. It is haunting. After all the noise and madness, that image lands with incredible sadness.
That's why The Devils has lasted. The shock would not matter after 55 years if there weren't something underneath it. Plenty of movies have been banned. Plenty have offended religious organizations. Plenty have contained explicit sex and violence. Most of them eventually become historical curiosities. The Devils hasn't.
And now this gorgeous restoration is going into actual American multiplexes. Not just a handful of midnight screenings at repertory theaters. Multiplexes. I find that absolutely hilarious.
I cannot wait to hear what happens when unsuspecting people wander into this thing because they saw a poster at the AMC and thought, “Hey, I've heard this is supposed to be a classic.”
Enjoy the nuns.
The restoration looks magnificent. The whites are almost blinding, the colors and blood are startling, the production design looks more extraordinary than ever, and the restored material makes Russell's vision feel appropriately complete and uncompromised.
Will people hate it? Absolutely. Will some people be offended? Without question. Will people walk out? I would be disappointed if they didn't.
But Ken Russell never made movies for people who wanted to remain comfortable. He made movies that screamed at you, laughed at you, seduced you, disgusted you and occasionally overwhelmed you with images you couldn't forget.
The Devils does all of that.
It is obscene, beautiful, hilarious, horrifying, politically furious, sexually deranged, emotionally powerful and completely frigging crazy.
I loved it when I was probably much too young to understand everything Ken Russell was doing. I love it even more now.
And the fact that, 55 years later, this notorious, censored, NC-17 piece of cinematic madness has escaped from the vaults and is heading back onto big screens in all its outrageous glory?
That makes me very happy. Welcome back, you crazy bastard. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
There's an entire subgenre of movies built around a very simple premise: one person, trapped in an almost impossible situation, with nobody around to help, forced to rely on their intelligence, instincts, and whatever limited resources they have to survive.
Some of these movies have been terrific. Danny Boyle's 127 Hours, with James Franco playing the real-life hiker Aron Ralston, who gets his arm pinned beneath an enormous boulder in a Utah canyon, was an incredibly intense, beautifully directed, and brilliantly acted movie. Buried, with Ryan Reynolds waking up inside a wooden coffin underground with nothing but a cell phone and a lighter, was another effective thriller.
You can even include variations like Gravity, All Is Lost, Cast Away, and The Martian. These movies take an inherently limited situation and, when they're done well, turn it into something genuinely suspenseful and emotionally involving.
The latest entry in this category is Whalefall, which has a pretty outrageous premise involving a teenager trapped inside the stomach of a sperm whale. Unfortunately, despite some impressive special effects and a few effective sequences, the movie gets swallowed up by one of the corniest father-son stories I've seen in quite some time.
Based on Daniel Kraus's bestselling 2023 novel, Whalefall is directed by Brian Duffield, who also adapted the screenplay with Kraus. Duffield previously directed Spontaneous and No One Will Save You, and his screenwriting and producing credits include Cocaine Bear.
Now, I realize Cocaine Bear has its fans, but when I think about the kind of emotional subtlety and sophisticated storytelling required to make a movie about grief, guilt, family relationships, and forgiveness, that's not exactly the first title that inspires confidence.
And while Duffield clearly has some interesting visual ideas, subtlety is definitely not one of this movie's strengths.
Austin Abrams plays Jay Gardiner, a 17-year-old who has spent most of his life struggling with his difficult relationship with his father, Mitt (Josh Brolin), a gruff, demanding, frequently abrasive professional diver who has raised his son with an almost comically exaggerated philosophy of toughness and self-reliance.
Mitt has two daughters, Eva (Jane Levy) and Nan (Emily Rudd), and a wife, Zara (Elisabeth Shue), but he's always been particularly hard on Jay, constantly criticizing him for not being more like the man he thinks his son should become.
When Mitt is diagnosed with mesothelioma, an aggressive form of cancer, he takes a boat out near the California coast with his longtime friend Hewey (the always terrific John Ortiz) and commits suicide by jumping into the ocean. His body is never recovered.
A year later, Jay is still struggling with guilt, anger, and unresolved feelings about his father. He's been away at college in Iowa, has become increasingly distant from his family, and hasn't even opened the letter his father left him before his death. Hoping to find some kind of closure, he decides to dive alone into the waters where Mitt disappeared and search for his remains.
Unfortunately, while exploring the ocean floor, Jay encounters a giant squid, which attracts an enormous sperm whale looking for dinner. The whale swallows the squid and Jay along with it, leaving the kid trapped inside its digestive system with roughly an hour of oxygen remaining in his scuba tank.
He now has to navigate the whale's internal organs, avoid being crushed or dissolved by stomach acid, and somehow figure out how to escape before he suffocates.
Now, that's a pretty good setup for one of these survival thrillers. It's ridiculous, of course, but I'm perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief if the filmmakers can make the situation convincing enough to generate some genuine suspense. And for a while, Whalefall actually works.
The sequence involving the squid and the whale swallowing Jay is impressively staged, the underwater photography is effective, and the CGI whale looks terrific. There are some genuinely claustrophobic moments once Jay finds himself trapped inside the animal, particularly when he's surrounded by pulsating organs, slimy membranes, and stomach acid that's literally burning through his skin and equipment.
There's a disturbing sequence involving his body becoming stuck to material inside the whale, and the physical discomfort of watching him struggle to free himself is pretty effective. The production design and visual effects do a nice job of creating an environment that feels disgusting, dangerous, and completely alien.
Abrams also deserves credit for the physical demands of the role. He's required to spend an enormous amount of screen time gasping for air, struggling through disgusting biological material, screaming, crying, and reacting to increasingly horrible physical circumstances.
He throws himself into the performance, and his terror and desperation are convincing enough. Abrams, who has appeared in Weapons and the latest Resident Evil movie, is an interesting young actor, although I couldn't help noticing how much of his performance here seems modeled on Timothée Chalamet.
The physical mannerisms, the voice, the emotional choices, even the way he carries himself frequently reminded me of Chalamet, who I consider one of the finest young actors working today.
At times, it almost feels as though the filmmakers couldn't get Chalamet, so they hired somebody who could deliver a reasonably convincing imitation. Abrams does a good job with the physical material, but the resemblance is distracting.
The real problem begins when the movie starts interrupting the survival story with flashbacks to Jay's relationship with his father. Initially, these scenes are reasonably interesting. Brolin is certainly entertaining as Mitt, a man who seems determined to redefine the word gruff every time he opens his mouth.
He's the kind of father who gets furious because his son would rather visit an ocean-themed amusement park with his friends than go diving into the actual ocean to see a real whale. He lectures Jay about courage, responsibility, masculinity, and the importance of confronting nature directly.
He's tougher on his son than on his daughters, and their relationship is filled with resentment, disappointment, and emotional distance. Brolin and Abrams have some decent moments together, and the early flashbacks establish why Jay has such complicated feelings about his father.
But then the movie keeps returning to these scenes, and every flashback becomes more predictable, more sentimental, and more heavy-handed than the last. We've seen this father-son relationship in dozens of other movies.
The demanding, emotionally unavailable father who doesn't understand his sensitive son. The son who resents his father's harsh treatment but secretly longs for his approval. The tragedy that separates them before they can reconcile. And, of course, the realization that all those difficult lessons the father taught him are precisely what the son needs to survive.
There's nothing inherently wrong with exploring those ideas, but Whalefall presents them with absolutely no subtlety or originality. Every emotional point is underlined, explained, and then underlined again, just in case somebody in the audience missed it the first three times.
It also doesn't help that the movie constantly stops its most interesting material to deliver these emotional lessons. Just when Jay is facing some genuinely horrifying situation inside the whale, we cut away to another conversation with Dad, another family argument, another speech about life, death, responsibility, or the majesty of whales.
There are also plenty of ecological messages about the importance of these magnificent creatures and the need to protect them. I'm all for saving whales, believe me, but the movie becomes so determined to deliver its environmental and emotional messages that it practically forgets it's supposed to be a suspense thriller.
The symbolism gets increasingly obvious, with the whale itself becoming a metaphor for Jay's relationship with his father, his grief, and his need for forgiveness. And then things get completely ridiculous.
As Jay struggles to survive, he begins hearing his father's voice inside his head. Eventually, the whale itself essentially becomes a manifestation of Mitt, with Josh Brolin's voice offering advice, encouragement, and instructions from beyond the grave. That's right. The kid is trapped inside a sperm whale, and his dead father is apparently communicating with him through the whale's digestive system.
I understand that this is supposed to represent Jay remembering the lessons his father taught him and finally coming to terms with their troubled relationship. But the execution is so unbelievably corny that I found myself laughing at moments when the movie clearly wanted me to be deeply moved.
The ghostly fatherly advice, the increasingly obvious symbolism, and the endless emotional speeches turn what should have been an intense survival story into a painfully sentimental exercise in recycled family drama.
Now, one of the challenges with these single-character survival movies is finding a believable way for the protagonist to communicate what they're thinking. Sometimes filmmakers use voice-over narration, sometimes flashbacks, and sometimes the character simply talks to themselves. Whalefall uses all three, frequently at the same time.
Jay spends an enormous amount of time explaining things aloud, remembering conversations, and listening to his father's increasingly intrusive spiritual guidance. I understand the dramatic necessity of some of this, but there's so much talking, so much explaining, and so much emotional hand-holding that the movie gradually loses whatever tension it established.
The final half hour feels endless, even though the basic premise should have provided a perfectly effective ticking-clock thriller.
The supporting cast does what it can with some very familiar material. Elisabeth Shue is good as Jay's grieving mother, and John Ortiz brings his usual reliability to the role of Mitt's friend.
Emily Rudd is fine as one of Jay's sisters, but I was particularly delighted when Jane Levy showed up as the other sister, Eva. I had no idea Levy was in this movie, and the moment she appeared, I immediately perked up. I absolutely love Jane Levy. She's one of those actresses who automatically makes any movie or television show better simply by being in it.
She has only a handful of scenes here, but she brings a grounded, believable warmth to her relationship with Jay, and I found her work more emotionally convincing than most of the elaborate father-son material surrounding it. Frankly, there isn't nearly enough Jane Levy in this movie, and that's never a good thing.
Brolin, meanwhile, gives exactly the kind of performance the screenplay demands, which is both the strength and the weakness of his work. He's an enormously talented actor, and he can certainly play an intimidating, emotionally closed-off father.
But Mitt is written in such broad, stereotypical terms that Brolin spends much of the movie barking instructions, delivering speeches, and acting like the world's angriest diving instructor.
The screenplay gives him very little room to create a more complicated human being, and by the time his voice starts functioning as a supernatural motivational speaker inside a whale, there's not much even an actor as good as Brolin can do to save the material.
What kept coming to mind while watching Whalefall was Oxygen, the terrific French science-fiction thriller directed by Alexandre Aja. That movie stars Mélanie Laurent as a woman who wakes up trapped inside a cryogenic chamber with no memory of how she got there and a rapidly diminishing supply of oxygen.
Like Whalefall, it's essentially a one-person show involving a desperate fight for survival, fragmented memories, and the gradual reconstruction of a character's past. But Aja handles those elements with tremendous skill, creating an intensely claustrophobic, intelligent, and emotionally satisfying thriller that never loses sight of its central mystery or its suspense.
Oxygen accomplishes so much of what Whalefall is attempting, and it does it far more effectively. I'd put it near the top of my list of movies about people trapped in impossible situations, right alongside 127 Hours and Buried.
Ultimately, Whalefall is a frustrating movie because there's a genuinely interesting survival thriller buried underneath all the sentimental nonsense. The special effects are impressive, the whale itself is beautifully realized, and there are some effective, skin-crawling moments involving the digestive system and the physical horrors Jay encounters.
Abrams gives a committed, physically demanding performance, and the premise certainly has potential. But the screenplay is so overloaded with familiar father-son clichés, heavy-handed environmental messaging, and increasingly ridiculous supernatural symbolism that the movie never becomes the intense, visceral experience it should have been.
I wanted to see a clever, resourceful kid figure out how the hell to escape from the inside of a gigantic sperm whale. Instead, I got an endless series of flashbacks, inspirational lectures, and a dead father who apparently decided to continue parenting from inside a marine mammal.
There are some impressive visuals and a few moments of genuine suspense, but they aren't nearly enough to overcome the screenplay's overwhelming corniness. If you're looking for a really good single-person survival thriller, watch Oxygen, 127 Hours, or Buried instead.
And despite the welcome presence of Jane Levy, there simply isn't enough of her, or enough genuine suspense, to save Whalefall. I can't recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️
The new Street Fighter movie is so bad that it actually made me long for the 1994 version starring Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia.
Think about that for a moment. I was sitting in a theater watching this new, expensive, incredibly loud, spectacularly stupid adaptation of the popular video game, and I found myself wishing I was watching the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie instead. That's how terrible this thing is.
The 1994 film was a ridiculous mess, but at least it had Raul Julia delivering a gloriously over-the-top performance as the villainous M. Bison.
This new version has plenty of overacting, ridiculous costumes, elaborate fight sequences, and some of the dumbest dialogue imaginable, but it also has a few interesting visual ideas, a terrific soundtrack, and enough sheer insanity to keep me from getting completely bored.
Unfortunately, none of those things make it a good movie.
Now, as I've mentioned many times before when reviewing movies based on video games, I don't play video games. Never have. The last video game system I owned was Pong back in the 1970s, and that's pretty much where my gaming career ended.
I've never played Street Fighter, I don't know the complicated histories of these characters, and I have absolutely no idea whether this movie is faithful to the games.
The audience I saw it with certainly seemed to recognize the characters, and there were moments when people responded enthusiastically to various appearances and references. That's fine. But I'm reviewing this as a movie, not as a two-hour collection of references to something I've never played. And as a movie, it's an absolute disaster.
The film is directed by Kitao Sakurai, whose background is actually pretty interesting. He's directed television, including episodes of Beef, but he's probably best known for helping create and direct episodes of The Eric Andre Show, one of the most bizarre, anarchic, and genuinely hilarious television programs of recent years.
Those insane, ten-minute explosions of absurdist comedy, violence, destruction, and celebrity humiliation were frequently brilliant. Sakurai clearly enjoys outrageous humor, aggressive editing, and visual chaos, and he brings all of those instincts to Street Fighter without much understanding of when to stop.
The result feels like somebody dumped a martial arts tournament, a Japanese anime series, a professional wrestling event, a 1990s music video, and an obnoxious sketch comedy show into a blender and forgot to put the lid on.
The movie opens in 1987 with a beautifully animated sequence introducing two young martial artists, Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Noah Centineo), who were raised and trained together under their master, Gouken (Don Lee). Following a tournament victory and the appearance of a supernatural fighter named Akuma (WWE star Roman Reigns), Gouken is killed, and the relationship between Ryu and Ken falls apart.
The sequence is presented in large, colorful, Japanese anime-inspired animation, and I actually liked it quite a bit. Then the movie jumps ahead to 1993, switches to live action, and becomes completely ridiculous.
The evil dictator M. Bison (David Dastmalchian) is organizing another World Warrior tournament, supposedly bringing together the greatest fighters on the planet, but the competition is actually a scheme to harness their fighting energy and make himself the most powerful warrior in existence.
Chun-Li (Callina Liang), secretly working for Interpol and seeking revenge against Bison for murdering her father, recruits Ryu and Ken to participate.
Before long, everybody is fighting everybody else, Bison is kidnapping people and extracting supernatural powers, and the tournament becomes a gigantic collection of elaborate battles and increasingly incomprehensible subplots.
The cast is a bizarre assortment of performers who seem to have wandered onto the set from completely different productions. You've got martial artists, professional wrestlers, comedians, musicians, and some genuinely talented character actors, all dressed in outrageous costumes and apparently operating under entirely different sets of instructions.
Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson plays the boxer Balrog, Eric André is the screaming tournament commentator Don Sauvage, Andrew Schulz plays Ken's manager, Dan Hibiki, and Kyle Mooney from Saturday Night Live turns up as part of a television news crew. WWE stars Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes are among the fighters, and Jason Momoa plays a green mutant.
Unfortunately, the two leads are among the least interesting people in the film. Andrew Koji is serviceable as Ryu, but the character is relentlessly serious and dull, while Noah Centineo is absolutely dreadful as Ken. He seems to think every line requires an exaggerated facial expression, a gigantic gesture, or some desperately unfunny comic delivery.
Neither actor has much chemistry with the other, which is a serious problem when their friendship and rivalry are supposed to provide the movie's emotional foundation.
The one actor who seems to understand exactly what kind of garbage he's appearing in is David Dastmalchian, who plays M. Bison with a level of shameless, unrestrained lunacy that almost becomes admirable. Dastmalchian is a terrific character actor, and here he appears to have decided that subtlety is something that happens in other movies.
He screams, sneers, makes ridiculous faces, delivers bizarre speeches, and generally behaves like a man who has been given absolutely no direction whatsoever. Some of what he does is embarrassing, some of it makes no sense, and some of it is genuinely funny, including a wonderfully strange moment involving Bison eating snails.
He's not as entertaining as Raul Julia was in the original movie, but he's easily the best thing about this one, mostly because he seems to be having a terrific time making a complete fool of himself.
And then there's Cody Rhodes. Good Lord. I've never understood the enormous popularity of this guy in professional wrestling. I find him incredibly annoying on the microphone, unimpressive in the ring, and one of the most overrated performers in WWE.
Here he plays Guile, the character portrayed by Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 1994 movie, complete with that ridiculous, towering blond flattop haircut. The filmmakers give Rhodes a collection of supposedly funny one-liners and comic situations, and he delivers every single one of them with the timing and personality of a piece of lumber.
He's terrible in the action sequences, terrible with the dialogue, and completely incapable of making any of the jokes work. So, in that respect, his performance is remarkably consistent with everything else I've seen him do.
Roman Reigns, meanwhile, is perfectly fine as Akuma and seems to be enjoying himself. At least one of the wrestlers understood the assignment.
Jason Momoa is another story. I've said this before, but Momoa is one of the most irritating actors working today. His performances in the Aquaman movies and A Minecraft Movie drove me crazy, and I thought he was almost unwatchable as Lobo in Supergirl. I've actually liked him in the Dune movies, where Denis Villeneuve keeps him under control and gives him something resembling a real character to play.
Here, however, he's back to his usual obnoxious routine as Blanka, a bizarre green, partially CGI creature who works for Bison because he's been promised a reunion with his mother.
Momoa delivers stupid one-liners, makes ridiculous faces, and mugs his way through every scene. The character looks absurd, the jokes don't work, and his performance simply adds another layer of irritation to an already exhausting movie.
There are, however, a couple of things about Street Fighter that I genuinely enjoyed, starting with the animation. Throughout the film, flashbacks, memories, and fantasy sequences are presented in that striking anime style established during the opening. The transitions between live action and animation are often inventive, and some of the animated sequences are beautifully designed.
There are also a few well-executed fight scenes, some entertaining visual effects, and moments when the movie's ridiculousness becomes amusing rather than annoying.
A sequence involving somebody's training session being interrupted while Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun" plays is pretty funny, and Eric André occasionally gets a laugh simply by doing the kind of screaming, deranged nonsense that made his television show so entertaining.
But the best thing about the movie, by far, is the soundtrack. Since the story takes place in 1993, the filmmakers have filled it with a wild assortment of pop, rock, hip-hop, and dance songs from the period and beyond, and many of the needle drops are terrific.
There's Soundgarden, Tupac, White Zombie, Kool & the Gang, MC Hammer's "2 Legit 2 Quit," Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch's "Good Vibrations," Montell Jordan's "This Is How We Do It," Meredith Brooks' "Bitch," and the Offspring's "Come Out and Play." There's even "It's Raining Men" by the Weather Girls and "Who Let the Dogs Out" by the Baha Men, along with music from 50 Cent, who, of course, is also in the movie.
Some of these songs came out well after 1993, so historical accuracy clearly wasn't a major concern. But the music is frequently edited beautifully into the fight sequences, turning them into elaborate, energetic music videos featuring ridiculously muscular people beating the crap out of each other. And I have to admit, some of that is pretty entertaining.
Unfortunately, the movie also commits what I consider an almost unforgivable musical crime during its opening ten minutes. It plays "What's Up?" by 4 Non Blondes not once, not twice, but four separate times. Four times!
I consider that one of the worst songs in the history of recorded music, and having to listen to it repeatedly, including a karaoke version performed very badly by the two lead actors, nearly drove me out of the theater before the movie had even gotten started. I was sitting there thinking, if they're going to keep playing this godawful song for the next two hours, I'm going to need medical attention.
Fortunately, the soundtrack improves considerably after that, although I'm not sure anything can completely compensate for being subjected to that song four times in ten minutes.
The movie's other major problem is that it never knows when to shut up or move on.
Practically every character, including people who have almost nothing to do with the story, gets some kind of elaborate introduction, backstory, flashback, or explanation. There are so many subplots that I eventually stopped trying to follow them, mostly because none of them are particularly interesting.
The humor is dominated by crotch jokes, vomit jokes, terrible puns, and broad physical comedy that rarely works. The fight choreography ranges from impressive to completely incoherent, and the performances swing wildly between mildly amusing and downright unbearable.
There are plenty of attractive, muscular people photographed in bright colors, and there's always something exploding, screaming, or flying across the screen, but none of it adds up to anything.
And the damn thing is two hours long. Two hours! This movie has absolutely no business running longer than about 88 minutes.
There's enough material here for a fast, ridiculous, disposable little action comedy, but Sakurai stretches everything out with endless explanations, unnecessary character developments, and fight scenes that seem to exist primarily because somebody remembered another character from the video game who hadn't appeared yet.
It's a movie that desperately needs somebody to walk into the editing room and start throwing entire sequences into the garbage. Preferably while wearing earplugs.
I will say that I wasn't completely bored. The movie is so relentlessly bizarre, so visually aggressive, and so committed to its own stupidity that there's usually something on the screen to stare at in disbelief.
The animation is good, the soundtrack is frequently excellent, Dastmalchian is gloriously unhinged, and a few of the fights are entertaining. But those scattered pleasures are buried beneath terrible performances, juvenile comedy, a nonsensical screenplay, and a running time that feels completely unjustified.
Street Fighter is one of the dumbest movies I've seen all year, an exhausting combination of anime, live-action martial arts, professional wrestling, music videos, and painfully unfunny comedy.
Maybe devoted fans of the video games will get something out of recognizing their favorite characters, costumes, and special moves. I certainly can't speak to that, because, as I've said, my video game experience pretty much begins and ends with Pong. But I can tell you that as a movie, this thing is a spectacular mess.
I can't recommend it. And if the video game is anywhere near as stupid as this movie, I'm perfectly happy that I never played it.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I need to go watch the Jean-Claude Van Damme version again.
At least that one has Raul Julia. - ⭐️1/2
The work of Jane Austen has been adapted, re-adapted, updated, modernized, reinterpreted and turned inside out so many times that whenever another version comes along, there is one obvious question that needs to be asked:
Why? Why do we need another Sense and Sensibility?
There have already been numerous film and television adaptations of Austen's 1811 novel, including BBC versions in 1971, 1981 and 2008, a Hallmark adaptation in 2024, various modernized interpretations and, of course, the one that casts a very large shadow over all of them: Ang Lee's wonderful 1995 film starring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman. That movie is terrific.
Emma Thompson adapted Austen's novel, won an Oscar for her screenplay, starred as Elinor Dashwood, and somehow found exactly the right balance between Austen's social observations, romantic complications, heartbreak and humor. Ang Lee directed it beautifully.
The movie was lush without becoming stuffy, intelligent without feeling like homework, romantic without becoming silly and, most importantly, it was enormously entertaining.
So if you're going to make another Sense and Sensibility 31 years later, you'd better have a pretty compelling reason. Unfortunately, this new version doesn't.
Directed by Georgia Oakley from a screenplay by Diana Reid, the 2026 Sense and Sensibility is certainly well acted, handsomely produced and reasonably faithful to Austen's story. But it is also surprisingly dour, emotionally constricted and occasionally downright depressing.
Instead of discovering a new way into Austen, Oakley seems determined to drain much of the warmth and wit out of the material and concentrate almost entirely on the sadness, disappointment and societal oppression surrounding these women.
The basic story remains familiar. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Elinor Dashwood and Esmé Creed-Miles plays her younger sister Marianne. After their father's death, Elinor, Marianne, their younger sister Margaret and their mother, played by Caitríona Balfe, find themselves facing financial uncertainty when the family estate passes to their half-brother John and his wonderfully unpleasant wife Fanny.
Elinor begins developing feelings for Fanny's brother Edward Ferrars, played by George MacKay, but their relationship becomes complicated by a secret engagement Edward made years earlier to Lucy Steele.
Meanwhile, the considerably more emotionally demonstrative Marianne falls passionately for the handsome John Willoughby, played by Frank Dillane, while remaining largely oblivious to the affection of Colonel Brandon, played by Herbert Nordrum.
Anybody familiar with Austen knows that heartbreak, secrets, money, class, social expectations, romantic misunderstandings and eventually some emotional revelations follow.
The difference between Elinor and Marianne is right there in the title. Elinor represents sense: restraint, practicality, responsibility and the suppression of emotion. Marianne represents sensibility: passion, romanticism, emotional openness and the willingness to throw herself completely into whatever she's feeling.
That's wonderful material for actors.
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles are both talented performers, and the movie surrounds them with an impressive cast. George MacKay is here. Fiona Shaw is here. Caitríona Balfe, Frank Dillane, Tom Brooke and others are all capable actors.
But everybody seems trapped inside the movie's relentlessly pensive tone.
The scenes between Elinor and Edward are a perfect example. Oakley shoots many of their encounters in tight, intimate compositions, emphasizing the restrictions around them and all the feelings they aren't allowed to express. I understand exactly what she's doing.
Visually and dramatically, the movie is trying to make us feel the pressure of this society closing around these characters. But understanding a directorial choice doesn't automatically make it enjoyable.
Compare those scenes to Thompson and Hugh Grant in the 1995 film. There was wit between them. There was awkwardness, but it was charming awkwardness. They could share a drawing room and have an actual conversation with some spark and humor in it. You enjoyed watching these people discover each other.
Here, everything is a slow burn. A very, very slow burn. The movie seems so committed to communicating repression that eventually I started to feel repressed myself.
The same thing happens with Marianne and Willoughby. One of the famous romantic moments in the story involves Marianne injuring herself and being rescued by Willoughby.
In Ang Lee's version, the rain, landscape and movement turn the sequence into this wonderfully cinematic romantic entrance. It announces Willoughby as exactly the kind of man Marianne would instantly transform into the hero of her own personal romantic novel.
Oakley's version stages the sequence on harsh beach terrain, emphasizing violent weather, danger and Marianne's chaotic emotional state. Again, I understand the choice. It's intentionally less romanticized. But something is lost.
That's the recurring problem with this adaptation. It keeps finding ways to make Austen more severe without finding enough ways to make that severity dramatically rewarding.
Even the dances and balls (which are enormously important spaces in Austen because they allow characters to flirt, observe, gossip, judge and communicate within incredibly rigid social rules) feel strangely pushed into the background.
Oakley incorporates modern dance into the film, and the movement is deliberately stiff and controlled, another visual representation of the societal pressures surrounding these people.
It's an interesting concept. It is also distracting. There are moments when the movie feels less interested in letting Austen's characters breathe than in constantly reminding us that they cannot breathe.
And this disappoints me even more because Georgia Oakley made Blue Jean. If you haven't seen Blue Jean, please see it. It was Oakley's 2023 feature debut, and it was one of my favorite films of that year.
Rosy McEwen gives an extraordinary performance as a closeted physical education teacher in England who is trying to keep her sexuality hidden at work during a politically hostile period, only to have that carefully divided existence threatened when one of her students enters her private world. That movie is also about repression.
But Blue Jean understands how to make repression dramatically alive. It understands the terror and emotional exhaustion involved in constantly monitoring yourself, and McEwen's performance is remarkable. It was her first leading film role, and she has gone on to do terrific work, including Black Mirror, but she's absolutely outstanding in Blue Jean.
So if this disappointing Sense and Sensibility accomplishes anything, I hope somebody watches it, looks up Georgia Oakley's previous film and discovers Blue Jean. Because that is a much better movie.
Back to Austen.
One of the few people allowed to bring some genuine comic energy into this version is Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings, and when she arrives, I initially welcomed her like somebody had finally opened a window. At last, somebody is having a good time.
Mrs. Jennings is one of those wonderful Austen characters who can provide comedy while also functioning as a gossip, observer and accidental agent of romantic chaos. Elizabeth Spriggs was delightful in the 1995 film, and Brenda Blethyn brought a warmer, more maternal quality to the character in the 2008 miniseries.
Shaw is a remarkable actress, and she certainly commits here, but she's been directed to play Mrs. Jennings so broadly that eventually she seems to have wandered in from another adaptation entirely. She's booming, boisterous, endlessly talking about the weather and functioning very obviously as comic relief.
The problem isn't that she's funny. The problem is that because everything surrounding her has been played with such solemnity, her performance becomes jarring. Instead of the humor naturally emerging from Austen's world, it feels like the movie briefly stops being itself whenever Mrs. Jennings walks into the room.
Several of the supporting characters have similar problems. John Dashwood is pushed toward buffoonery, and some of the extended family members who have provided such memorable texture in previous versions never become particularly interesting here.
These characters are supposed to create an entire social ecosystem around Elinor and Marianne, with people gossiping, interfering, matchmaking, judging, withholding money, making terrible romantic decisions and generally complicating everybody else's lives. Here, too many of them simply feel functional.
And that's strange because Austen is anything but humorless. The romantic suffering is real, but so is the comedy of people behaving badly while pretending to behave properly. That balance matters.
This new Sense and Sensibility seems almost suspicious of pleasure. The photography can be beautiful, the costumes and locations are handsome, and the actors are clearly talented, but the movie keeps tightening everything until the emotional world begins to feel smaller rather than deeper.
I don't need every Jane Austen adaptation to look like the 1995 movie.
In fact, if you're going to remake something this familiar, please don't just imitate what worked before. Find another perspective. Challenge the material. Reinterpret it. But the reinterpretation has to give me something in return.
If you're going to remove much of the wit and romantic sweep, what are you replacing them with? Here, the answer seems to be more sadness. More restraint. More seriousness. More pensive close-ups. Eventually that isn't enough.
The movie does remain fairly faithful to the architecture of Austen's story. Marianne discovers the truth about Willoughby. Elinor suffers silently after learning about Edward's engagement. Colonel Brandon proves himself honorable. Marianne becomes gravely ill.
Romantic allegiances shift, secrets are revealed, Lucy Steele makes a wonderfully opportunistic decision, and eventually the Dashwood sisters arrive at the emotional destinations Austen created for them. But I didn't feel nearly enough along the way. That's a serious problem when you're adapting Sense and Sensibility.
The 1995 movie understood that the pleasure of Austen isn't merely discovering who ends up with whom. It's spending time with these people. It's watching them talk, misunderstand each other, conceal things, reveal things, flirt, gossip and negotiate the absurd rules of their society while desperately trying to find some happiness inside them.
Ang Lee and Emma Thompson made that process a joy. Georgia Oakley makes it feel like work.
So, no, I don't think we needed another Sense and Sensibility. Not this one, anyway.
Fans of Austen may find enough here to make it worthwhile. There are interesting choices, good actors and a sincere attempt to emphasize the social pressures surrounding the Dashwood sisters. I don't think the movie is incompetent. I think it's misguided.
And that's almost more frustrating. Because all of the pieces are here. They're just being played so seriously, so stoically and so pensively that the life gradually drains out of them.
If you've never seen Sense and Sensibility, go watch the 1995 version. And if you've already seen that one? Watch it again.
Then watch Blue Jean. You'll have a much better time. - ⭐️⭐️
Fjord is a tricky movie.
It is complicated, provocative, occasionally maddening and deliberately unwilling to give you the comfort of knowing exactly who is right. It is also the kind of movie that will almost certainly start an argument the minute you walk out of the theater. And I mean that as a compliment.
Written and directed by Cristian Mungiu and loosely inspired by a real case involving a Romanian-Norwegian family whose children were removed by Norwegian child welfare authorities, Fjord is seemingly a family drama and legal thriller. But what Mungiu is really examining is judgment.
How quickly do we decide we understand people we barely know? How much should cultural and religious differences matter when we're deciding whether somebody is a good parent? Where does legitimate concern for children end and institutional overreach begin?
And perhaps most importantly, are we willing to defend people whose values we may vehemently disagree with?
Those are enormous questions, and Fjord doesn't pretend to have easy answers.
Mungiu is one of the central filmmakers associated with the Romanian New Wave, and he made the extraordinary 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2007.
He's also made Beyond the Hills, Graduation and the fascinating 2022 drama R.M.N., another movie deeply concerned with cultural divisions, outsiders, community prejudice and what happens when supposedly civilized people are forced to confront somebody different from themselves.
Now, Fjord has won Mungiu another Palme d'Or.
Sebastian Stan plays Mihai Gheorghiu, a Romanian man who moves with his Norwegian wife Lisbet, played by Renate Reinsve, and their five children from Bucharest to a remote Norwegian coastal village.
The family is deeply religious and extremely conservative. Their lives revolve around prayer, Bible study and strict rules. The children don't have the same access to phones, pop music, YouTube, video games and other modern distractions that their classmates have.
Mihai was also raised in a culture where physical discipline (something like giving a child a smack on the butt) was considered acceptable parenting. In Norway, that's viewed very differently.
The trouble begins when their adolescent daughter Elia arrives at school with bruises. Questions are asked. The children talk. Child welfare authorities become involved, and eventually all five children (including Lisbet's nursing infant) are removed from the home.
And suddenly you're asking yourself: Wait a minute. What exactly happened here? That question hangs over almost the entire movie.
Did Mihai and Lisbet abuse their children? Are Norwegian authorities protecting kids from a legitimately dangerous household? Are they imposing one country's cultural standards on people raised with completely different ideas about family and discipline? Are religious and political prejudices influencing the investigation?
Mungiu keeps refusing to answer those questions for you. That's what makes Fjord fascinating.
Every time I thought I had settled into a comfortable position, the movie gave me another piece of information that made me reconsider it. Just when you become furious at the apparent injustice being inflicted on Mihai and Lisbet, Mungiu shows you something about the family that makes you uneasy.
Just when you begin thinking the authorities may have legitimate reasons for their actions, you see the cold institutional machinery surrounding this family and start questioning everything again. The movie keeps shifting the ground underneath you.
Mihai is particularly difficult to categorize. He is conservative, deeply religious and believes marriage should be between a man and a woman. Meanwhile, the movie strongly suggests that Elia and her neighbor and classmate Noora may be falling in love with each other.
Does Mihai's belief make him somebody I agree with? No. Does it make him an abusive father? That's an entirely different question. And Fjord understands the importance of that distinction.
Sebastian Stan is terrific here. He's almost unrecognizable with thick glasses, a receding hairline, scruffy beard and completely different physical presence. He speaks Romanian and some Norwegian, but Mihai doesn't understand Norwegian particularly well, which adds another fascinating layer to everything happening around him.
One of the movie's most effective sequences involves officials and lawyers discussing whether the children will remain separated from their parents while Mihai sits there unable to fully understand what they're saying. Lisbet has to interpret for him.
Think about how horrifying that would be.
Your children have been taken from you. You've recently moved to another country. You're adjusting to a new job, a new culture and a completely different understanding of what constitutes acceptable parenting.
Now strangers are sitting around a table deciding whether you can have your children back, and you don't even understand the words they're using to discuss you. Stan doesn't turn this into some gigantic Oscar-clip breakdown. He holds it in.
You can see the anger and confusion building inside Mihai, but Stan keeps the performance remarkably controlled. And because Mungiu is determined to preserve the ambiguity, he also gives Mihai moments that make you uncomfortable. There are scenes where he quietly watches the children from a distance, and because we know his beliefs about his daughter's possible sexuality, we begin wondering what he's thinking.
He doesn't do anything. That's the point. Mungiu lets our own assumptions fill in the blank.
Renate Reinsve is equally good, and one of her best scenes is almost painfully simple. After her nursing baby has been taken away, Lisbet discovers that she can no longer produce milk. There is no enormous screaming breakdown. Reinsve plays the moment quietly, and that restraint makes it devastating.
Both Stan and Reinsve give two of the best performances I've seen this year. And it's the second time they have brilliantly acted together, following their remarkable work in 2024's A Different Man.
They never beg the audience to sympathize with them. They simply allow us to watch these parents trying to process something unimaginable while simultaneously leaving enough uncertainty around their behavior that we can never completely relax.
The movie is also smart enough to examine the supposedly more progressive family next door.
Mia Halberg, played by Lisa Carlehed, and her husband Mats are raising Noora in a much freer environment. Mia is a lawyer and eventually becomes enormously important to the Gheorghius when their first legal representation falls apart over fundamental disagreements with the family's beliefs.
Mia becomes, in some ways, the audience's representative. She doesn't necessarily share Mihai and Lisbet's values. In fact, she may disagree with them profoundly. But she begins confronting the much harder question: Does disagreement justify what is happening to them?
That's the heart of the movie. Can you defend somebody you disagree with? Not somebody whose politics conveniently match yours. Not somebody who worships the way you worship, raises children exactly the way you do or shares your ideas about sexuality, family and society. Somebody you genuinely disagree with.
At the same time, Mungiu refuses to present Mia's family as some enlightened counterexample. Noora is deeply troubled. She sneaks out, takes a boat onto the water in the middle of the night, rebels against her parents and at one point cuts her wrist. Her relationship with Elia becomes one of the movie's emotional centers.
So which family has figured out parenting? Neither one. Because nobody does.
That's another thing I admire about Fjord. It isn't simply contrasting bad conservative parenting with good progressive parenting, or vice versa. It asks whether outsiders looking through the window at somebody else's family can ever fully understand what is happening inside.
The scenes involving the children are among the best in the film because they complicate everything the adults are arguing about. Elia and Noora aren't symbols in a political debate.
They're teenagers trying to understand themselves while their parents, teachers, lawyers, social workers and eventually entire countries turn their lives into an argument.
The final scene involving these young people is heartbreaking, and Mungiu earns it by spending so much time observing them quietly. That's his style throughout the movie.
Fjord runs about two and a half hours, and although I think it's a little too long, it rarely feels sluggish. Mungiu is comfortable letting scenes breathe. Conversations unfold at length. People sit in rooms and talk. Courtroom proceedings play out patiently. Nobody is rushing toward the next dramatic explosion.
And the courtroom material is excellent. Beyond all of its cultural and philosophical questions, Fjord works simply as a legal drama. Watching the Norwegian system operate is fascinating, and Mungiu understands that the suspense doesn't need to come from somebody suddenly standing up and screaming, “You can't handle the truth!”
The suspense comes from language. A statement. A translation. A child's recollection. A cultural misunderstanding. One phrase interpreted differently by two people can potentially destroy a family.
There is, however, one substantial section of the movie that I don't think works nearly as well.
Mihai eventually reaches back to Romania for help, and Romanian television personalities, lawyers, media figures and protesters descend on the situation. What began as a small-town family crisis becomes an international incident. Cameras arrive. The Internet gets involved. YouTube gets involved. Protesters gather outside the courtroom.
Apparently this reflects elements of the real case that inspired the film, so I understand why Mungiu includes it. Dramatically, I think it hurts the movie.
The intimate scale is precisely what makes Fjord so powerful. We are watching neighbors judge neighbors, children interact with children, parents trying to understand institutions and a tiny community deciding what it thinks it knows about a family.
Once the media circus arrives, the movie becomes broader and more obvious.
It doesn't ruin the film, but it temporarily pulls attention away from everything Mungiu has been examining so carefully. At two and a half hours, this is also where some repetition begins creeping in. I could lose portions of that subplot without losing anything essential about the movie's argument.
Because the argument isn't really about Romania versus Norway. It's about us. It's about the frightening ease with which human beings make absolute judgments about other human beings. And that makes Fjord feel particularly relevant right now.
We live in an unbelievably caustic, confrontational period in which disagreement has increasingly become grounds for dismissal. Somebody votes differently, worships differently, raises children differently or believes something about society that you find offensive, and suddenly we're not simply disagreeing with that person.
We're deciding what kind of person they are. Sometimes we're deciding whether they're worthy of basic fairness. Fjord asks us to sit with how dangerous that can become. And again, Mungiu doesn't make this easy by turning Mihai into some flawless victim. That would destroy the entire point. Mihai has beliefs that many viewers are going to dislike intensely. The film wants you to dislike some of them.
Then it asks: Are you still willing to defend him if he's being treated unjustly? And that's a much more interesting question.
And I can almost guarantee that people are going to argue about this movie. Some viewers will see the Gheorghius primarily as victims of institutional and cultural prejudice. Others will look at the family's strict religious environment and see warning signs everywhere. Some will trust the child welfare system. Others will be horrified by it.
Mungiu knows that. He's counting on it. Because Fjord isn't really asking you to choose the correct side. It's asking you to examine why you chose it.
Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve are outstanding, the young performers are terrific, the legal sequences are compelling, and Mungiu once again demonstrates how effectively he can take enormous political and cultural conflicts and compress them into rooms where ordinary people are simply trying to live with one another.
I don't think Fjord is one of the very best films of the year. But I do think it's one of the year's most interesting arguments.
And in a time when people seem increasingly incapable of living alongside anyone they disagree with, there's something refreshing about a movie willing to ask whether our principles actually mean anything if we only extend them to people who already share them.
Can you defend someone you vehemently disagree with?
Fjord asks the question. Then it has the intelligence not to answer it for you. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Spiders have been terrorizing movie audiences for decades, and as a lifelong horror fan, I've always had a particular affection for movies involving these creepy, eight-legged little bastards.
The latest addition to this long, wonderfully disgusting tradition is Crawlers, a loud, bloody, occasionally hilarious, and ultimately disappointing horror comedy that borrows so much from Infested that it practically owes that movie a percentage of its box office receipts.
And that's a problem, because Infested is a fantastic movie. It's beautifully directed, genuinely terrifying, filled with extraordinary suspense, and features some of the most disturbing spider sequences I've seen in years.
But it's also about something. Beneath the arachnid attacks and the gruesome deaths is a thoughtful examination of racism, xenophobia, social prejudice, and the way society treats people it considers outsiders. The spiders become part of a larger allegory about human behavior, fear, and cultural divisions.
Crawlers, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing on its mind beyond watching thousands of spiders crawl into people's mouths, burst out of their bodies, and kill a bunch of obnoxious idiots in increasingly disgusting ways. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Sometimes I just want to watch a bunch of horrible people get eaten by spiders.
But when your movie so closely resembles a much smarter, scarier, and better-made film, those comparisons become pretty difficult to avoid.
Directed by Ángel Gómez Hernández from a screenplay by Jayson Rothwell, Crawlers takes place almost entirely inside Paradiso Palms, a rundown apartment complex managed by Serena (Matilda Lutz), an overworked, underappreciated young woman who basically does everything around the building.
She's the manager, the janitor, the maintenance department, the painter, the plumber, and the unfortunate person who has to deliver rent-increase notices to a collection of tenants who already hate her.
She lives there rent-free, dreams of becoming a singer-songwriter, and treasures a guitar given to her by her mother. Her ultimate goal is to escape this miserable building and make something of her life. Unfortunately, she's about to discover that dealing with leaky pipes and angry tenants is nothing compared with dealing with thousands of venomous spiders.
The building is populated by a wonderfully ridiculous collection of stereotypes, including a Goth dominatrix with an interest in sorcery (Melina Matthews), a single father caring for an infant, a socially awkward and very mean technology nerd with an AI girlfriend and a giant pet snake, and a neglected little girl with a cast on her leg who has developed a friendship with Serena.
There's also the building's thoroughly despicable owner, played by William Miller, who treats the entire property like a tax write-off and couldn't care less about the people living there. He's a cheap, cowardly creep who forces Serena to do all his dirty work, including delivering those rent increases, because he doesn't have the guts to face his tenants himself.
The trouble begins when a traveler named George (Chris Rogers) returns to the building with an unwanted eight-legged souvenir. Before long, the spiders are multiplying, George is dead, and Serena discovers his grotesque remains. The authorities mistake the situation for a dangerous biological outbreak and quarantine the entire complex, trapping everybody inside while the spiders spread through the hallways, ventilation shafts, elevators, and apartments.
Eventually, the police prepare to pump poisonous gas into the building, leaving Serena and the surviving tenants with two possible ways to die. They can be killed by the spiders, or they can be killed by the people who are supposedly trying to save them.
And since Serena knows every maintenance tunnel, utility room, and hidden passageway in the place, she's the only person with a reasonable chance of getting everybody out.
The first fifteen minutes of Crawlers are easily the best part of the movie. Hernández establishes the characters, the building, and the completely ridiculous tone with a terrific sense of speed and humor.
There's a very funny montage of Serena dealing with the tenants, fixing things, getting yelled at, and generally putting up with one indignity after another. The characters are broad, cartoonish caricatures, but that's part of the joke. Most of these people are such obnoxious jerks that when the spiders finally start attacking them, you find yourself rooting for the spiders. That's a perfectly acceptable approach to this kind of movie, and initially, it's a lot of fun.
Hernández, making only his second feature, certainly knows how to make a movie loud and visually aggressive. The opening credits practically explode off the screen, the editing is frantic, the music and sound effects come blasting at you, and the jump scares arrive with almost comical frequency. He's clearly influenced by Dario Argento and the Italian giallo filmmakers, along with John Carpenter and especially Sam Raimi.
Remember those opening credits in the Evil Dead movies and Drag Me to Hell, where Raimi practically throws the title through the back wall of the theater? Hernández loves that kind of thing. Some of the production design even has a strange, grimy, neon-lit Blade Runner quality.
He's obviously studied some terrific filmmakers, and he's very good at imitating their techniques. Unfortunately, he never quite develops a style of his own.
Still, the spider effects are genuinely impressive. The CGI creatures look appropriately disgusting, ranging from tiny little monsters to much larger, nastier specimens, and there are some wonderfully revolting sequences involving spiders crawling under people's skin, emerging from wounds, and finding their way into places where no living creature should ever be allowed to go.
There's even a spider's-eye-view gimmick that uses multiple images to suggest the creature's many eyes, and it's pretty funny whenever it appears. The gore is plentiful, the attacks are energetic, and the filmmakers clearly understand that audiences buying tickets to a spider movie expect to see some extremely unpleasant things happening to human bodies.
One of the movie's funniest elements involves William Miller's performance as the building's sleazy owner. He's established early as the biggest human villain in the story, a thoroughly miserable bastard who exploits Serena and despises his tenants.
Then he disappears for a while before returning in a subplot involving his relationship with the building's resident dominatrix. When he finally reappears wearing an elaborate S&M slave outfit, the movie becomes gloriously ridiculous.
His eventual encounter with the spiders, broken glass, a garbage chute, and a large trash container is one of the funniest and most satisfyingly nasty sequences in the entire film. Miller is hilarious, and his character gets exactly the kind of outrageous treatment he deserves.
Unfortunately, once the movie gets past its terrific opening, it begins repeating itself. Somebody walks down a dark hallway. Spiders appear. Somebody screams. There's a loud musical sting, a disgusting attack, and another frantic escape. Then we do it again. And again.
There are scenes involving police officers and government officials in hazmat suits, endless corridors covered in webs, and people trapped in elevators while spiders attack from above. That elevator sequence, in particular, feels lifted almost directly from Infested.
In fact, practically every time Crawlers starts building some momentum, it reminds you of a similar scene from that much better French movie. And I don't think it's particularly smart to keep reminding your audience of a superior film while they're watching yours.
There are other familiar moments, too, including a sequence that owes an enormous debt to World War Z, except instead of zombies climbing over one another to scale a barrier, it's spiders. Hernández throws everything he can think of at the screen, but eventually all the screaming, running, jump scares, and disgusting spider attacks begin to blur together.
The quarantine subplot doesn't really work, the characters never develop beyond their initial stereotypes, and the movie doesn't have the intelligence or emotional substance to support all the mayhem.
Unlike Infested, which used its characters and setting to explore something meaningful, Crawlers is content to remain a collection of increasingly frantic horror set pieces.
Things do pick up during the final fifteen minutes, when Serena comes up with one of the most ridiculous survival strategies imaginable. She puts on a full-body leather-and-rubber dominatrix outfit, complete with a mask, figuring that the spiders won't be able to penetrate the material.
Watching Matilda Lutz march around the building dressed like she's heading to the world's most dangerous S&M convention while battling an army of venomous spiders is genuinely amusing. It's the kind of completely absurd, grindhouse-inspired nonsense that the movie should have embraced more consistently.
By this point, Hernández has essentially abandoned any pretense of suspense in favor of outrageous, cartoonish action, and at least the movie starts having some fun again.
Holding the whole thing together is a terrific performance by Matilda Lutz, an actress I've liked for years. She was especially impressive in Coralie Fargeat's Revenge (2017), a brutal, stylish, enormously entertaining exploitation thriller in which she plays a young woman who becomes the target of a group of men during a hunting getaway and turns the tables on them in spectacular fashion.
I thought Revenge was a much better movie than Fargeat's wildly overrated follow-up, The Substance, which I found incredibly derivative. Lutz was outstanding in Revenge, and she's very good here, too.
She gives Serena enough personality, determination, humor, and vulnerability to make us care about her, even when practically everybody around her is behaving like a complete idiot. She's an appealing lead, and she handles both the comedy and the physical demands of the role extremely well.
The frustrating thing about Crawlers is that there's a reasonably entertaining little horror comedy buried somewhere inside all this derivative material. The opening is fast and funny, the spiders look great, the gore is suitably disgusting, William Miller is a riot, and Matilda Lutz makes an excellent heroine.
There are some genuinely amusing moments, a few effective shocks, and enough outrageous imagery to satisfy viewers who simply want to watch creepy creatures do horrible things to people. And at only 82 minutes, the movie certainly doesn't overstay its welcome. I appreciate a horror film that knows when to get the hell out of the theater.
But being short, loud, and occasionally disgusting isn't enough. Crawlers never really comes together, and its constant borrowing from better movies becomes increasingly distracting.
Hernández has energy, enthusiasm, and an obvious love for horror cinema, but he spends so much time recreating things other filmmakers have already done that he forgets to give his own movie a distinctive identity.
The result is a film that's intermittently entertaining but never particularly suspenseful, surprising, or memorable.
I can't quite recommend Crawlers, although I certainly didn't hate it. There are some good laughs, some terrific spider effects, a few wonderfully nasty deaths, and a very appealing lead performance.
If you're looking for 82 minutes of ridiculous arachnid mayhem, you could do worse. But if you really want to see a genuinely frightening, intelligent, beautifully made movie about a spider infestation inside a quarantined apartment building, go back and watch Infested. It's vastly superior in practically every way.
And when I finish ranking my favorite spider movies, I can guarantee you one thing: Crawlers isn't going to be anywhere near the top of that list. - ⭐️⭐️
Chris Rock is one of the greatest and most important stand-up comedians in the history of the medium. Period.
His best work belongs in the same conversation as the groundbreaking material of Richard Pryor and George Carlin, and his ability to tackle race, politics, relationships, sex, hypocrisy, and the absurdities of American culture with intelligence, anger, insight, and tremendous humor is practically unmatched.
After a somewhat shaky and underutilized stint on Saturday Night Live, Rock developed into an extraordinary stand-up performer with a genuinely distinctive voice. His best specials are brilliant, fearless, controversial, and incredibly funny.
Unfortunately, almost none of those qualities have translated into his work as a filmmaker.
In fact, Chris Rock is a pretty lousy director and screenwriter, and his latest movie, Misty Green, is easily his worst. It's a misguided, derivative, unpleasant, shockingly misogynistic disaster that desperately wants to be edgy and provocative but ends up being one of the worst movies of the year.
Rock has been trying to bring his unique comedic perspective to the big screen for more than two decades, with consistently disappointing results. His directorial debut, Head of State, was a simplistic and ineffective political satire about a Black presidential candidate.
I Think I Love My Wife, a remake of Eric Rohmer's wonderful Love in the Afternoon, was a confused, frequently misogynistic romantic comedy that wasted a terrific premise, although Kerry Washington was a standout.
His 2014 film Top Five, another attempt to examine celebrity, relationships, and show business, had some interesting moments but ultimately suffered from the same problems that have plagued his other movies. Rock takes subjects that he brilliantly dissects in his stand-up routines and turns them into heavy-handed, obvious, belabored screenplays.
The razor-sharp observations become simplistic speeches, the satire loses its bite, and the characters become mouthpieces for his opinions rather than actual human beings. With Misty Green, he's taken those problems to an entirely new level.
Written and directed by Rock, and released by A24, Misty Green is a dark comedy-drama about a once-successful actress desperately trying to revive her career while dealing with addiction, poverty, family problems, and the spectacularly ugly side of Hollywood.
It's clearly inspired by the frantic, high-anxiety filmmaking of the Safdie brothers, particularly Uncut Gems, along with the grimy, morally complicated work of Abel Ferrara, Darren Aronofsky, and Sean Baker.
Rock seems determined to make one of those edgy, cynical, uncomfortable A24 movies filled with desperate people making terrible decisions. The problem is that he doesn't possess the filmmaking skills, the storytelling discipline, or the insight necessary to pull it off.
He's imitating the style of filmmakers who are infinitely more talented than he is, without understanding what makes their movies work.
The film stars the enormously talented British actress Rosalind Eleazar, familiar from the excellent television series Slow Horses, as Misty Green, a former television star who won a Supporting Actress Emmy back in 2008 for a popular network series.
Those glory days are long gone. Misty is now broke, addicted to drugs, struggling to find acting work, and living in the expensive Santa Monica condo of a wealthy older lover who has recently died.
The movie begins with Misty waking up in lingerie and smeared makeup, surrounded by evidence of a particularly rough night, only to be confronted by the dead man's furious widow, played by Amy Landecker. The widow recognizes Misty from her television days and gives her exactly seven days to get out of the apartment.
So now Misty has a week to find some money, find somewhere to live, and somehow put her collapsing life back together.
Her agent, Randy (Topher Grace), is trying to get her auditions, but Misty has developed a reputation as a difficult, volatile actress who has burned a lot of bridges. She's forced to audition for degrading, stereotypical roles, deal with condescending casting directors, and watch less talented performers get opportunities that she believes should be hers.
Meanwhile, she's financially supporting her deeply troubled brother Jay (Daniel Kaluuya), who has spent time in psychiatric institutions and struggles with serious mental illness. Jay's increasingly unstable behavior becomes another source of anxiety for Misty, particularly as local television news reports on a manhunt for a Black suspect accused of murdering a white college student.
Rock attempts to weave the racial tensions surrounding that investigation into the larger story, but the subplot feels clumsy, manipulative, and ultimately unnecessary.
Misty also spends time with her friend Naomi (Anna Kendrick), another actress who is preparing to marry a wealthy man she doesn't particularly like, and with Zach (Adam Driver), a sleazy, drug-addicted filmmaker who provides Misty with cocaine, bad advice, and an absolutely disgusting opportunity to make some quick cash.
Zach offers her $200,000 to travel to Dubai and have sex with a wealthy royal who happens to be a huge fan of her old television show. At the same time, Misty reconnects with Jordan (Chris Rock), a filmmaker and casting director involved with a new production of Dreamgirls, who might be able to offer her a legitimate chance at a comeback.
Misty must decide whether to take the degrading payday or attempt to rebuild her career through actual work, discipline, and whatever dignity she has left.
There's certainly the potential for a compelling movie here. A once-famous Black actress trying to survive in an industry that has discarded her, dealing with addiction, financial desperation, racism, and the indignities of the audition process, could make for a fascinating character study.
Hollywood is an absolutely brutal place, and there are plenty of stories worth telling about the people who get chewed up and spit out by the entertainment business. Unfortunately, Chris Rock has absolutely nothing new to say about any of it.
We've seen these stories before. Many, many times. Hollywood's obsession with youth, beauty, money, sex, drugs, fame, and power has been examined in countless movies, some of them genuine masterpieces.
From Sunset Boulevard and The Player to Mulholland Drive, The King of Comedy, and dozens of other films, talented filmmakers have been exposing the hypocrisy and cruelty of show business for decades. Rock apparently believes he's uncovering some shocking secrets about Hollywood, but everything in Misty Green is painfully obvious.
Actresses are treated terribly. Casting directors can be racist. Producers sleep with performers. Talent doesn't always matter. Wealthy people exploit desperate people. Drug addiction destroys lives. Hollywood is filled with phonies, predators, and idiots. Yes, Chris. We know.
What makes the movie particularly frustrating is that Rock approaches these familiar subjects with an almost relentless anger that he apparently mistakes for insight. There's nothing wrong with making an angry movie. Some of the greatest films ever made are absolutely furious about the world they depict.
But anger alone isn't enough. You need characters worth examining, situations that reveal something interesting, and a filmmaker capable of shaping those ideas into something meaningful.
Instead, Misty Green becomes a series of ugly encounters involving unpleasant people saying ugly things, with no genuine depth or particularly clever observations to justify any of it.
The filmmaking itself is also surprisingly amateurish. Rock employs shaky camerawork, fractured editing, flashbacks, dream sequences, and sudden tonal shifts that seem designed to create the kind of nervous energy found in Uncut Gems.
But the Safdie brothers understand rhythm, escalation, tension, and the psychology of desperation. Abel Ferrara knows how to explore the darkest corners of human behavior without reducing his characters to cartoons. Darren Aronofsky can make addiction and self-destruction genuinely terrifying, while Sean Baker finds complicated humanity in people living on the margins.
Rock seems to have watched a handful of movies by these directors and decided to borrow their techniques without understanding why they use them. The result isn't edgy or experimental. It's just messy, irritating, and frequently inept.
The performances don't help much, either, although there's one major exception.
Daniel Kaluuya is a terrific actor, but his portrayal of Misty's mentally ill brother is boorish and surprisingly ineffective. The screenplay's treatment of schizophrenia and other psychiatric problems is simplistic and occasionally insulting. His character's behavior often seems designed merely to provide another shocking incident or another obstacle for Misty to overcome.
Anna Kendrick does what she can with a character who exists primarily to complain about men, money, and the compromises women make in Hollywood. Adam Driver, another enormously gifted performer, is stuck playing a cartoonishly sleazy filmmaker who snorts cocaine, hangs around bars, and treats women like commodities.
There's nothing particularly interesting about any of these people, and the actors are forced to deliver dialogue that rarely sounds like anything actual human beings would say.
And then there's Chris Rock himself, who is genuinely terrible in the movie. His character, Jordan, spends much of his screen time delivering long, angry speeches about Hollywood, racism, the entertainment industry, and the stupidity of the people who run it.
These scenes don't feel like conversations between characters. They feel like Rock is testing out some unfinished stand-up material that wasn't good enough to make it into one of his specials. He repeatedly uses racial language and provocative observations that might have worked within the context of a carefully constructed comedy routine, but here they just hang in the air, awkwardly and without purpose.
Rock is stiff, unnatural, and painfully self-conscious as an actor, and his dialogue is so obviously written to express his personal grievances that the character never becomes believable. It's speechifying disguised as screenwriting, and it's not particularly good speechifying.
There's also a bizarre collection of celebrity appearances, including Ice-T and Busta Rhymes, that add absolutely nothing to the proceedings. Busta Rhymes turns up in a strange sequence involving wealthy people in Dubai, and I honestly couldn't figure out what Rock was trying to accomplish.
Is this supposed to be some kind of revelation about famous musicians performing for wealthy sheikhs? Is it a joke about celebrity hypocrisy? Is Busta Rhymes simply there because Chris Rock knows Busta Rhymes? Who knows?
The movie is filled with these awkward little moments that seem to exist because Rock has something he wants to say, but he hasn't figured out how to say it within the context of an actual story.
The one genuinely impressive element of Misty Green is Rosalind Eleazar. She's a magnetic screen presence, an extraordinarily talented actress, and she works incredibly hard to make Misty feel like a real person.
Even when the screenplay gives her nothing but bitterness, desperation, and self-destructive behavior, Eleazar manages to suggest something more complicated beneath the surface.
There's a terrific sequence at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel in which Misty takes the stage and performs a haunting version of Radiohead's "Creep," and for a few minutes the movie actually comes alive.
Eleazar is compelling, vulnerable, and emotionally engaging in ways that the rest of the film never manages to be. She carries the entire picture on her shoulders, and it's a shame that she's trapped in such a miserable, poorly written movie. I'd love to see what she could do with this character in the hands of a director who actually understood her.
But beyond the derivative storytelling, the terrible dialogue, and the inept direction, there's something else about Misty Green that I found genuinely disturbing: its attitude toward women.
This is an incredibly misogynistic movie. The women are repeatedly presented as manipulative, calculating, sexually transactional, bitter, dishonest, or desperate to use men for money and professional advancement. Conversations between Misty and Naomi about their careers, relationships, and sexual histories are written with a sneering contempt that I found borderline offensive.
Rock seems to believe he's exposing the ugly compromises women are forced to make in Hollywood, but the movie frequently feels as though he's condemning the women themselves.
There's a huge difference between satirizing a system that exploits women and making a movie that seems to despise the women caught inside that system. Rock apparently doesn't understand that difference.
I'm genuinely surprised that actresses as talented as Eleazar and Kendrick didn't look at some of this dialogue and ask Rock what exactly he was trying to say. Maybe they did. Maybe there were conversations about the material that never resulted in meaningful changes. I have no idea.
But the finished film has a deeply unpleasant attitude toward its female characters, and because Rock is responsible for both the screenplay and the direction, that attitude ultimately belongs to him.
And here's the thing: I came away from Misty Green feeling as though Chris Rock has some serious unresolved anger toward women. I don't know what happened in his personal life, and I'm certainly not going to pretend that I do, but the movie plays like the work of somebody with an enormous collection of grievances about women who have disappointed him, rejected him, or somehow wronged him.
Rather than creating a thoughtful examination of the ways Hollywood mistreats actresses, he seems to have constructed a world in which practically every woman is somehow compromised, selfish, or morally suspect.
It's a profoundly ugly perspective, and it overwhelms whatever legitimate points he might have wanted to make about racism, sexism, and exploitation in the entertainment industry.
By the time the movie was over, I wasn't thinking about the tragedy of Misty Green or the injustices of Hollywood. I was thinking that Chris Rock might benefit from talking to a therapist about whatever issues with women seem to be finding their way into his screenplays.
That's probably not the reaction he was hoping for, but it's the one I had. The movie feels less like a carefully considered work of social criticism and more like a collection of personal resentments dressed up as provocative filmmaking.
And that's what makes this such a massive disappointment. Chris Rock is a brilliant stand-up comedian. He has spent decades proving that he can be insightful, challenging, outrageous, and hilariously funny while tackling some of the most complicated subjects in American culture.
But those abilities simply don't translate into his filmmaking. He confuses cynicism with intelligence, anger with insight, ugliness with realism, and imitation with artistic ambition. Misty Green wants desperately to be the kind of uncomfortable, morally complex movie that Abel Ferrara or the Safdie brothers might make, but it lacks the imagination, craftsmanship, and humanity that make their best work so powerful.
Rosalind Eleazar deserves enormous credit for giving this mess whatever emotional credibility it possesses, but even her terrific performance can't save it. Misty Green is a relentlessly unpleasant, painfully derivative, terribly directed movie filled with recycled Hollywood clichés, dreadful dialogue, wasted actors, and a disturbing undercurrent of misogyny.
It's not brave, it's not particularly clever, and it certainly isn't the biting satire that Chris Rock apparently thinks he's made.
It's one of the worst movies of 2026, and further evidence that while Chris Rock belongs among the greatest stand-up comedians of all time, he really needs to stop directing movies.
And he should probably stop using feature films as a testing ground for half-assed stand-up material and unresolved personal grievances.
What a disaster. - ⭐️
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