CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 2-6-26
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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, February 6th, 2026.
Here we go again. I honestly never would have guessed back in 2024, when The Strangers: Chapter 1 limped into theaters, that it would take three full movies to tell a story that barely justified one.
And yet here we are in 2026 with The Strangers: Chapter 3, the “final” chapter of a trilogy that feels less like a planned narrative and more like a desperate attempt to stretch thin, recycled ideas until there’s absolutely nothing left but noise, blood, and tedium.
This movie picks up immediately after the end of Chapter 2. Maya, played by Madelaine Petsch, is the lone survivor after killing Pin-Up Girl. She’s wounded, traumatized, wandering through the Oregon woods, and still being hunted by the remaining masked killers (Scarecrow and Dollface) while the town of Venus, Oregon, closes ranks around them.
The big twist, such as it is, is that the killers don’t just want Maya dead. They want to recruit her. They want to break her psychologically and turn her into the next Stranger, complete with a mask, because apparently, the franchise now thinks that explaining everything and spelling out every idea makes it scarier. It doesn’t.
We also get more of the town’s “secret,” which is no secret at all, the moment Richard Brake shows up as Sheriff Rotter. Richard Brake has spent his entire career playing unhinged psychopaths and nightmare fuel villains.
The second he appears onscreen, you know exactly who he is and exactly what he’s going to do. Surprise: he’s corrupt, complicit, and deeply involved in protecting his killer son. This isn’t tension. This is casting shorthand, doing all the work the script refuses to do.
The movie inexplicably opens with a flashback set three years earlier at the same roadside motel where victims always check into Room 24. Someone knocks. Someone asks a question. Someone dies. It’s pointless, redundant, and adds absolutely nothing except runtime.
Then, just to make sure we really understand what we’re watching, the film slams us with a title card definition of “serial killer,” complete with the word “strangers” emphasized, as if the audience wandered in without knowing which franchise they bought a ticket for.
From there, the movie constantly jumps back and forth in time, delivering clunky, unnecessary flashbacks explaining the childhoods and origins of the masked killers.
We see how Scarecrow killed someone as a child, how his sheriff father covered it up, how the group formed, and how Dollface was recruited.
None of it is interesting. None of it is frightening. And all of it destroys what little mystery this series ever had. The single most effective thing about the original The Strangers (and I use “effective” loosely) was the anonymity of the killers. They were terrifying because they had no backstory.
This movie not only gives them backstory, but it also underlines it, highlights it, and beats you over the head with it.
The irony here is painful. These movies exist because of the 2006 French film Them, one of the most genuinely terrifying home invasion movies ever made. Tight, brutal, and relentless, Them runs under 80 minutes and never wastes a frame.
The original 2008 The Strangers was essentially an uncredited American knockoff of that film, and everything since has been diminishing returns.
Now, with Chapter 3, we’re so far removed from the primal fear of home invasion that the movie has become a sloppy small-town conspiracy horror knockoff, vaguely echoing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre without any of its intensity, grit, or originality.
To be fair—and this is important—Renny Harlin knows how to direct. He’s an enormously talented craftsman. He can stage action, build slow-burn tension, and cut scenes with real technical skill.
There are moments here, particularly early on with Maya trapped in a car with the sheriff, where the pacing and editing briefly suggest a better movie struggling to get out. But technique can’t save a script this dumb.
It’s like watching a world-class chef forced to cook with spoiled ingredients.
The kills are plentiful and bloody. Scarecrow loves his axe, and you will see it slammed into bodies again and again and again. There’s gore, there’s brutality, but there’s no impact.
Violence without suspense is just noise. Even the Winnebago sequence involving Maya’s sister, which is nicely shot and competently staged, ends with a pointless vehicle crash that exists solely because someone thought flipping a camper would look cool.
At one point, Maya’s sister mutters that she could really use a Xanax, and honestly, that was the most relatable line in the entire movie.
Madelaine Petsch does what she can. She has a strong screen presence and communicates trauma effectively without dialogue. Unfortunately, she’s trapped in a one-note role inside a movie that mistakes misery for depth.
Everyone else is either underwritten, wasted, or cartoonishly evil. There is no suspense, no dread, and certainly no fear.
By the time the movie starts, ironically, blasting “Crazy on You” by Heart, followed later by “Nights in White Satin” by The Moody Blues, I wasn’t thinking about the characters or the story. I was wondering who approved the music licensing for this nonsense.
When your horror movie has me thinking about record label decisions instead of what’s happening onscreen, something has gone very wrong.
Despite being only 91 minutes long, The Strangers: Chapter 3 feels endless. It’s boring, repetitive, overexplained, and aggressively pointless. It even leaves the door open for yet another sequel with a final lingering shot involving the Scarecrow mask.
Judging by the fact that I saw this on opening night with exactly two other people in the theater (and no advance press screenings, no critical push, nothing), I sincerely doubt anyone will be clamoring for more.
This is the third chapter of a story that never needed to exist, following two previous chapters that added nothing to a franchise that itself was built on a ripoff.
It’s one of the worst movies of 2026, a complete waste of time, and a depressing reminder of how far Renny Harlin has drifted from the days when he was making genuinely exciting genre films.
Skip this. Watch Them instead. And maybe keep some Xanax handy—just in case. - ⭐️
The Moment is one of those movies that makes you suddenly and painfully aware of how old you are. I'm a 60-year-old, white, classic rock fan, and I can say without hesitation that I am very clearly not the target audience for this film.
And that matters here, because The Moment is so deeply rooted in a very specific pop-cultural micro-era that if you weren’t plugged into it at the exact right time, you’re basically watching from another planet.
I am aware of Charli XCX. I’ve seen her pop up in various places. I liked her appearances on Saturday Night Live. I thought she was funny and game. I’ve listened to some of her music, and it does absolutely nothing for me.
I was not caught up in what was apparently the massive, inescapable cultural phenomenon known as “Brat Summer” in 2024. To hear this movie tell it, you couldn’t walk five feet without bumping into Brat, hearing Brat, seeing Brat, or being told how culturally seismic Brat was.
That may have been true for a certain demographic. It was not true for a middle-aged white guy from Chicago who was busy watching movies, listening to old records, and doing his job.
So right away, I’m coming into The Moment at a disadvantage.
That said, I love music documentaries. I love behind-the-scenes looks at musicians, especially when the artists are interesting, self-aware, or genuinely talented in ways that translate beyond their fanbase.
I also love mockumentaries when they’re done right. Rock mockumentaries have a long history, and the gold standard remains This Is Spinal Tap, which is still untouchable.
Nothing has ever come close to that movie, and frankly, nothing ever will. The Moment isn’t just worse than Spinal Tap. It’s not even playing the same sport.
This movie is a mockumentary built around a fictionalized version of Charli XCX preparing for her first headlining arena tour, blending real footage from the actual 2024 tour with a scripted, behind-the-scenes narrative about creative control, fame, corporate pressure, and the exhausting machinery of modern pop stardom.
On paper, that’s a solid idea. There is plenty to satirize in the world of pop music in 2024. Endless Zoom calls. Brand partnerships. Product placement. Social media performance as identity. The pressure to remain relevant for five minutes longer.
Unfortunately, The Moment never quite knows what it wants to be.
It’s tonally confused, structurally sloppy, and wildly uneven. It wants to be a sharp satire, but it rarely commits. It wants to be an honest self-examination, but it keeps pulling its punches. It wants to feel chaotic and manic, but mostly it just feels unfocused.
The movie is loaded with ideas, and almost all of them are half-baked. Scenes begin, gesture at something interesting, and then move on before anything lands.
Charli XCX herself is a compelling screen presence in short bursts, but she cannot carry an entire feature film, and this movie makes the mistake of asking her to do exactly that. She’s playing a heightened version of herself, but the character never becomes fully dimensional.
There’s a lot of frantic energy, a lot of running around, a lot of shouting about artistic integrity versus corporate demands, but very little emotional grounding. By the time the movie hits its second half, it becomes a real slog.
There are bright spots. Rosanna Arquette is always welcome, and it’s genuinely nice to see her back on screen. She does what she can as a ruthless label executive trying to keep the “Brat” machine running indefinitely, and she brings some bite to material that desperately needs it.
There are also a few amusing cameos, including Rachel Sennott, who continues to be one of the most reliably funny and interesting young actors working right now, and appearances by Kylie Jenner and others that will probably delight fans.
There are even a couple of decent jokes, including some fun digs at Joaquin Phoenix’s I’m Still Here, which remains one of the most misguided pseudo-mockumentaries ever made. Those moments got a chuckle out of me.
But without question, the best thing in this movie is Alexander Skarsgård. He plays Johannes, a pompous, tasteless, wildly confident director hired to turn Charli’s raw aesthetic into a sanitized, corporate concert film.
Skarsgård clearly understands that the script is ridiculous, and he leans into it hard. He’s having fun. He’s sharp. He’s fearless. And he generates nearly every genuine laugh in the movie.
Right now, Skarsgård is on a roll between this, Pillion, and his spectacular hosting gig on SNL, and he completely walks away with this film.
The problem is that one great performance cannot save a movie that doesn’t work. The Moment drags. It repeats itself. It confuses noise for insight. And it never fully commits to being either a real documentary or a fully realized mockumentary.
It gestures toward smarter films, including Private Parts, which handled fame, self-mythology, and media culture with far more clarity and intelligence, but it never comes close to matching them.
By the time it limps to its conclusion, the movie feels exhausted by its own premise.
If you are a huge Charli XCX fan, none of this will matter. You’re going to see this movie, and you’ll probably enjoy being immersed in that world again. If you lived through Brat Summer as a defining cultural experience, this will likely resonate in ways it simply cannot for me.
But if you’re not already invested in Charli XCX, if you’re just looking for a clever, well-constructed mockumentary or a sharp satire about fame and pop culture, this isn’t it.
I’m clearly about forty years too old for this movie, and The Moment does absolutely nothing to bridge that gap. It’s a misfire, a mess, and ultimately something I can’t recommend.
At the end of the day, I would rather have just stayed at home... and listened to some Sabbath. - ⭐️1/2
It’s honestly hard to describe just how idiotic Dracula: A Love Tale really is, but I’ll give it my best shot. And to do that, we have to start with Luc Besson, who, in my opinion, is one of the most overrated and consistently awful filmmakers of the past forty years.
A director whose reputation somehow continues to survive despite a filmography loaded with movies that I consider among the worst ever made.
Besson burst onto the scene in the mid-’80s with Subway, a flashy, neon-soaked, music-video-style exercise in empty cool. He followed that with The Big Blue, then hit it big with La Femme Nikita, which people still defend for reasons I cannot comprehend.
From there it was one misfire after another: Leon: The Professional, an extraordinarily overrated film saved only by Natalie Portman’s terrific child performance; The Fifth Element, which I consider one of the worst movies ever made; The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, another near-unwatchable disaster. And he never stopped.
Lucy, The Family, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Dogman. Visually noisy, narratively incoherent, emotionally empty movies, all of them.
So when I heard Luc Besson was tackling Dracula, I knew exactly what was coming. And somehow, Dracula: A Love Tale managed to be even worse than I expected.
This is a very loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, filtered through Besson’s bloated sense of style and his inability to tell a coherent story.
The film opens in 15th-century Wallachia, where Prince Vladimir returns from battle to discover his beloved wife Elisabeta is dead. In his grief, he renounces God and is cursed with immortality, becoming Dracula.
From there, the movie follows him across four hundred years as he searches obsessively for her reincarnation, eventually discovering her as Mina in 19th-century Paris.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because the first half of this movie blatantly rips off Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992. And I don’t mean inspiration. I mean outright theft.
The production design, the costumes, the look of the aged Dracula when Jonathan Harker arrives at the castle—it’s all lifted directly from Coppola’s film. Even the structure of the early scenes mirrors that version almost beat for beat.
Danny Elfman, a composer I generally love, completely embarrasses himself here as well. His score not only recycles his own earlier work, but openly rips off Wojciech Kilar’s magnificent score from Coppola’s Dracula. There are passages where it’s practically identical. It’s astonishingly lazy.
Caleb Landry Jones stars as Dracula, and he is awful. Every choice he makes is over-the-top, forced, and painfully self-conscious. The growling voice, the exaggerated physicality, the bizarre facial expressions—it’s all terrible.
Jones has an unusual face and can be effective in the right role, but here, buried under bad wigs and worse makeup, he is completely unbelievable as a romantic figure. The idea that this version of Dracula could seduce anyone is laughable.
Zoë Bleu, playing both Elisabeta and Mina, is even worse. There is absolutely no chemistry between her and Jones. The movie confuses physical aggression for passion, throwing the actors against walls and having them grab each other aggressively as a substitute for actual emotion.
It never works. The supposed eternal love at the heart of this story is completely absent.
Christoph Waltz plays an unnamed priest who essentially fills the Van Helsing role, and he is dreadful. Over the past few months, Waltz has appeared in two terrible adaptations of classic horror stories, and this is no exception.
He does the same showy bag-of-tricks performance he’s been recycling since Inglourious Basterds, and it’s exhausting. I now dread seeing his name in a cast list, because it almost guarantees a hammy, lazy performance.
The movie piles on one stupid idea after another. There are endless flashback montages showing Dracula wandering through history in powdered wigs and elaborate costumes, splashing himself with a magical perfume that hypnotizes women.
Yes, perfume. This idiotic invention (thankfully not from Stoker’s novel) has somehow become a staple of bad modern Dracula adaptations, and it’s used here as an excuse for costume changes and dance montages. It’s ridiculous.
Jonathan Harker spends an absurd amount of time sitting in Dracula’s castle listening to these idiotic stories, which no human being would tolerate for more than five minutes. And instead of the traditional vampire brides, the castle is populated by badly animated gargoyles.
These gargoyles later engage in WWE-style wrestling moves during the final siege, performing moonsaults and tossing soldiers around like it’s a bad video game cutscene. It is laugh-out-loud awful.
There is one extremely gory beheading sequence with blood spraying everywhere, which is the closest the movie comes to horror. Otherwise, it’s completely toothless. Not scary. Not romantic. Not interesting.
One of the most unintentionally funny moments comes early on, when Dracula keeps trying to kill himself after renouncing God. He jumps out of the castle window repeatedly, doesn’t die, limps back upstairs, and jumps again.
He does this at least ten times, and it gets funnier every single time. That’s the movie in a nutshell—trying desperately to be tragic and operatic, and ending up ridiculous.
By the time we reach the climax, with Romanian soldiers storming the castle, gargoyles body-slamming people, Waltz holding a stake to Jones’s chest, there is absolutely nothing at stake.
The story has been so badly told, so muddled, so relentlessly stupid, that you couldn’t care less how it ends.
Dracula: A Love Tale is hollow, empty, derivative, and often unintentionally hilarious. It is one of the very worst adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying something, considering how many bad Dracula movies exist.
I am including Dario Argento’s dreadful 3D version and the countless bargain-basement Dracula mashups of the ’60s and ’70s.
This movie has a solid budget, talented technicians, and a great composer wasting his time. What it doesn’t have is a functioning screenplay, believable performances, or a director who understands tone, storytelling, or restraint. It is a colossal waste of money, time, and source material.
One of the worst Dracula movies ever made. Avoid it at all costs. - ⭐️
Here’s the thing about Whistle: this is one of those movies that knows exactly what it is, knows exactly where it comes from, and, most importantly, knows exactly who it’s playing to. And that goes a long way with me, especially when it comes to horror.
The setup is simple, clean, and familiar in the best way. A group of high-school misfits stumble across an ancient Aztec death whistle, which is literally a cursed object that, when blown, summons manifestations of their own future deaths.
Not metaphorical future deaths. Not symbolic future deaths. Actual, physical, demonic, nightmarish versions of how they are going to die, coming straight for them.
Once the whistle is blown, the clock starts ticking, the body count rises, and the kids have to dig into the artifact’s history to see if there’s any way to stop what they’ve unleashed.
That’s it. No overcomplication. No fake mythology dump that bogs the thing down. Just a clean horror engine that starts running immediately and doesn’t really let up.
And yeah, let’s be honest, this movie is derivative. Hugely so. It owes a massive debt to A Nightmare on Elm Street, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream, Final Destination, The Ring, and, more recently, Talk to Me.
If you’ve seen those movies (and I have, many times), you’re going to recognize the DNA instantly. But the difference here is that Whistle isn’t pretending it invented anything. It wears its influences proudly, even playfully, and then focuses on execution.
Corin Hardy, who directed The Nun, knows how to stage scares. He understands pacing, atmosphere, and how to stretch tension just enough before snapping it. The movie is well shot, well cut, and (after a slightly shaky opening sequence with some not-great CGI) settles into a much more confident visual rhythm. Once the killing starts, the effects get better, the imagery gets nastier, and the movie really starts to have fun.
And make no mistake: this is a gorehound’s movie.
The kills are big. They’re imaginative. They’re mean. And a couple of them are legitimately shocking. There’s a death involving a smoker that basically fast-forwards through the horrors of lung cancer in a way that is grotesque, funny, and disturbing all at once.
There are factory deaths, industrial accidents, and a few moments that I absolutely will not spoil, but trust me, you will know them when they happen. These are Final Destination-level set pieces, and they’re executed with real craftsmanship in terms of makeup, practical effects, and timing.
The cast helps a lot. Dafne Keen is terrific and very likable, anchoring the movie with real presence. Sophie Nélisse, Sky Yang, Percy Hynes White—this is a strong, charismatic group of young actors who sell the ridiculousness without winking too hard at it.
There’s also a really nicely handled queer romance woven into the story that feels organic and earned, not performative or box-checking, which is refreshing.
Nick Frost shows up as a teacher named Mr. Craven, and he smokes Cronenberg cigarettes (get it?). Subtlety is not the point here, and I appreciated that. The movie is full of little horror-fan nods and visual winks that acknowledge the genre history without stopping dead to explain them.
And here’s another key thing: Whistle is 85 minutes long.
God bless it.
This movie does not overstay its welcome. It gets in, sets up its rules, delivers the goods, and gets out. No bloated mythology. No unnecessary third-act sermonizing. No two-hour runtime pretending there’s more depth here than there actually is. It knows it’s thin on theme, and it doesn’t pretend otherwise.
Is this movie going to change horror? No. Is it groundbreaking? Not even close. But it doesn’t need to be. What it is is a well-directed, well-acted, extremely gory, very entertaining throwback to high-school supernatural horror, with a killer central gimmick and some genuinely memorable death scenes.
If you’re a horror fan, a gorehound, or someone who just wants a tight, nasty, fun 85 minutes at the movies, Whistle absolutely delivers. I had a good time with it, and I recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
I should probably preface this by saying that I have never been a big Kevin James fan. I didn’t like The King of Queens, despite the fact that I love Leah Remini, and she was easily the best thing about that show, along with Jerry Stiller.
I’ve never cared for Kevin James’s stand-up, and his track record as a movie star has been, for me at least, consistently awful. His so-called breakout with Hitch is one of the worst romantic comedies of the 2000s.
I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry is unspeakably bad. The Dilemma was terrible. The wacky comedies like Zookeeper, Here Comes the Boom, Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and its sequel are unwatchable. His collaborations with Adam Sandler, including Pixels and the Grown Ups movies, are dreadful.
More recently, there was Home Team, a painfully forced Netflix comedy that tried very hard to be heartwarming and failed miserably, and that movie was directed by the same people who directed this one.
So yes, I went into Solo Mio with very little patience to begin with, and the movie did absolutely nothing to earn any goodwill from me.
Solo Mio is a romantic comedy-drama about Matt, played by Kevin James, a mild-mannered, well-meaning guy who plans the perfect destination wedding in Rome, only to be left at the altar when his fiancée disappears, leaving behind a letter and an engagement ring.
With a non-refundable honeymoon package already paid for, Matt decides to go on the trip alone, traveling through Italy on what was meant to be a couples-only “Two Become One” honeymoon tour.
Along the way, he encounters a group of meddling travelers who offer wildly contradictory advice, drinks too much, wallows in his sadness, and eventually meets a kind Italian woman who helps him rediscover his sense of purpose and maybe, just maybe, love again.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is. This story has been told a hundred times, from both male and female perspectives, and it has almost always been done better than it is here.
Italy, without question, is the best thing about this movie. The countryside is beautiful, the cities are colorful, and the locations are shot well enough to remind you why people fall in love with the idea of going there.
Unfortunately, the movie treats Italy like a postcard backdrop rather than a meaningful setting, and it never transcends that surface-level charm.
The film’s biggest mistake is how relentlessly it hammers home its central gag. Matt is alone on a couple’s honeymoon. We get it. We understand the discomfort, the loneliness, the awkwardness. But the movie insists on repeating this idea over and over and over again.
Shots of Kevin James sitting alone while couples laugh around him. Kevin James riding a tandem bicycle by himself. Kevin James staring sadly while other people kiss. Kevin James giving doe-eyed looks into the middle distance. Scene after scene after scene of the same joke, the same visual, the same emotional beat, all played as broadly and as sentimentally as possible.
The movie is aggressively nice in a way that becomes grating. It works overtime to make Matt seem lovable, wounded, and deserving of sympathy, but instead of earning that emotional connection, it just pushes it on you with manipulative music cues, soft lighting, and endless reaction shots. Kevin James plays the character as a mopey, sad-eyed lump, and I never found him charming or funny, just inert.
The supporting cast is largely wasted. Jonathan Roumie, Kim Coates, Alyson Hannigan, and others drift in and out, offering advice that’s meant to be amusingly contradictory, but none of it lands.
One of the most irritating elements of the movie is the character Marcello, played by Alessandro Carbonara, who delivers some of the supposed edgy or punchline-heavy moments. His performance is grating, unfunny, and wildly overused, making him one of the most annoying supporting characters I’ve seen this year.
The film is directed by the Kinnane Brothers, who also worked with Kevin James on Home Team, and once again, they lean hard into corniness. Everything is soft-edged, obvious, and drenched in sentiment.
This is an Angel Studios release, and while Solo Mio doesn’t hammer religious messaging as aggressively as some of their other films, the sentimental tone is unmistakable. The movie piles on sincerity and sweetness to such an extent that it becomes cloying and exhausting.
There is nothing new here. Nothing surprising (except for a couple of surprise cameos... which are not that surprising). No fresh perspective on heartbreak, recovery, or self-discovery. It’s a checklist of rom-com clichés executed without wit, insight, or genuine emotional truth.
Kevin James’s physicality is occasionally used for comedy, but those moments fall flat as well, relying on the same tired ideas about his size and awkwardness.
When all is said and done, Solo Mio is a corny, manipulative, by-the-numbers romantic comedy that mistakes repetition for emotion and sentimentality for depth.
It’s yet another Kevin James vehicle that fails to justify his presence at the center of a film, and it adds nothing to a genre that has already explored this territory far more effectively. - ⭐️1/2
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