CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 10-9-26
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, October 9th, 2026.
If you've ever wondered exactly how much David Fincher had to do with the greatness of The Social Network, Aaron Sorkin has finally provided us with an answer.
Everything. Fincher had everything to do with it.
The Social Reckoning is a standalone sequel of sorts to the 2010 film, this time written, co-produced and directed by Sorkin himself. It deals with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the thousands of internal company documents she leaked, and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, whose reporting became known as “The Facebook Files.”
It is also one of the most self-congratulatory, pompous, simplistic and endlessly pretentious movies I've seen in a very long time. And yes, even by Aaron Sorkin standards.
I should say that Sorkin is capable of writing good screenplays. The screenplay for The Social Network is probably the best thing he's ever written. I like Malice. Charlie Wilson's War is pretty solid. I even kind of liked Molly's Game, his feature directing debut.
But I've always had problems with Sorkin's writing because nobody talks the way Aaron Sorkin writes people talking. Nobody.
His characters don't really have conversations. They deliver Aaron Sorkin dialogue at one another. Everybody has the perfect response. Everybody talks a mile a minute. Everybody knows exactly when to make the clever reference, cite the statistic, deliver the devastating comeback or launch into the beautifully constructed monologue that explains the theme of the scene you are currently watching.
I couldn't stand Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I've always found much of The West Wing incredibly irritating for exactly this reason. Sports Night had it, too. When Sorkin's writing is filtered through a great director, however, it can work.
Mike Nichols directed Charlie Wilson's War. Harold Becker directed Malice. And David Fincher directed The Social Network.
Fincher brought an extraordinary visual intelligence, precision, editing rhythm and (most importantly) an understanding of actors to Sorkin's screenplay. He took all those words and turned them into cinema.
Aaron Sorkin is not David Fincher. He's not even close.
Sorkin's Being the Ricardos is one of the worst movies I've seen in the past 15 years. I didn't like The Trial of the Chicago 7 either. And in The Social Reckoning, every weakness he has as both a writer and filmmaker is sitting right there on the screen, completely unprotected.
The movie opens in 2019 with a fictional prologue involving a white woman named Kayleigh, played by Portia Doubleday, whose car has broken down. When Black and Asian police officers approach her, she becomes hostile, starts recording the interaction, uses racist language and uploads the footage to Facebook.
Frances Haugen, played by Mikey Madison, recognizes Kayleigh as someone she once knew, and is now a person whose political and social attitudes have apparently been transformed through online radicalization.
This becomes one of the motivations behind Frances' growing concern about Facebook and its algorithms. The point is established immediately. Facebook can radicalize people. Ok, got it. Unfortunately, Sorkin spends the next couple of hours making sure we get it another 75 times.
Frances works inside Facebook and discovers increasingly disturbing information about how the company's algorithms promote rage, misinformation and extremist content because rage, misinformation and extremist content create engagement.
She eventually connects with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, played by Jeremy Allen White, and begins secretly supplying him with internal Facebook information.
There's a very good movie somewhere inside this material. This isn't it.
Mikey Madison won the Academy Award for Anora, but I've liked her for years. She was hilarious in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, fun in Scream, and I still think her best work is on Pamela Adlon's wonderful television series Better Things. She's terrible here.
Some of that is Sorkin's fault because Frances has been written as a collection of nervous tics, awkward behavior and screenplay devices designed to constantly remind us that she isn't good at normal human interaction.
She can't date properly. She doesn't know how to relate to coworkers. She has various physical conditions that become character quirks. And when she begins secretly meeting Horwitz, Sorkin comes up with the idea that she should wear slinky, low-cut evening gowns so that if anybody sees the two of them together, they'll assume they're on a date rather than exchanging confidential information.
So now we get Mikey Madison photographed repeatedly in tight dresses while the screenplay supplies a supposedly practical reason for doing it. It feels creepy. It also feels strangely sexist in a movie that is constantly congratulating itself on its moral awareness.
Jeremy Allen White is somehow worse.
As Horwitz, he gives one of the dullest, most monotonous performances I've seen in a major movie this year. There is almost no variation in his delivery. Sorkin gives him jokes, ironic observations and endless dialogue, and White delivers most of it in essentially the same register.
You never understand why this guy is such a terrific journalist. You don't feel the excitement of discovering a gigantic story. You don't feel the obsession. You don't feel the urgency.
Compare that to All the President's Men, which Sorkin clearly wants us to do. Actually, don't.
That's just mean to All the President's Men.
And then there's Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg.
Jesse Eisenberg was brilliant in The Social Network. His Zuckerberg could be arrogant, cruel, funny, insecure, petty and deeply unlikable, but there was always a human being underneath the performance. You could understand the emotional machinery operating inside him even when you hated what he was doing.
Strong plays Zuckerberg like a malfunctioning robot preparing an Oscar acceptance speech.
It is such an aggressively calculated performance that I could almost hear awards-season campaign consultants applauding in the background.
Strong is famously committed to his method, and this performance feels like capital-M Method Acting: every pause, stare and strange vocal choice announces that Important Acting is happening here. Well, it isn't. It's ridiculous.
The movie itself has the same problem. It desperately wants you to understand that it is Important.
Sorkin structures the story through shifting timelines beginning in 2019, moving through the pandemic and eventually reaching 2021. At first he introduces elaborate chapter headings.
There's a prologue. There's a section called “Cassandra,” which naturally requires an explanation of Cassandra because God forbid anybody in the audience not understand the reference.
Then halfway through the movie, Sorkin basically abandons the chapter device and starts throwing dates and timelines at us instead. It's sloppy, just sloppy.
The movie jumps backward and forward without gaining anything dramatically from the structure. The chronology seems complicated largely because Sorkin wants the movie to feel complicated.
Then COVID arrives, which gives him another collection of issues to lecture us about.
Frances goes to a grocery store. Somebody is screaming about wearing a mask. Okay. Remember that? Of course you do. We were all there.
But Sorkin keeps treating shared cultural memories like astonishing revelations. Characters discuss statistics, percentages, algorithms, extremism, mental health, social media, misinformation and billionaire greed, and nearly every scene feels like somebody has stepped to the front of the classroom to explain today's lesson.
Here's the thing: I basically agree with the movie's central argument.
I think social media has had an enormously damaging effect on human behavior. It has altered the way we communicate. It has encouraged people to retreat into ideological bubbles. It rewards outrage. It monetizes anger. It has turned human attention into a commodity while enormously wealthy people become even wealthier.
Facebook has plenty to answer for.
Mark Zuckerberg is a controversial figure whose motives I certainly don't trust. So, Sorkin doesn't lose me because I disagree with him. He loses me because he has absolutely no respect for my ability to understand anything without having it explained to me in a six-minute monologue.
Everybody gets a speech. Everybody.
Eventually you want somebody to enter a room and simply say, “Anybody want coffee?”
Instead, they'd probably explain the geopolitical history of coffee cultivation, provide four statistics about caffeine consumption, make a reference to Aristotle and then walk briskly down a hallway.
And then we get the basketball scene. Good Lord.
Frances and Horwitz are in a hotel room while a basketball game is playing on television. A player makes a three-point shot to tie the game and celebrates with a fist pump. Frances is confused. She doesn't understand the fist pump. She asks Horwitz why the player did that.
He explains that the guy made the shot. She still doesn't understand. Why would somebody celebrate a tie?
This is a grown woman in her thirties working for one of the largest technology companies in the world, and Sorkin has apparently written her as someone who has never encountered the concept of sports celebration.
She doesn't have to know basketball. She doesn't have to know what a three-pointer is. But she doesn't understand why somebody would raise a fist after accomplishing something?
Come on.
And naturally, because this is Aaron Sorkin, the fist-pump business comes back later in an unbelievably obvious attempt at emotional payoff. That's not character development. That's screenwriting homework.
There are a few actors who survive all of this.
Bill Burr is amusing as Charlie, a member of Zuckerberg's legal team, because Burr knows how to deliver a punchline and has enough natural personality to occasionally make Sorkin's dialogue sound like something a human being might actually say.
Although there's a scene where Charlie tosses his phone across a room to another character, walks away and never retrieves it, and I spent far too much time wondering, “Is Bill Burr ever getting his phone back?”
He doesn't. That's the kind of filmmaking we're dealing with.
Betty Gilpin is also terrific as Horwitz's boss. Gilpin has enough force and personality to push through the dialogue and create the impression of a more interesting character than the screenplay actually gives her.
Wunmi Mosaku does some solid work as part of Zuckerberg's legal team, and there are a couple of amusing moments involving younger Wall Street Journal staffers.
But a few good supporting performances and a handful of funny lines aren't going to save this thing.
Especially when Sorkin arrives at January 6.
The final third of The Social Reckoning ties Facebook, algorithmic radicalization, political extremism and the January 6 Capitol attack together with all the subtlety of somebody beating you over the head with a lectern.
Sorkin recreates portions of January 6. Zuckerberg and his people watch events unfold. The earlier fictional character returns as part of the larger thematic argument. Everything the movie has been saying is brought together into one giant statement about social media, politics, money, extremism and what has happened to us as human beings.
And Sorkin adds nothing new. That's what bothers me.
Everybody knows what happened on January 6. Everybody has an opinion about it. We've seen the footage. We've lived through the political aftermath. We've spent years discussing social media's role in misinformation and radicalization.
If you're going to use something that significant as the climax of your movie, then tell me something I haven't heard before. Show me something differently. Challenge me.
Instead, Sorkin simply connects the dots in enormous black Magic Marker and then stands back as though he's painted the Sistine Chapel.
The problem with The Social Reckoning isn't that it's political. The problem isn't that it criticizes Facebook. The problem isn't that it has something to say about billionaires, algorithms, COVID, social isolation, journalism or January 6.
The problem is that it thinks saying those things automatically makes it profound. It doesn't.
And that's why this movie actually irritates me more than something like The Beast, another movie opening this weekend.
The Beast is unbelievably stupid. Samuel L. Jackson drives around in a weaponized presidential limousine, screams at people and blows stuff up. Fine. The Beast knows exactly what it is. I've seen terrible horror movies this year. I've seen dumb comedies. I've seen ridiculous action pictures.
Those movies don't make me as angry as The Social Reckoning because they aren't standing in front of me demanding applause for their brilliance.
This movie thinks it's brilliant. It thinks it's important. It thinks it's profound. It thinks every speech is devastating, every statistic is revelatory and every reference is clever. And it isn't.
The comparison to The Social Network only makes everything worse. That movie was smart, funny, cold, energetic, brilliantly acted and beautifully directed. Fincher understood how to take Sorkin's heightened dialogue and build an actual cinematic world around it.
The Social Reckoning exposes what happens when nobody is there to save Aaron Sorkin from Aaron Sorkin.
Mikey Madison gives one of her weakest performances. Jeremy Allen White is shockingly dull. Jeremy Strong is giving a performance that seems engineered in a laboratory to generate awards-season clips.
The structure is messy, the direction is flat, the politics are obvious and the screenplay pounds its themes into the ground until there's nothing left but speeches.
Will it get Oscar nominations? Probably. It certainly seems designed to. But awards bait is still bait.
The Social Reckoning wants desperately to be All the President's Men for the social-media age. It wants to be another Social Network. It wants to be a Frank Capra movie about ordinary people taking on enormous institutions...by the way, the characters actually discuss Capra, just in case you somehow miss that.
What it actually is is an enormously self-satisfied movie about the dangers of self-satisfied people.
That's almost interesting. Almost.
Aaron Sorkin has made one of the worst movies of the year. - ⭐️
I have to say, I was genuinely surprised by how much I enjoyed Other Mommy.
This is a movie that Universal Pictures seemed determined to hide from critics. No advance press screenings, no real opportunity for reviewers to see it before opening, and very little fanfare considering that we're talking about a major studio horror movie starring Jessica Chastain and Jay Duplass, produced by James Wan and Blumhouse, and directed by Rob Savage, a filmmaker who has already demonstrated that he knows how to scare the hell out of people.
Usually, when a studio does that, it's not a particularly encouraging sign. So I walked into Other Mommy with pretty low expectations, figuring I was in for another generic supernatural horror movie about an imaginary friend who turns out to be something evil.
Well, I was wrong.
Other Mommy is a wild, surreal, bloody, frightening, occasionally hilarious and frequently completely illogical nightmare of a movie that throws conventional storytelling rules out the window.
It's also surprisingly moving, beautifully directed and anchored by a terrific performance from a young actress named Arabella Olivia Clark. I had a great time watching it, even when I had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on. And there are plenty of those moments.
Based on Josh Malerman's 2024 novel Incidents Around the House, the film centers on eight-year-old Bela, played by Clark, a shy, sensitive little girl living with her mother Ursula (Jessica Chastain) and father Russell (Jay Duplass). On the surface, they appear to be a relatively normal suburban family, but underneath that surface, things are falling apart.
Ursula is consumed by her career and is having an affair. Russell, who handles much of the parenting, seems determined to maintain the appearance of a happy marriage even as that marriage disintegrates around him.
Bela senses everything. She hears the arguments, notices the tension and understands that something is terribly wrong, even if she's too young to completely comprehend what's happening.
She's already an insecure child. She has a scar on her back that makes her uncomfortable, she's terrified of speaking in front of her classmates, and she's struggling with all the ordinary anxieties that can make childhood difficult.
Now add the possibility that her parents are going to separate, that her entire family might disappear, and that the people she depends on most are keeping secrets from her.
That's a lot for an eight-year-old kid to handle. And then something starts appearing in her bedroom closet. Bela calls it Other Mommy.
Sometimes it looks exactly like Ursula. Sometimes it looks like a horribly distorted version of Ursula. Sometimes it barely looks human at all. It wants Bela to let it inside her heart, and it keeps asking for permission, becoming increasingly aggressive and terrifying as the little girl refuses.
Now, you could take all of this literally and watch the movie as a supernatural thriller about a demonic creature trying to possess a child. And there is certainly enough violence, blood, monster makeup and physical destruction to support that interpretation.
But I think the movie is doing something much more interesting.
What we're really watching is the nightmare world of a little girl whose family is collapsing.
Other Mommy becomes a manifestation of everything Bela fears: abandonment, betrayal, uncertainty, the possibility that her mother isn't really the person she thought she was, and the terrifying realization that the adults in her life might not be capable of protecting her.
The monster wants to get inside her heart because that's exactly where all this fear and pain already exists. And director Rob Savage takes that idea and goes absolutely nuts with it.
I've become a big fan of Savage. His 2020 film Host, made during the pandemic and unfolding through a computer-screen video call, was a remarkably effective little horror movie.
He followed that with the found-footage nightmare Dashcam, and then directed The Boogeyman in 2023, a genuinely scary adaptation of Stephen King's short story featuring Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina and David Dastmalchian.
Savage understands how to build suspense. He understands the importance of atmosphere, camera placement and timing. And he knows how to deliver a jump scare without making it feel like somebody simply turned up the volume and threw a rubber monster into the frame.
With Other Mommy, he gets to work on a much larger, stranger canvas, and he takes full advantage of it.
There is an absolutely terrific sequence during an anniversary party at the family's house in which Other Mommy assumes the appearance of Bela's babysitter. What begins as an unsettling encounter becomes an elaborate, gravity-defying nightmare involving balloons, a room that seems to turn upside down and Bela being violently tossed around as the physical laws of the universe apparently decide to take the evening off.
It's a beautifully constructed sequence, and it also changes the nature of the movie because other people witness what's happening. This isn't simply a little girl seeing things in her bedroom. Other Mommy is real. Or at least real enough to throw people around, destroy rooms and eventually kill them.
The family flees the house, the police become involved, and they seek refuge elsewhere, including with the man Ursula has been having an affair with. Naturally, that doesn't exactly help the already deteriorating family situation, and the more secrets that emerge, the more aggressive the creature becomes.
The movie keeps escalating until it becomes a series of increasingly elaborate nightmare sequences, and some of them are genuinely extraordinary.
One of my favorites takes place in an indoor children's amusement center, complete with tunnels, slides and a gigantic ball pit. Savage turns this supposedly cheerful environment into a surreal horror landscape where gravity, space and location seem to shift without warning.
The action moves from the ball pit to a car and then into an enormous body of water, all connected through a kind of dream logic that makes absolutely no literal sense but works beautifully on an emotional and visual level.
And Savage is doing something clever with the colors.
The bright reds, yellows and blues of the children's play area reappear throughout the movie in different contexts. During another sequence involving a supernatural ritual, Bela and Russell wear protective helmets that echo those same colors. Visual details carry over from one nightmare to another, connecting scenes that otherwise seem to exist in completely different realities.
That's not accidental.
It's a filmmaker using images, colors and movement to establish a visual language, even when the story itself is becoming increasingly fragmented.
The camera movements are wonderfully fluid. The editing is sharp, the cinematography is genuinely creepy, and the sound design and music contribute enormously to the atmosphere. There are terrific practical-looking creature effects mixed with digital work, and Savage isn't afraid to get nasty. This is an R-rated horror movie, and it earns that rating.
People die. Blood flies. Bodies are distorted. Jessica Chastain's face stretches and melts, her limbs contort, her eyes glow, and at times Other Mommy becomes a full-fledged monster that seems to have escaped from the worst possible childhood nightmare. And Chastain is clearly having an absolute blast.
She's very good as Ursula, a deeply flawed mother who loves her daughter but has made some terrible decisions. But she's even better as Other Mommy, using her voice, facial expressions and physicality to create something genuinely disturbing. Sometimes she barely moves or changes her expression, and she's terrifying. Other times she's twisting her face and body into something completely inhuman.
It's a terrific dual performance, and it gives Chastain an opportunity to do something wonderfully strange.
Jay Duplass is reliably good as Russell, a man whose determination to deny the obvious becomes almost as damaging as the problems he's trying to ignore. And Arabella Olivia Clark is fantastic as Bela.
Clark has appeared in a few films, including playing a younger version of Amanda Seyfried's character in The Housemaid, but this is a major leading role, and she carries an enormous amount of the movie.
She's convincing as a frightened, insecure child without ever becoming one of those annoyingly precocious movie kids who seem to have been written by adults who have never actually met a child.
She's vulnerable, believable and emotionally grounded, which is essential because almost everything around her is completely insane. And then, about halfway through the movie, something happened that made me like it even more.
Karen Allen showed up. Karen Allen!
I had absolutely no idea she was in this movie.
Throughout the first half, Ursula keeps referring to her mother, Bela's grandmother, as somebody she doesn't particularly want involved. Apparently, Grandma Ruth has some unusual beliefs about spirits and the supernatural, and Ursula considers her a bit of a kook.
We hear her voice on the telephone, and eventually, after the family has fled several increasingly dangerous locations, they end up at Grandma's house. And there's Karen Allen.
I actually gasped. The person I was watching the movie with practically applauded.
This is Marion Ravenwood from Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is the wonderful actress from Starman, Shoot the Moon, Scrooged and so many other terrific movies. Karen Allen is one of those performers whose presence immediately makes me happy, and seeing her suddenly appear in this completely bonkers horror movie was an absolute delight.
Why Universal wasn't advertising the fact that Karen Allen was in the movie is beyond me.
She's only in it briefly, a little more than a glorified cameo, but she's wonderful. There's a lovely scene between Grandma Ruth and Bela in which they discuss spirits, the supernatural and the difficulties of life, and Allen brings a warmth and humanity to the proceedings that the movie desperately needs at that moment.
Of course, the fact that Karen Allen is now playing grandmothers also made me feel about 150 years old. But I'll get over it.
The movie also includes Dichen Lachman as an exorcist, and there's a terrific séance sequence that manages to be both frightening and visually inventive. As the story progresses, the distinction between psychological trauma and supernatural reality becomes increasingly difficult to define, and Savage seems perfectly comfortable allowing those boundaries to collapse.
Now, I can absolutely understand why some people are going to hate this movie.
If you demand that your horror movies follow a clear, linear narrative with established rules, consistent geography and logical explanations for every supernatural event, Other Mommy is probably going to drive you crazy.
There are moments when the movie is almost completely incoherent. Characters move from one location to another in ways that defy explanation. The creature seems capable of doing virtually anything the screenplay requires.
Reality changes constantly, and just when you think you've figured out the rules, Savage throws those rules into a garbage can and sets the garbage can on fire. But I didn't care. Because I stopped trying to make literal sense of the movie fairly early on.
I accepted it as a 90-minute nightmare unfolding through the eyes of a terrified eight-year-old girl. Once I did that, the entire experience became much more interesting.
Children don't process emotional trauma through neat explanations and logical narratives. Their fears become exaggerated, distorted and sometimes monstrous. A disagreement between parents can feel like the end of the world. A secret can become something terrifying. The possibility of losing your family can seem like a monster waiting inside your bedroom closet.
That's what Other Mommy understands.
The movie is really about a child desperately trying to make sense of a world that no longer feels safe, and Savage uses the freedom of horror filmmaking to turn that emotional experience into something physical, violent, colorful and surreal.
Is Other Mommy perfect? not even close. It gets ridiculous. It occasionally loses control of its own narrative. Some of the supernatural developments are so outrageous that I found myself laughing, and I suspect there will be plenty of people who simply refuse to go along with the whole thing. But I went along with it.
I thought it was scary. I thought it was imaginative. I admired the direction, the performances, the visual design and the willingness to embrace the kind of completely unhinged nightmare logic that too many mainstream horror movies avoid.
And I loved that it wasn't afraid to be genuinely weird.
Rob Savage has made a movie that is less interested in explaining its monster than in exploring the emotional damage that gives that monster its power. Jessica Chastain gets to play a troubled mother and a horrifying supernatural creature.
Arabella Olivia Clark gives a terrific performance at the center of it all. There are wild special effects, nasty deaths, great scares, some surprisingly funny moments and enough visual imagination to fill three ordinary horror movies.
And Karen Allen shows up! Come on. That alone made my night.
Other Mommy is scary, surreal, messy, bloody, occasionally incoherent and completely nuts.
It doesn't always make sense. I don't think it's supposed to.
And I had a really good time watching it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
There is something interesting about Dave Boyle as a filmmaker, even when the movie he’s making isn’t particularly interesting. Boyle is an American writer, director and producer who has built much of his career around Japanese-language stories and Japanese and Japanese-American characters, creating this unusual little corner for himself in independent film and television.
He made Big Dreams Little Tokyo, White on Rice, Surrogate Valentine and Man from Reno, and more recently served as a lead writer and director on the popular Netflix series House of Ninjas. He has a genuine affection for Japanese culture and cinema, and a very good eye for atmosphere.
You can see all of that in his new supernatural horror film Never After Dark. Unfortunately, you can also see about 30 other horror movies in Never After Dark.
Moeka Hoshi stars as Airi, a traveling psychic medium who makes her living wandering around the Japanese countryside getting rid of ghosts. Most are fairly routine nuisances, and Airi treats the whole thing almost like a plumber showing up to unclog your sink.
She knows the rituals and the rules, and she has one particularly important rule: she does not work after dark. Airi also has an unusual traveling companion. Her younger sister Miku (Kurumi Inagaki) is dead, but Airi can still communicate with her through reflective surfaces, like mirrors, windows, anything that allows Miku to appear from the other side.
Airi’s latest job takes her to an isolated former hotel in the forests of Hokkaido, recently purchased by Teiko (Tae Kimura) and her skeptical adult son Gunji (Kento Kaku), who intend to renovate the place.
There is one particularly troublesome room containing a grandfather clock permanently stopped at midnight. Airi sends Teiko and Gunji away and begins her ritual, involving a candle, a mirror and a lock of her own hair.
That is when she encounters something considerably nastier than the spirits she normally deals with: a horrifying figure with a grotesquely gaping mouth who begins appearing throughout the building.
And this is where Never After Dark announces exactly what it wants to be. This is Dave Boyle’s love letter to J-horror, and he isn’t remotely subtle about it.
J-horror was everywhere in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Movies like Ringu, Ju-On: The Grudge, Dark Water, Pulse and One Missed Call became enormously popular, and eventually Hollywood started remaking seemingly every one of them.
The movement had a distinctive style: psychological dread, urban legends, curses, haunted technology, pale ghosts with strange movements, long stretches of quiet interrupted by sudden bursts of horror. It became such a phenomenon that even people who never saw the Japanese originals knew what these movies looked and felt like.
I have always been a little outside the club on this particular horror movement. And believe me, I am a horror fanatic. Horror is my favorite genre, and I just wrote an entire book, 40 Years, 40 Horror Films, examining how horror movies and the genre itself have evolved over the past four decades.
J-horror is obviously part of that history, but it has never been one of my favorite corners of the genre. I liked Ringu. I thought The Grudge was okay. Most of the American remakes left me cold, although Walter Salles’ Dark Water with Jennifer Connelly is an exception. I think that is a genuinely effective movie.
So your reaction to Never After Dark may depend partly on how nostalgic you are for that era, because Boyle has made what amounts to a sincere, handsomely crafted imitation of those films. The problem is that imitation is pretty much all it is.
Boyle certainly knows how to create an atmosphere. Working with cinematographer Patrick Ouziel, he gets a lot out of the isolated hotel, the surrounding forest and the increasingly oppressive darkness.
There are some creepy moments outside among the trees, and several of Airi’s rituals are genuinely suspenseful, particularly when she becomes trapped inside visions and has to blow out the candle to break the spell.
Boyle understands how to use silence and space, and there are a handful of jump scares that actually work.
Jonathan Snipes’ score is also terrific, although calling it “influenced” by Goblin’s legendary score for Dario Argento’s Suspiria may be putting it mildly. Whenever Airi begins one of her rituals (the spinning wheel, the candle, the burning hair) the music practically transforms into Goblin.
It is so obvious that I almost started laughing. Then again, if you are going to steal from somebody, steal from the best. Goblin’s Suspiria score remains, for me, the greatest horror movie score ever recorded, so at least Boyle and Snipes have excellent taste in grand larceny.
That is also the central problem with the entire movie. Everything keeps reminding me of something else.
Unfortunately, there are the obvious comparisons to The Shining, which are inevitable, because of the film's very similar location and striking set familiarity.
The Gaping Mouth Man (Mutsuo Yoshioka), with his strange movements and repeated appearances throughout the building, is creepy enough, but we have seen variations on this ghost countless times.
At certain moments his physicality even reminded me of Michael Winner’s completely insane 1977 horror film The Sentinel, which remains one of the strangest, craziest and most entertaining supernatural movies of that decade.
Unfortunately, every time Never After Dark reminded me of The Sentinel, I mostly wanted to stop watching Never After Dark and put on The Sentinel.
The relationship between Airi and her dead sister has the same problem. Miku’s appearances in reflections allow the movie to reveal Airi’s grief and their shared history, and there is an interesting idea here about someone whose ability to communicate with the dead has prevented her from accepting death herself.
But Boyle never develops the relationship deeply enough for it to have the emotional weight it needs. You can feel echoes of The Sixth Sense, The In Between and, most significantly, the terrific South Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters. That last one especially hangs over this movie.
The characters never become much more than types, which is frustrating because one of the best scenes has nothing to do with ghosts. Gunji and Airi have a few drinks together and simply talk. It is relaxed, funny and human, and for a few minutes these people actually feel like people rather than characters waiting for the next supernatural event.
I wanted more of that, because the movie desperately needs more moments in which we understand Airi as a person instead of simply watching her function as the psychic heroine of a horror movie.
Then, after spending roughly its first two-thirds establishing itself as a moody supernatural ghost story, Never After Dark changes gears. The story begins moving between the supernatural Gaping Mouth Man and the human being behind the image, and suddenly we are essentially watching a stalking/slasher movie.
The mysterious figure becomes an unstoppable maniac roaming the property, pursuing and attacking people, and the atmospheric J-horror exercise turns into a conventional survival thriller.
This does not deepen the movie. It makes it feel even more derivative. We have gone from recycled J-horror imagery to recycled slasher imagery, and by the time the movie starts connecting its time distortions, visions and supernatural mythology to the reality behind the haunting, I was considerably less interested than I had been during the quieter opening sections.
There are intriguing ideas involving grief, time and Airi’s refusal to let go of her sister, but they never coalesce into anything particularly fresh or moving.
What keeps Never After Dark alive (and comes very close to making it worth recommending) is Moeka Hoshi.
Hoshi is terrific. She received international attention for her wonderful work on Shōgun, and she has an enormously watchable quality that Boyle uses very effectively here. Airi could easily have been nothing more than another supernatural-horror protagonist wandering through dark rooms holding a candle, but Hoshi gives her intelligence, humor, toughness and vulnerability.
She never overplays the material. Even when the screenplay fails to give Airi enough dimension, Hoshi suggests that there is more happening underneath, and whenever the movie starts drifting into generic horror territory, she pulls you back in.
There are things I like about Never After Dark. It is beautifully shot, handsomely mounted, Boyle creates some legitimately creepy images, the Hokkaido setting is wonderfully atmospheric, a few of the scares work, and the music (however familiar it may sound) is effective as hell.
Most importantly, Moeka Hoshi gives a terrific central performance and almost single-handedly holds the whole thing together.
But Never After Dark ultimately feels like somebody lovingly reconstructed a J-horror movie from 2002, added elements from several other ghost movies, threw in a little Suspiria, and eventually decided it should become a slasher film too.
There is craftsmanship here, and there is clearly affection for the movies Boyle is referencing. What is missing is the thing I ultimately need from any new horror movie: a reason for this particular one to exist beyond reminding me of other movies I already like better.
If you are a devoted fan of that late-'90s/early-2000s J-horror style, you may get considerably more out of Never After Dark than I did. Boyle knows the language and recreates its atmosphere with considerable skill.
But for me, a couple of good scares, some beautiful cinematography and a terrific Moeka Hoshi performance aren't quite enough to overcome how familiar the whole thing feels.
I can admire the craftsmanship. I just wish the ghosts weren't the only things in Never After Dark that felt like they had come back from the past. - ⭐️⭐️
If you know me at all, you know that I am a huge Renny Harlin fan.
This is the man who directed Deep Blue Sea, The Long Kiss Goodnight, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, Driven, Cutthroat Island and, most importantly, Die Hard 2, which I consider one of the greatest action movies ever made.
In fact, I like Die Hard 2 more than the original Die Hard. Yes, I said it. I will stand on that mountain. Speaking of mountains, he also directed Cliffhanger.
Anyway, Renny Harlin has been making these kinds of movies for decades, and when he's operating at his best, he understands something very simple about action filmmaking: momentum matters. Blow something up. Throw somebody through a window. Crash a vehicle. Impale somebody on something. Keep moving.
Unfortunately, 2026 has not exactly been a banner year for Harlin.
The Beast is his third movie this year, following the awful The Strangers: Chapter 3 and Deep Water, the Aaron Eckhart/Ben Kingsley plane-crash-and-sharks movie that played like a tribute to bad 1970s disaster movies. You would think that three Renny Harlin movies in one year would make me incredibly happy.
It has not.
But now we have The Beast, which is an absolutely ridiculous movie, one of the dumbest action films you're going to see this year and easily the best of Harlin's three 2026 releases. I'll take the victories where I can get them.
Harlin wasn't even originally supposed to direct this thing. James Madigan was initially attached before Harlin came aboard, and the movie reunites him with Samuel L. Jackson, who starred in Harlin's The Long Kiss Goodnight, one of the great action movies of the '90s.
Jackson plays President Oscar Paladdin.
That's right. Samuel L. Jackson is the President of the United States. We're already off to a good start.
During a massive coordinated attack on the country, Paladdin's convoy is ambushed and he ends up trapped inside the heavily armored presidential limousine known as The Beast. His Secret Service agent Taft, played by Joel Kinnaman, has been badly wounded after fighting off a bunch of attackers and is bleeding out in the backseat.
The president is cut off from most of the people who would normally protect him, doesn't completely understand who is attacking him or why, and gradually discovers that The Beast isn't merely an armored limousine.
It's basically the Batmobile if the Department of Transportation designed the Batmobile. There are weapons everywhere. Hidden guns. Classified defense systems. Communications equipment. All kinds of ridiculous military hardware that President Samuel L. Jackson has to figure out how to operate while driving through hostile streets at extremely high speeds. And that's the movie.
It's Die Hard crossed with Speed, with a little bit of those Gerard Butler Has Fallen movies thrown in, except instead of John McClane being trapped inside Nakatomi Plaza, Samuel L. Jackson is trapped inside an incredibly expensive government automobile that can apparently destroy half the city.
I laughed a lot. Sometimes intentionally.
The movie unfolds largely in real time and from the perspective of the vehicle, which is actually a clever way of making what was obviously not an enormously expensive production feel bigger than it is. Harlin has always known how to stretch an action premise, and he keeps things moving quickly enough that you don't have much time to ask questions.
This is important. Do not ask questions during The Beast. Questions will destroy this movie.
There are codes Paladdin needs to access. There are people screaming instructions at him through the communication system. There are attackers everywhere. There are weapons he has to figure out. He has to locate his wife. He has to stop a coup. He has to keep Taft alive.
And because The Beast can drive itself, Paladdin occasionally climbs into the backseat to tend to Taft's wounds. Except the self-driving system requires the president to touch the steering wheel every two minutes. Of course it does.
So Samuel L. Jackson will be desperately trying to prevent Joel Kinnaman from bleeding to death and suddenly the car essentially says, “Hey, Mr. President, could you come up here and touch the wheel?” This is the kind of movie we're dealing with. And whenever The Beast simply accepts its own stupidity, it's actually pretty entertaining.
The biggest mistake the screenplay makes is occasionally trying to convince us that there's more going on here. There are flashbacks and dreamlike sequences involving Paladdin's past and his relationships, and the movie periodically goes inside his head in an attempt to give him emotional depth.
Stop it. I don't need emotional depth. Samuel L. Jackson is driving the presidential Batmobile. There are people shooting at him. Give him another missile.
Every time the movie pauses to explain Paladdin's humanity or provide psychological context, you can practically feel the momentum disappearing. This premise doesn't need to be elevated. It needs to be exploited.
All The Beast needs to be is Samuel L. Jackson driving really fast, screaming at people, swearing, discovering increasingly ridiculous weapons and blowing up bad guys.
Fortunately, a lot of the movie is exactly that.
Jackson and Harlin clearly understand each other. Jackson knows precisely what kind of movie he's in, and your tolerance for The Beast is probably going to depend almost entirely on how much you enjoy watching Samuel L. Jackson be Samuel L. Jackson. I enjoy that quite a bit.
He's yelling at the command center. He's yelling at the bad guys. He's yelling while driving. He's yelling while trying to save Taft. He's yelling while figuring out how the weapons work.
He's the President of the United States, and apparently his primary governing philosophy is yelling.
Works for me.
Joel Kinnaman is fun, too. He's spent plenty of time in genre movies, and he knows how to sell this nonsense without pretending it's Shakespeare. Taft gets his own moments of extreme violence, and the camaraderie between Kinnaman and Jackson gives the movie whatever actual human connection it needs.
Harlin also gets to indulge his affection for nasty action violence. Remember the icicle through the eye in Die Hard 2? Renny Harlin remembers.
There's CGI blood flying around, people getting ripped apart, intestines making appearances they probably didn't need to make, and various bad guys dying in appropriately ridiculous ways. It's excessive, sometimes hilariously so, but Harlin still knows how to stage an action sequence. That's the thing.
Even when the movie is complete nonsense, the action itself is usually clear. Vehicles move through space in ways you can understand. The geography makes sense. The editing doesn't turn every confrontation into visual oatmeal. When somebody is chasing somebody else, you know where everybody is.
That shouldn't be remarkable, but have you watched action movies lately?
Harlin may be working with a limited budget and an idiotic screenplay, but the guy knows where to put the camera when something needs to explode. And a lot of stuff explodes.
There are also plot developments involving the coup and the attackers that I am not going to spend much time explaining because I'm not entirely convinced the movie could explain them either. The screenplay keeps adding information as though eventually all of this is going to click together into some brilliant political conspiracy.
It doesn't. This is not The Manchurian Candidate. It's Samuel L. Jackson in a car with machine guns. Let's maintain perspective.
The whole thing also feels very much like one of those Liam Neeson action movies that have been appearing regularly for the last 15 years. Give an aging movie star one simple problem, isolate him somewhere, provide a bunch of anonymous bad guys and let professional filmmakers get 95 minutes out of it.
There's nothing wrong with that formula when it works. And The Beast works just enough.
I can't fully recommend the movie because it is simply too damn stupid. There are too many moments where logic packs a suitcase, leaves the theater and catches a flight home. The attempts at emotional depth don't work, the conspiracy becomes increasingly ridiculous, and if you spend more than 30 seconds thinking about what is actually happening, the entire thing collapses.
But I was never bored. That's something. Especially after Harlin's other movies this year.
Samuel L. Jackson commits completely. Joel Kinnaman is a solid partner. Harlin gets to direct car chases, gunfights, explosions and absurdly violent deaths, and the whole thing is over in about an hour and 40 minutes. Sometimes that's enough.
So if you want to kill 90-some minutes watching Samuel L. Jackson play the President of the United States while driving an armored limousine at top speed, screaming, swearing, firing enormous weapons and blowing people up while Renny Harlin happily throws CGI blood all over the screen, you could do worse.
Much worse. I've seen The Strangers: Chapter 3. The Beast is ridiculous. It's stupid. It makes almost no sense. And it's modestly entertaining.
For Renny Harlin in 2026, I'll take it. - ⭐️⭐️1/2
There are some movies that get remade over and over again and you understand why. The original had a great premise, or somebody sees an opportunity to reinterpret the material for another generation.
Then there is Angel and the Badman.
The original Angel and the Badman came out in 1947 and starred John Wayne as Quirt Evans, a wounded gunfighter who winds up being nursed back to health by a family of Quakers, including a young woman named Penny.
Quirt is a violent man with a violent past who suddenly finds himself surrounded by people whose entire philosophy is built around peace, compassion and treating others with kindness. Inevitably, he begins wondering whether maybe there is another way to live.
The movie is historically interesting because it was the first film John Wayne produced, and you can see what he was trying to do with it. Wayne was already a star, but Quirt gave him an opportunity to play around with the image of the hardened Western gunfighter and explore what might happen if that guy suddenly had to confront faith, pacifism and his own capacity for change.
It was written and directed by James Edward Grant, who had an unusual career. Grant only directed two movies (this one and Ring of Fear) but wrote more than 60, including a whole bunch of Westerns and several John Wayne pictures.
His credits included Hondo, The Alamo, The Proud Rebel, Santa Fe and Belle of the Yukon. So Grant certainly knew the genre, even though Angel and the Badman itself is a fairly stiff little Western. It has some interesting ideas and was unusual for its time, but I've never considered it some forgotten masterpiece.
Apparently somebody keeps thinking it needs to be remade anyway.
There was already a Hallmark version in 2009 starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Deborah Kara Unger and Luke Perry, with John Wayne's grandson Brendan Wayne making an appearance.
If you think about it, Angel and the Badman is almost hilariously perfect Hallmark material: dangerous man arrives, decent woman sees the goodness buried inside him, love and kindness change his ways. Just add a Christmas tree and somebody trying to save the family bakery and you're practically there.
Now we have another remake, this time from Angel Studios. Of course we do.
If there was ever an old John Wayne movie sitting around waiting to become an Angel Studios production, this is probably it. Angel has built its brand around Christian and faith-based entertainment, and I've talked before about my problems with many of its movies.
It isn't the presence of faith that bothers me. Movies can explore faith, Christianity, redemption and spirituality in profound and fascinating ways. My problem is when the message becomes more important than the characters and the filmmaking, and instead of exploring an idea, the movie starts pounding it into your head.
That's exactly what happens here.
Director Julio Quintana's version stars Zachary Levi as Quirt Evans, who begins the movie as a hardened outlaw and gunfighter before stumbling wounded onto the Worth family's ranch. Penny, played by Meg Fraser, nurses him back to health with the help of her family, including her widowed mother Irene, played by Jean Louisa Kelly.
Quirt gradually becomes involved in their lives, helps them deal with a neighboring rancher who has dammed up their water supply, and begins considering the possibility that perhaps violence doesn't have to define the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, Marshal Boone McClintock, played by Tommy Lee Jones, is keeping an eye on Quirt, and the outlaw Laredo, played by Neal McDonough, is eventually coming for him.
The mining claim from the original has been replaced with stolen Confederate gold, and the explicit Quaker/Society of Friends identity of the Worth family has been removed. But the basic plot remains remarkably close to the 1947 film.
What has disappeared is almost everything that made the original remotely interesting.
The conflict in the John Wayne version came specifically from placing this violent gunfighter among Quakers. You had two fundamentally opposed philosophies colliding with one another, and Wayne's presence made the contradiction even more interesting because audiences already associated him with a particular kind of Western masculinity.
This remake strips away much of that specificity and replaces it with generic faith-based messaging about righteous Christian people showing a bad man the proper path. Everything has been cleaned up, simplified and neutered.
And then we get to Zachary Levi. Oh boy.
This is now the second movie this year in which Levi has been hilariously miscast as some kind of hardened action hero. Just a few weeks ago I saw The Fix, which may still be the worst movie I've seen all year, and Levi was spectacularly unconvincing as a tough military action guy.
Now somebody has apparently decided that he should step into John Wayne's boots and play an intimidating Western gunslinger. He can't. I'm sorry. He just can't.
I used to really like Zachary Levi. He was enormously charming on Chuck, and there was a goofy likability to him that worked in the better moments of the Shazam! movies. But somewhere along the way that charm seems to have disappeared, and lately he keeps getting cast in roles that require a kind of physical authority, danger and toughness that he simply doesn't possess.
Watching him as Quirt Evans feels like watching somebody cosplay a Western gunfighter.
That's also what was wrong with him in The Fix. He wasn't a hardened military guy; he looked like an actor pretending to be one. Here he doesn't seem like somebody who has spent years killing people and surviving in the brutal Old West. He looks like Zachary Levi dressed up as somebody who might have appeared in a John Wayne movie.
There is nothing underneath it.
And because the entire story depends on believing that Quirt really was a dangerous man before Penny and her family begin changing him, the movie is in trouble from the minute Levi arrives. Redemption isn't particularly meaningful if you never believe in the darkness that supposedly preceded it.
It doesn't help that the entire production has that strangely scrubbed quality that plagues a lot of low- and mid-budget period filmmaking. Westerns need dirt. They need sweat. They need dust, blood, worn clothing, ugly landscapes and people who look like they've actually been living in this environment instead of arriving from wardrobe five minutes earlier.
Nothing in Angel and the Badman feels lived in.
Early in the movie, Penny is trying to hitch a horse to a plow, and even something that simple feels staged. The ranch doesn't feel like a place where generations of people have worked and struggled. The clothes don't feel worn. The violence has no weight. The danger has no grit. The whole Old West setting feels less like a world and more like a set somebody rented for the weekend.
Meg Fraser and Levi also have very little chemistry, which creates another enormous problem because their relationship is supposed to provide the emotional foundation for Quirt's transformation.
Penny needs to represent a life that Quirt never imagined he could have. Instead, their scenes mostly feel like actors dutifully moving through the beats required to get the movie to its predetermined message.
Neal McDonough, who has become something of a regular presence in Angel Studios productions, plays Laredo, and he goes in the opposite direction. He's pushing so hard to be the dangerous Western villain that the performance becomes another kind of costume.
McDonough can be an enormously entertaining actor when the material allows him to lean into his intensity, but here everything feels forced.
Then there's Tommy Lee Jones.
Jones recently turned 80, and I have to admit there is something kind of touching about seeing him climb onto a horse again. If this winds up being his last Western, there is certainly a nice bit of movie history in watching him get back into the saddle one more time.
Unfortunately, that's about all there is.
Jones appears to be coasting through the movie, doing a vaguely Walter Brennan-ish old-lawman routine and collecting his paycheck. He has reached the stage of his career where simply seeing Tommy Lee Jones in a Western carries a certain amount of pleasure, but the movie doesn't give him enough to turn that presence into an actual character.
That is the problem with almost everything here. Nothing feels authentic because authenticity isn't really the priority. The priority is delivering the message.
The 1947 movie was already heavy-handed. It was already a fairly obvious story about violence confronting pacifism and a bad man discovering that kindness might be more powerful than a gun. But there was at least some sincerity behind what John Wayne and James Edward Grant were trying to do.
Wayne was consciously experimenting with his own screen persona, and the Quaker element gave the movie a specific philosophical tension.
This remake takes virtually the same plot beats and removes the tension. Instead of wrestling with difficult ideas about violence, faith and redemption, everybody mostly seems to be waiting for the next opportunity to demonstrate what the movie believes.
There is a difference between a story about faith and a movie designed to deliver a faith-based message. The first one can challenge you. The second one already knows exactly what you're supposed to think. Angel and the Badman is the second one.
And when you combine that heavy-handedness with the lack of chemistry, the modest production values, the scrubbed-clean Western setting and a lead performance that I found unintentionally hilarious, there isn't much left.
It is actually remarkable that Angel and the Badman has now been remade twice. The John Wayne original is an interesting footnote in his career and certainly worth seeing if you're interested in Wayne's evolution as an actor and producer, but it isn't exactly The Searchers.
The Hallmark remake wasn't good either. And somehow this one is worse.
If you're a fan of the original, there is absolutely no reason to see this version. It recreates much of the story without the historical context, philosophical specificity or sincerity that made the 1947 movie interesting in the first place.
And if you're coming to Angel and the Badman completely fresh, you're left with a bland, artificial Western dominated by another embarrassingly miscast tough-guy performance from the truly awful Zachary Levi.
John Wayne's boots were always going to be difficult to fill.
This movie doesn't even come close. - ⭐️1/2
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