CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 2-13-26
- Nick Digilio
- 3 minutes ago
- 23 min read
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review six new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, February 13th, 2026.
Here’s the thing I want to make absolutely clear right up front, because I know how these things tend to get framed: my hatred of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has absolutely nothing to do with some sacred-cow reverence for Emily Brontë’s novel.
I don’t worship the book. I don’t admire it. I don’t even like it. I’ve never liked Wuthering Heights. I’ve always thought it was kind of a miserable slog, and I’ve never understood why it’s been elevated to untouchable-literary-masterpiece status.
So if you’re looking for some “he hated it because she dared to change a classic” argument, you can throw that right out the window immediately. That’s not what’s happening here.
I hate this movie because it’s a terrible movie. Full stop.
Emerald Fennell’s 2026 Wuthering Heights is one of the most aggressively inept, self-satisfied, and stylistically desperate films I’ve seen in a while, and it continues a depressing downward trend in Fennell’s inexplicable directing career.
This is her third feature, and somehow each one has been worse than the last. Promising Young Woman was heavy-handed, smug, and blunt-force moralizing, barely held together by Carey Mulligan’s terrific performance.
Saltburn was all idiotic surface, all posture, a visually extravagant nothing-burger that confused production design with filmmaking and provocation with substance.
And now Wuthering Heights arrives, a movie that mistakes volume for intensity, lusty posing for passion, and constant aesthetic assault for storytelling.
The basic setup is familiar, at least in outline. Heathcliff is brought into the Earnshaw household, forms a feral, obsessive bond with Cathy, grows up brutalized by circumstance, is betrayed when Cathy marries the respectable Edgar Linton, disappears, then returns wealthy and emotionally ruined to wreak emotional havoc.
Except here, Fennell strips the story down to roughly half the novel, jettisons the entire second-generation arc, softens Heathcliff’s cruelty, and reframes the whole thing as a Catherine-centric, horny gothic melodrama that wants desperately to feel dangerous without ever actually being so.
Margot Robbie plays Cathy, and it genuinely pains me to say this because she’s one of my favorite actors working today, but she is completely wasted here. This is the first time I can remember watching a Margot Robbie performance and feeling absolutely nothing.
That’s not on her. That’s on a screenplay that gives her nothing but repetitive emotional beats and a director who has no idea how to shape a performance. Jacob Elordi, meanwhile, continues his streak of proving that height, cheekbones, and smoldering looks are not the same thing as talent.
His Heathcliff is stiff, empty, and utterly lifeless. There’s no menace, no mystery, no magnetism. He looks great brooding on the moors, sure, but that’s about it. Heathcliff should feel like a force of nature. Elordi feels like a damp candle.
Fennell’s direction is the real problem, though. She has no sense of rhythm, no understanding of how scenes should breathe, and no instinct for when to pull back.
Everything is slammed at you. The score is blaring. Charli XCX songs are shoved into scenes like blunt instruments. The camera is constantly insisting on importance rather than earning it.
There’s no subtlety, no modulation, no confidence. It’s filmmaking by overcompensation. She treats the audience like idiots, assuming that louder, sexier, flashier will automatically equal deeper and more meaningful.
And let’s talk about “sexy,” because this movie is clearly desperate to be sexy. It wants so badly to be scandalous, bodice-ripping, forbidden, sweaty, transgressive.
And yet, despite all the grabbing, kissing, writhing, and heavy breathing, there is not a single genuinely erotic moment in the entire film. Not one. Chemistry cannot be manufactured through frantic cutting and a pounding soundtrack. Passion has to come from character, from tension, from longing. None of that exists here. It’s all pose, no heat.
The supporting cast is criminally underused. Hong Chau’s Nelly is reduced to vague glances and unclear motivations. Martin Clunes plays the abusive father in the broadest, most obvious strokes imaginable.
Alison Oliver and Shazad Latif drift in and out as narrative functions rather than people. The child actors at the beginning are weak, and the entire opening stretch feels like a grim, overlit sketch of trauma rather than something lived-in or emotionally grounded.
There is a moment midway through the film (one of the key plot turns) that hinges on a misunderstanding so clumsily staged and so lazily written that it genuinely feels like it wandered in from an episode of Three’s Company.
I half-expected Mr. Roper to pop out from behind a door. That’s the level of dramatic sophistication we’re dealing with here.
Visually, yes, the locations are pretty. The costumes are elaborate. Linus Sandgren’s cinematography has flashes of beauty. But none of it coheres. Scenes are chopped to bits. Emotional arcs are flattened. The movie has no internal pulse. It’s just one overwrought sequence after another, all screaming for attention.
I honestly don’t know who this movie is for. Fans of the book are likely to be furious about the omissions and changes. Audiences looking for something truly erotic won’t get it. People hoping for a bold reinterpretation will instead find a shallow Skinemax fever dream that thinks it’s profound.
And if you’re someone who deeply misses the work of Zalman King (if you long for the days of Red Shoe Diaries, Two Moon Junction, and Wild Orchid playing at 2 a.m.) then congratulations, this might be your movie. For everyone else, it’s a deeply unpleasant endurance test.
This is one of the worst films of 2026 so far. A hollow, noisy, pretentious mess that mistakes aesthetic aggression for artistry and passion for spectacle.
Emerald Fennell desperately wants to be seen as provocative and daring, but all she’s done here is prove, yet again, that style without discipline is just noise.
If you’re curious about Wuthering Heights, go watch literally any other version, or don’t. But skip this one. It’s a truly lousy movie. - ⭐️
There are bad movies, there are disappointing movies, and then there are movies that make you actively angry while you’re watching them. Movies that feel smug, self-satisfied, unbearably pretentious, and convinced of their own brilliance while offering absolutely nothing of value.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die lands squarely in that last category, and I cannot remember the last time I had such a violently negative reaction to a film.
I hated this movie. I didn’t just dislike it. I didn’t merely find it frustrating or misguided. I found it profoundly empty, astonishingly arrogant, relentlessly obnoxious, and almost insultingly stupid.
This is a movie that thinks it’s hilarious, thinks it’s insightful, thinks it’s cutting-edge satire, and fails on every single level it attempts to operate on.
It is unfocused, bloated, self-indulgent, and feels like two hours and fifteen minutes of loud, incoherent noise being hurled at the audience under the mistaken belief that chaos equals intelligence.
The premise sounds promising on paper. A scruffy man from the future, played by Sam Rockwell, drops into a Norms diner in Los Angeles and recruits a random group of patrons to help him stop a rogue artificial intelligence from destroying humanity.
He’s tried this mission over a hundred times already, resetting the timeline whenever it fails. That setup could have gone in interesting directions. Time loops. AI paranoia. Social media addiction. Human disconnection. These are fertile grounds for satire and science fiction.
Instead, what we get is a catastrophic mess.
The screenplay by Matthew Robinson is unbelievably obnoxious. Robinson has done good work in the past. The Invention of Lying was clever and genuinely thoughtful. Whatever spark he once had is completely absent here.
This script is a recycling bin of half-baked ideas, obvious targets, and painfully shallow observations. It sprays commentary at everything it can think of, like AI, phones, teenagers, school shootings, social media, groupthink, advertising, grief, education, all without ever landing a single meaningful punch.
And then there’s perennial hack Gore Verbinski. I truly do not understand how this man continues to get work. He has somehow acquired a reputation as a visionary director, and I find that baffling.
He made The Ring, which I’ve always thought was unnecessary and overrated. He directed three Pirates of the Caribbean movies, which are bloated, dumb spectacles. The Weather Man is the most interesting thing he’s ever done.
He’s responsible for the disastrous The Lone Ranger, and A Cure for Wellness felt like a cheap, clueless knockoff of Yorgos Lanthimos without any understanding of what made those films work.
Here, Verbinski has absolutely no control over tone, style, or pacing. The camera never stops moving. The visual language is frantic and meaningless.
It’s like he watched a bunch of Terry Gilliam movies, completely misunderstood them, and then tried to imitate the surface-level chaos without any of the intelligence, purpose, or imagination. The special effects are thrown everywhere. Ideas collide and cancel each other out.
Nothing breathes. Nothing lands.
This is also the first movie I can remember where I actively disliked Sam Rockwell. And that hurts to say, because he’s one of my favorite actors working today. But there is no direction here. He’s left to flail, mug, and scramble for laughs that never come. He’s not alone. Nearly everyone in this incredible cast is completely wasted.
Haley Lu Richardson, who is terrific in almost everything she does, is saddled with an indecipherable goth stereotype who is allergic to technology and Wi-Fi, gets nosebleeds, and exists purely as a clumsy metaphor.
Michael Peña is reduced to a one-note nerd. Zazie Beetz, one of the most magnetic and charismatic performers we have, is criminally underused as a bland, personality-free teacher.
Juno Temple comes closest to rising above the material, but even she can’t escape the weight of this awful script.
The movie tries to be about everything. It wants to satirize teenagers addicted to phones by turning them into zombies. It wants to comment on school shootings in a way that is neither insightful nor funny, just painfully dumb.
There’s an entire subplot involving cloned children who return after school shootings, programmed like walking advertisements. That’s not bold satire. That’s first-grade-level observation presented as if it’s groundbreaking.
Nothing has a target. Nothing is sharpened. Everything is just noise.
The structure doesn’t help. The film is chopped into chapters, with character names popping up and flashbacks explaining everyone’s trauma, exactly like other, better films have done before.
It’s pretentious, unnecessary, and derivative. It reminded me of movies that do this well, which only made this feel worse by comparison.
By the time the movie climaxes with a giant battle involving a nine-year-old creating world-ending AI, bizarre monsters made of cat heads, killer toys, and endless digital chaos, I was completely checked out. It felt like a grab bag of visuals stolen from better movies, smashed together without thought or purpose.
This movie is loud. It is exhausting. It is arrogantly convinced of its own brilliance. It mistakes volume for insight and chaos for commentary.
There is not one frame of this movie that I found intelligent. Not one joke that landed. Not one observation that felt fresh. It is a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute endurance test that felt closer to ten hours.
What makes it even more frustrating is that the real world is absolutely ripe for satire right now. AI, social media addiction, violence, disconnection, grief, technology—these are terrifying, fascinating subjects.
In the right hands, this could have been sharp, unsettling, and genuinely funny. Instead, in the hands of Gore Verbinski and Matthew Robinson, it becomes one of the most pompous, hollow, and irritating movies I’ve seen in years.
This is a complete waste of an extraordinary cast, a waste of money, and a waste of time. It’s a movie made for people who want to feel smart simply for sitting through it, despite learning absolutely nothing. An utter disaster.
One of the worst movies I’ve seen in a very long time. - 1/2 star
Crime 101 is a slick, overlong, deeply derivative heist thriller that wants very badly to be a modern classic and instead settles for being a pale, exhausting knockoff of better movies you’ve already seen, most notably Heat, which it borrows from so aggressively that at times it feels less like inspiration and more like a tracing.
The setup is familiar and clean on paper. Chris Hemsworth plays Mike Davis, an elite jewel thief who operates by a strict personal code. He’s patient, disciplined, and prides himself on never killing anyone. He’s planning one last big score along the 101 freeway in California before getting out for good.
Mark Ruffalo is Lou Lubesnick, a slovenly, obsessive detective who becomes convinced that these jewel heists are the work of a lone operator and not the cartels everyone else suspects.
Halle Berry plays Sharon Colvin, an insurance broker who underwrites the very jewels Davis is targeting and who finds herself pulled into the orbit of the crime.
Hovering over all of this is Nick Nolte as a gravel-voiced crime boss who assigns jobs and decides when it’s time to replace Mike with someone younger, more reckless, and far more dangerous: Barry Keoghan’s Ormon, a lunatic criminal who spends most of the movie either riding a motorcycle or wearing a ridiculous motorcycle helmet.
On paper, this should work. Don Winslow’s novella is lean and sharp. Bart Layton, who wrote and directed the film, at times knows how to stage tension. The cast is stacked. The cinematography is strong. The opening ten minutes are genuinely tight, well edited, and nicely scored. For a brief moment, you think you might be in for something lean and tough.
And then the movie just keeps going. And going. And going.
At over two hours and twenty minutes, Crime 101 is wildly overindulgent, and the longer it runs, the more obvious its problems become. Layton is clearly in love with Heat.
Not just the themes, but the structure, the character archetypes, the beachside apartments, the tone, the pacing, the “cop versus criminal who secretly respect each other” dynamic.
Ruffalo is essentially doing an Al Pacino-lite routine, minus the ridiculous intensity. Hemsworth is the Robert De Niro figure, the disciplined professional with rules. The problem is that Layton doesn’t bring Michael Mann’s precision, obsession, or underlying melancholy to the material. He brings imitation without insight.
The characters are almost entirely built from clichés. Ruffalo’s arc is laughably shallow. At the beginning, he’s overweight, unshaven, chain-smoking, miserable, and disconnected from his wife.
By the end, he shaves, chews Nicorette, tucks in his shirt, and can roll up a yoga mat properly. That’s it. That’s the arc.
Halle Berry’s character exists mainly to endure cartoonishly blunt sexism at work, which is hammered home with absolutely no subtlety, and then to become morally conflicted about helping a criminal. Berry goes through the motions, but the character is thin and badly written.
Nick Nolte looks and sounds like he wandered in for a day of work, growled his lines, and wandered back out. Barry Keoghan’s character is so aggressively coded as “dangerous” that it becomes absurd.
Yes, we understand he’s reckless. Yes, we understand he kills people. We do not need him riding a motorcycle, wearing a helmet, punching strangers, and glaring menacingly in scene after scene to get the point. The movie never trusts the audience to understand anything without it being underlined five times.
Then there’s the waste. And this is where the movie really starts to infuriate me.
Jennifer Jason Leigh (one of the greatest actresses of the past forty years) appears in exactly one scene. One. She has three lines of dialogue. She plays Ruffalo’s estranged wife, shows up in a restaurant, speaks briefly, and disappears forever.
I didn’t even realize she was in the movie until she showed up, and then she was gone. In a movie that runs over two hours, that is an unforgivable waste of talent.
Monica Barbaro, who was spectacular as Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown, is reduced to playing Hemsworth’s blind-date girlfriend, a walking symbol of the “normal life” the criminal might want. She has nothing to do.
Corey Hawkins is stuck spewing partner-cop clichés. Tate Donovan plays a rich idiot target so broadly that it becomes unintentionally funny.
And yet, here’s the thing, Chris Hemsworth is actually very good. He is easily the best thing in the movie. He commits fully to the role, brings weight and restraint to a badly written character, and gives the film far more depth than it deserves.
He’s convincing in the action, solid in the heist sequences, and genuinely interesting in quieter moments. There’s a confrontation between Hemsworth and Keoghan in a convenience store that is legitimately tense and effective. It’s one of the few scenes where the movie actually breathes.
But one strong performance cannot save a movie this bloated, this derivative, and this unfocused.
By the time the final extended heist sequence rolls around (bringing all the characters together in a loud, violent, predictable climax) the movie has long since worn out its welcome. The supposed mutual respect between cop and criminal lands with a thud because we’ve seen it done better dozens of times.
What finally tipped me over was realizing that I was thinking about beachfront real estate while watching the movie. When your crime thriller has me distracted by how many characters conveniently live in or rent oceanfront apartments in Los Angeles, something has gone very wrong.
That’s Heat again, by the way. Another borrowed detail, another reminder of a slightly better film.
Aside from a strong opening, solid cinematography, and Hemsworth’s committed performance, Crime 101 is a disappointment.
It’s derivative, overlong, stuffed with stereotypes, and guilty of one of the most shocking wastes of acting talent I’ve seen in years.
It wants to be important, wants to be iconic, wants to be remembered—and instead it ends up feeling like a glossy echo of movies that actually earned their place.
A huge letdown. - ⭐️⭐️
Goat is one of those movies where, about twenty minutes in, I found myself thinking, “Okay…this is actually kind of working.” And that surprised me, because I went into it with expectations that were pretty low. Not rock-bottom, but low. And honestly? This is a perfectly entertaining animated movie.
It’s not great, it’s not going to change the world, it’s not going to be remembered as some landmark in animation history, but it is a solid, colorful, funny-enough way to kill about a hundred minutes.
Your kids will like it. You’ll probably like it too. And considering how brutally bad some of the other wide releases have been lately, that alone feels like a minor miracle.
The setup is simple and familiar. We’re in an anthropomorphic animal world where the biggest, strongest beasts dominate a brutal, basketball-like sport called roarball. Our hero is Will Harris, a goat (small, scrappy, underestimated) who dreams of being the greatest of all time.
He idolizes Jett Fillmore, a legendary panther player stuck on the perpetually losing Vineland Thorns. Will is broke, struggling to pay rent, working a diner job, and generally being told in a thousand different ways that “smalls can’t ball.”
Then, in classic modern-movie fashion, one moment goes viral. Will shows up league MVP Mane Attraction (an enormous, arrogant horse) in a one-on-one, and even though he technically loses, he drains enough ridiculous shots to make the internet lose its mind.
Suddenly he’s signed to the Thorns, partly as a publicity stunt, partly as a desperation move, and definitely as an underdog experiment that nobody really believes in.
From there, you know the beats. The team doesn’t trust him. The star player feels threatened. The owner is a mess. The coach is sidelined. There’s a long losing streak, internal conflict, a redemption arc, a big championship game, an injury, an apology, and a last-second shot.
You have seen this movie before. You have seen versions of this movie dozens of times. The difference here is execution, and Goat executes well enough to be consistently pleasant.
Sony Pictures Animation is wildly inconsistent. They’re capable of brilliance—Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse are absolute masterpieces—but they’ve also given us disasters like The Emoji Movie and some very questionable franchise junk.
Goat lands somewhere comfortably in the middle. It’s nowhere near the Spider-Verse films, but it’s lightyears better than their worst impulses. The animation is colorful, fluid, and easy on the eyes.
The roarball sequences are staged clearly, with enough energy and motion to keep things moving, and the character designs are expressive without being obnoxious.
The voice cast is a big plus. Caleb McLaughlin is very good as Will, he is earnest without being whiny, enthusiastic without being grating. Gabrielle Union brings real weight and authority to Jett Fillmore, and David Harbour, Nick Kroll, Nicola Coughlan, and Stephen Curry all have fun, distinct presences.
Patton Oswalt, as usual, knows exactly how to work a recording booth, and Jennifer Hudson adds some genuine warmth and emotional grounding. Even Jelly Roll pops up and gets a few solid laughs. It’s a stacked cast, and for the most part, they’re used well.
Stephen Curry’s involvement as a producer actually shows. There’s a surprising amount of authenticity in how the sport itself is treated—team dynamics, ego, coaching, selfish play versus trust. It’s simplified for kids, obviously, but it’s not totally hollow.
The movie’s message about perseverance, inclusion, and redefining what “greatness” looks like is familiar, but it’s delivered without being too obnoxious or preachy.
And that’s really the key word here: familiar. There is nothing new in Goat. Talking animals playing sports, underdog stories, viral fame, teamwork, believing in yourself, yes, this stuff has been done a million times. But it’s done competently here, with enough charm, humor, and visual polish to make it worthwhile.
The soundtrack is fun, the jokes mostly land, and the movie moves at a brisk pace without overstaying its welcome.
So no, Goat is not a classic. It’s not groundbreaking. It’s not going to blow your mind. But it is perfectly serviceable family entertainment, and in a marketplace flooded with either cynical garbage or exhausting ambition, sometimes “perfectly serviceable” is more than enough.
You could do a lot worse than spending a couple of hours with some animated animals, a goofy sports movie, and a goat who just wants to prove that smalls can ball. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Every once in a while, you just need a good, goofy, splatter-filled comedy-horror movie about exploding bodies, parasitic fungus, and actors you absolutely would not expect to see covered in slime and fake blood. And that’s exactly what Cold Storage is.
The setup is ridiculous in the best possible way. Two night-shift employees at a self-storage facility (built, of course, on top of an old, decommissioned military base) accidentally unleash a parasitic fungus that has been sealed away for decades.
As the temperature rises, the fungus wakes up, spreads like wildfire, controls brains, mutates bodies, and eventually causes people and animals to burst apart in spectacular fashion.
Naturally, this escalates into a potential extinction-level event, and it’s up to these two regular working stiffs, along with a grizzled, semi-broken former bioterror operative, to keep the apocalypse contained underground.
This thing has been sitting on a shelf for a while, and you can feel it. It was shot a couple of years ago, delayed, reshuffled, and finally dumped into a release window that has been absolutely flooded with horror movies.
As a huge horror fan, I’m thrilled we’re getting so many genre releases, but there’s definitely been a quantity-over-quality problem lately. Cold Storage lands somewhere in the middle of that pile, it's not a classic, not a disaster, but a reasonably fun, messy, splattery diversion.
What immediately caught my attention is the pedigree. The screenplay is by David Koepp, who is a legendary screenwriter, full stop. This is the guy who wrote Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible, Spider-Man, Panic Room, Carlito’s Way, Indiana Jones, and even last year’s Steven Soderbergh films Presence and Black Bag.
Here, he’s adapting his own novel, which gives the movie a slightly looser, more indulgent feel. It’s directed by Jonny Campbell, who’s done a lot of television and previously made Alien Autopsy, which honestly feels like a perfect résumé entry for something this strange.
The tone is very much in the Shaun of the Dead tradition: comedy first, horror second, but with no shortage of gore. There are exploding heads, ruptured bodies, possessed animals, green mold spreading across walls, and some genuinely impressive practical makeup effects.
The fungus itself is a fun twist on the zombie-virus trope, and the body-bursting imagery is frequently gross, occasionally inventive, and clearly meant to get laughs as much as winces.
The cast is part of the fun. Joe Keery, forever recognizable from Stranger Things (complete with the Stranger Things haircut) is actually quite good here. I’m not a big Stranger Things fan, but he delivers his lines with a nice deadpan rhythm and plays the reluctant everyman well.
Georgina Campbell, who’s quickly becoming a modern scream queen thanks to Barbarian and The Watchers, is solid and grounded, and the two of them have decent chemistry as night-shift workers trying to survive something completely insane.
Sosie Bacon pops up as well, continuing her run in genre films after Smile, and Liam Neeson shows up doing what Liam Neeson does in these kinds of movies now: gravelly voice, grumpy demeanor, physical ailments, and an air of “I’ve seen some things.”
His profanity-laced monologues are actually pretty funny, and he seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he’s in.
What’s truly baffling (and also kind of delightful) is the presence of Vanessa Redgrave and Lesley Manville in small roles. These are towering, legendary actresses with extraordinary careers, and here they are in a movie featuring exploding corpses, possessed deer, and brain-controlling mold.
Either they lost a bet, or they genuinely thought this would be fun. Either way, it adds to the oddball charm.
The movie opens with a title card that says, “Pay attention. This shit is real,” then launches into a convoluted flashback involving Skylab in 1979. I’m old enough to remember Skylab falling out of the sky, but I guarantee a good chunk of the audience has no idea what that is.
It’s one of many odd tonal choices that don’t entirely work but are weird enough to be amusing.
Is Cold Storage original? Not even remotely. You’ve seen this movie before in different forms. Pandemic thrillers, underground military secrets, night-shift workers stuck in a bad situation, grizzled experts returning for one last job—it’s all recycled.
But it moves at a brisk pace, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and delivers exactly what it promises: gross-out effects, a few good laughs, and some solid genre performances.
This isn’t something you need to rush out and see on the biggest screen possible, but when it inevitably shows up on streaming, it’s a perfectly acceptable Friday-night movie.
Grab a couple of drinks, invite a few friends, watch bodies explode, listen to Liam Neeson growl, and marvel at the fact that Vanessa Redgrave is in this thing at all.
Cold Storage could have been a lot worse. As a goofy, splattery horror-comedy distraction, it mostly works, and horror fans looking for some messy fun could definitely do worse. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
I walked out of Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie feeling two things at the same time, and they were both pretty strong: one, this movie was absolutely not made for me, and two, I’m not convinced it was made for anyone who actually likes to laugh.
I know that sounds harsh, and I also know there are people out there who treat this thing like a sacred text, like it’s some underground cult comedy masterpiece, the kind of movie you quote at parties and high-five your friends about because you “get it.”
Well, I get it. I get what they’re trying to do. I get the style, the references, the whole DIY, mockumentary, meta, time-travel, buddy-comedy, Canadian-in-jokes stew they’re stirring. I just don’t get why anyone would want to eat it for an endless 97 minutes.
The basic setup is simple enough, and honestly it’s the only part of this whole thing that makes any sense. Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol play fictionalized versions of themselves, two unemployed buddies in Toronto who call themselves a band (Nirvanna the Band) despite the minor detail that they’ve never actually written a song, recorded a song, or really done anything band-related besides talk about being a band.
Their entire existence, their entire identity, their entire reason for waking up in the morning is this obsessive quest to play a gig at The Rivoli, a Toronto club. Not “we want to play gigs,” not “we’re trying to build an audience,” not “we’re making music and want to get booked.”
No, no. Just: play The Rivoli. That’s it. That’s the dream. That’s the holy grail. And the way they try to accomplish it (over and over) is by hatching increasingly elaborate schemes that have absolutely nothing to do with music. They’re basically two guys running cons on the universe while insisting they’re artists.
In the movie, they crank the stupid dial even higher with a plan involving a DeLorean-inspired RV—because of course—and when their latest scheme blows up in their faces, it accidentally sends Matt, Jay, and their buddy/cameraman Jared back to 2008.
So now it becomes this time-travel mockumentary adventure where they’re stranded in the past and need to find a way back to the present, while also still obsessing over The Rivoli, because apparently even time itself must bow down to their delusion.
They run into younger versions of themselves, they start messing with timelines, and the movie starts doing this Back to the Future riffing where it’s constantly nudging you like, “Eh? Eh? You see what we’re doing? You see the reference? You see how clever we are?” And I’m sitting there thinking, no, you’re not clever, you’re loud.
And that’s the thing. The entire movie is built on a comedy philosophy I cannot stand: the idea that being irritating is the same as being funny, and that being obnoxious is a substitute for having jokes.
Matt Johnson, who directs and co-writes and stars, is the epicenter of that philosophy. He plays a version of himself that is so aggressively unlikable, so relentlessly overbearing, that the movie becomes a test of endurance.
He has this approach where he seems to believe that if he just talks faster, yells louder, pushes harder, and commits more aggressively to being a jerk, you’ll eventually crack and laugh. I did not crack. I didn’t laugh once. Not once.
And I sat through the whole thing, hoping that maybe—maybe—at some point the movie would settle into a rhythm, or the friendship dynamic would become interesting, or a scene would land, or there would be an actual comic escalation that paid off. Instead it’s just variations on the same noise.
It doesn’t help that the movie leans into that “real world ambush” style where they mix scripted scenes with interactions involving unsuspecting people on the street, and it’s done with that smug, self-satisfied, look-at-the-camera energy that wants you to be impressed by how fearless and spontaneous and “authentic” it is.
I’m sorry, but no. This is the kind of thing that reminds you of why Borat makes you feel like you need a shower afterwards, and I’m not a Borat guy. I don’t find that stuff funny. I find it uncomfortable in the worst way: not because it’s pushing boundaries or making a sharp point, but because it’s weaponizing awkwardness as a punchline and then acting like it’s revolutionary.
If you’re going to do the “mess with real people” thing, you better have either a real satirical target or a genuinely brilliant comic engine. This movie has neither. It has two guys being pests.
Now, I will grudgingly admit something, because I try to be fair even when I’m miserable: technically, the movie is sometimes impressive in how it stitches together different kinds of footage.
They pull material that looks like it’s from the earlier web series era, they intercut with new stuff, they create the illusion of time travel by colliding old and new versions of the same people and locations, and in terms of sheer construction, you can see the effort. Fine. But effort isn’t entertainment, and editing tricks don’t matter when the foundation is annoying.
The time-travel jokes themselves are the kind of thing that feel like they were written on a napkin by someone who just discovered irony. “Oh wow, it’s 2008, Bill Cosby is still beloved.” “Oh wow, people are laughing at homophobic jokes in The Hangover.” Yes, thank you, we understand time passes and culture changes.
(Also, The Hangover came out in June of 2009... so, they even got that wrong.)
The movie keeps stopping to congratulate itself for pointing out obvious things, and then it acts like it’s delivering some profound social commentary. It’s not. It’s a string of “remember this?” and “isn’t this weird now?” observations that feel like Twitter posts stretched into scenes.
There’s also that running obsession with Orbitz (because the movie needs a quirky fuel source for their RV time machine) and again, it’s just one more piece of wacky window dressing designed to make the movie feel “random” in that very internet-comedy way. Random is not automatically funny. Sometimes random is just… random.
The Back to the Future borrowing is especially maddening because it doesn’t build anything new out of it. It just points at it. It recreates the vibe without earning it.
If you’re going to play in that sandbox, you’re automatically inviting comparisons to movies that actually have charm, pacing, storytelling, characters you can root for, and jokes that land.
And if we’re talking time-travel comedies, all I could think about—because my brain was desperate for oxygen—was how much better the Bill & Ted movies are at this exact sort of thing. Those movies are silly, sure, but they’re also warm, and they’re built around a friendship you actually like spending time with.
This movie wants that same “two idiot buddies against the universe” energy, but it doesn’t understand that it only works if the idiots are lovable, or at least interesting. Here, they’re just exhausting.
And that’s what I kept coming back to: the movie’s sense of humor is basically the movie screaming, “Isn’t it funny that we’re doing this?” No. It isn’t. Not when I don’t care about these guys, not when the tone is smug, not when the entire thing feels like a private joke being performed at me rather than shared with me.
I know people who saw it at festivals and claimed the room was losing their minds, laughing nonstop. I believe them. I’ve seen crowds laugh at all kinds of things I don’t find funny. Comedy is subjective, sure.
But I also sat in a theater where only a handful of people were laughing, and I looked around and felt that familiar sensation: this is one of those movies that thinks it’s brilliant simply because it’s self-aware, and it thinks being meta automatically makes it smart. It doesn’t. It just makes it louder.
So yeah, Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie was torture for me. Not mildly annoying. Not “eh, it’s not my thing.” Actual, teeth-grinding torture.
It’s derivative of better mockumentaries, better time-travel movies, better buddy comedies, better prank-based projects, better everything. It’s a movie that treats irritation like a punchline and smugness like a personality.
If you already love the web series, if you already worship this particular cult of awkward, if you already think Matt Johnson’s brand of performative obnoxiousness is hilarious, then you’ll probably be delighted and you’ll tell me I’m dead inside. Fine.
But if you’re like me—if you want a comedy to actually contain comedy, if you want characters you don’t actively want to shove out of an RV at 88 miles per hour—then stay far, far away. - ⭐️
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