CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 3-6-26

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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, March 6th, 2026.

1) THE BRIDE!

I really wanted The Bride! to work. I like Maggie Gyllenhaal. I admired her first film as a director, The Lost Daughter. The cast here is phenomenal.

And the idea itself, revisiting Bride of Frankenstein and giving it a different perspective, maybe a feminist twist, maybe a modern reinterpretation of Mary Shelley’s ideas, sounds terrific on paper. That’s a great starting point.

Unfortunately, the result is the first huge disappointment of 2026 and easily one of the worst movies of the year so far.

Gyllenhaal’s film is a Gothic romance set in 1930s Chicago. Christian Bale plays Frank, essentially a variation on Frankenstein’s monster, who longs for companionship and asks a scientist, Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), to create a mate for him. They resurrect a murdered woman named Ida, played by Jessie Buckley, who becomes “the Bride.”

Once she’s brought to life, the two monsters fall into a strange relationship, eventually becoming fugitives on the run while police, mobsters, and various hangers-on chase them across a stylized Depression-era Chicago, New York, and elsewhere.

On paper, that could be a fascinating reworking of the myth.

In practice, it’s a chaotic, overstuffed mess of half-formed ideas smashed together into one of the most obnoxious movies I’ve seen in a long time.

The film opens with Jessie Buckley appearing as Mary Shelley in black-and-white footage, screaming and cackling about the story she “really wanted” to tell—a female perspective on the monster myth, a Bride who would reclaim agency and identity. Right away, the movie announces itself with the subtlety of a foghorn.

Buckley, in this introduction, is doing this bizarre performance that sounds like Helen Mirren if Rich Little were doing the impression. She’s bellowing, mugging, and then at one point literally announces, “Here comes the motherfucking Bride!” before the title card slams onto the screen.

Yeah, that’s the opening of the movie. And from that moment forward, you know you’re in trouble.

Buckley then shifts into playing Ida, a gangster moll in 1930s Chicago, except the character constantly flips between personalities, accents, and physical behaviors. Sometimes she’s Ida, sometimes she’s Mary Shelley, sometimes she’s something else entirely.

Is she possessed? Is she hallucinating? Is she experiencing some kind of split personality? The film never explains it. Instead, Buckley spends the entire movie doing this herky-jerky, body-twitching, accent-switching performance that becomes exhausting within the first five minutes.

It’s honestly one of the worst performances of the year. Loud, obnoxious, and so over-the-top that it becomes unintentionally funny. At times, it reminded me of Kristen Wiig’s old SNL character Sue, you know, the one who panics about surprise parties and thrashes around with manic physical comedy. Imagine that energy dropped into a Gothic monster movie, and you’ll get the idea.

And none of this is reined in, because Maggie Gyllenhaal as director seems incapable of controlling anything in the film. The performances run wild, the tone shifts constantly, and every single idea she’s ever had appears to be crammed into this movie.

Sometimes it’s a gangster picture set in Depression-era Chicago. Sometimes it’s a monster movie. Sometimes it’s a lovers-on-the-run story straight out of Bonnie and Clyde or Natural Born Killers. Sometimes it wants to be a musical.

Yes, there is actually a full musical number in the middle of the film where Frank and the Bride lead a crowd in a performance of “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” clearly meant as a tribute to Young Frankenstein. It’s poorly choreographed, badly edited, and so awkward that it feels like a parody of itself.

Christian Bale, meanwhile, is making these odd comedic choices as Frank. The monster is obsessed with old Hollywood musicals and movie stars, particularly a performer played by Jake Gyllenhaal. There are scenes where Frank wanders into movie theaters, dances around in top hats and tails, and waxes poetic about cinema.

None of this connects to anything else in the film. It’s just another idea tossed into the pile.

Peter Sarsgaard plays a detective pursuing the couple, with Penélope Cruz as his secretary, who’s actually doing all the investigative work. Cruz is completely wasted. Annette Bening is completely wasted.

Jake Gyllenhaal shows up for a while as an actor Frank idolizes. None of these characters are developed, because the movie keeps sprinting toward the next bizarre tonal shift.

And the film’s feminist themes (clearly something Gyllenhaal cares deeply about) are handled with all the nuance of a sledgehammer. The Bride repeatedly shouts “Me too!” during the final stretch of the movie, just in case the audience somehow missed the point.

The idea of the Bride becoming a symbol for a feminist uprising in 1930s Chicago briefly appears as a subplot, then disappears, then comes back again during a post-credit sequence.

It’s a potentially interesting idea, but like everything else in the film, it’s introduced and then abandoned.

Watching this movie, it becomes painfully obvious that Gyllenhaal saw Poor Things and wanted to make something in that vein—a story about female creation, autonomy, rebellion against patriarchal control.

The difference is that Yorgos Lanthimos understood exactly what he was doing. Poor Things is layered, smart, and tonally controlled. The Bride! feels like someone trying to imitate that kind of movie without understanding what made it work.

Visually and structurally, it also resembles Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux, and that is not a coincidence, since it shares the same cinematographer and composer. And like those films, it’s loud, chaotic, self-serious, idiotic, and embarrassingly empty.

About the only performer who emerges with any dignity intact is Jeannie Berlin, who plays Dr. Euphronious’ maid. She only has a handful of scenes, but she’s consistently interesting and grounded.

Berlin, the daughter of Elaine May, is a terrific actress and writer, and every time she appears, you’re reminded what a real performance looks like.

Otherwise, this movie is just a barrage of clichés and bad decisions. Horror clichés, gangster clichés, doomed-romance clichés, musical clichés, feminist allegory clichés, and they are all jammed together into a bloated, incoherent mess.

It’s loud. It’s obnoxious. It’s confused. And it’s anchored by a lead performance that’s almost impossible to tolerate.

What’s especially frustrating is that the source material is legendary. James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein from 1935 is one of the greatest horror films ever made. It’s witty, elegant, strange, and emotionally rich. To even mention this movie in the same breath is embarrassing.

Maggie Gyllenhaal said she wanted to “tell the truth” about the Bride. I have no idea what that truth is supposed to be, because the film buries whatever point it might have under layers of screaming, bullets, musical numbers, and half-baked ideas.

When all is said and done, The Bride! isn’t radical. It isn’t daring. It’s just a noisy, incoherent pile of unfinished thoughts masquerading as a bold reimagining.

It’s the biggest disappointment of the year so far and easily one of the worst movies of 2026. Avoid it at all costs. - ⭐️

2) HOPPERS

Pixar’s latest, Hoppers, is… fine.

And when you’re talking about Pixar, “fine” is kind of a letdown.

This animated sci-fi adventure, directed by Daniel Chong and written by Jesse Andrews, is about a 19-year-old animal lover named Mabel Tanaka who uses experimental “hopping” technology to transfer her consciousness into a lifelike robotic beaver in order to save a beloved forest glade from being bulldozed by a smarmy mayor.

It’s got a big ensemble cast (Piper Curda as Mabel, Bobby Moynihan as a dorky beaver monarch named King George, Jon Hamm as Mayor Jerry Generazzo, Kathy Najimy as the professor who invents the tech, Meryl Streep (!) as an Insect Queen) and it’s packed with action, environmental messaging, and animal politics.

On the Pixar scale? It lands squarely in the middle. It’s not as weak as the Cars movies, but it’s nowhere near the level of Toy Story, Wall-E, or even something like Elio, which was sharper and more emotionally satisfying. This one never quite gets there.

The setup is complicated—maybe needlessly so. Mabel, inspired by sweet childhood memories of her grandmother (voiced warmly by Karen Huie), grows up loving a local glade in Beaverton that’s home to a beaver colony.

When Mayor Jerry announces a freeway project that would wipe it out, she takes activism to the next level by hijacking her biology professor’s secret “Hoppers” program, which allows humans to project their minds into robotic animals. She hops into a robot beaver, goes rogue, and infiltrates the animal kingdom.

If that sounds a little like Avatar, don’t worry... the movie knows. There’s an actual meta joke acknowledging that this whole thing sounds like Avatar. But here’s the problem: just pointing out that you’re borrowing from Avatar doesn’t make it any less derivative.

And I happen to think the Avatar movies are bloated, humorless tech demos, so building your Pixar original on that framework isn’t exactly inspiring.

And it’s not just Avatar. We’ve seen animal allegories done better in Zootopia, in A Bug’s Life, in The Jungle Book, in Sing, and even in The Bad Guys. The idea of deconstructing animal society, creating monarchs and councils, and “pond rules” about survival, it’s all familiar territory.

Inside the glade, Mabel meets King George, voiced by Bobby Moynihan, who is easily one of the best things in the movie. He’s an optimistic, slightly clueless beaver monarch who loves ’80s pop rock and believes deeply in community.

Moynihan is terrific. There are a lot of SNL veterans in this cast (Moynihan, Melissa Villaseñor as a grumpy bear, Ego Nwodim as the Fish Queen, Vanessa Bayer as a giant shark assassin named Diane), and they really deliver.

The voice work across the board is strong. Dave Franco chews the scenery as Titus, the Insect King. Jon Hamm is clearly having a blast as the self-important mayor.

When the movie works, it’s because of those performances and some genuinely funny throwaway jokes. There’s a bit with two spiders arguing about a web arrow (“What is that?” “It’s an arrow, Todd.”) and the movie just cuts away. Stuff like that lands.

The back-and-forth between what animals “see” (fully animated faces and human speech) and what humans see (regular animals making normal animal noises) is consistently funny. That visual gag works every time.

There are also stretches of really solid action. The third act, when an evil robotic version of Mayor Jerry is created and nearly triggers a catastrophic brain-melting rally using weaponized audio trees, is surprisingly intense.

The animation goes big and creepy. Evil robot Jerry is genuinely unsettling in an over-the-top, almost horror-movie way. The wildfire sequence that follows has real stakes and some beautifully chaotic visuals.

But here’s where I get hung up.

The movie wants to take its environmental message very seriously. Save the glade. Protect the ponds. Stop human development from destroying fragile ecosystems. And that’s a great, sincere message.

But you can’t have birds flying a full-grown shark through the air to knock a car off a cliff in one scene and then expect me to treat your ecological realism as sacred in the next. That tonal inconsistency undercuts the sincerity. It turns something that could feel urgent into something that feels like a cartoon lecture with explosions.

And overall, despite the lively moments, I found my mind wandering. The story beats are predictable. The emotional arcs (Mabel reconciling with the mayor, learning that her anger blinded her, bridging the human-animal divide) are handled competently but without the depth we’ve come to expect from Pixar at its best.

Oddly enough, when it was all over, I kept thinking about Frogs, the 1972 grindhouse eco-horror cult movie with Ray Milland, where polluted nature literally fights back, and frogs basically run the show.

There’s a stretch in Hoppers where the amphibians are calling shots, and between the ecological revenge angle and the over-the-top animal retaliation, it felt like a kid-friendly animated riff on that weird drive-in classic. Which is not something I ever thought I’d say about a Pixar movie.

So where does that leave it?

Hoppers is entertaining. The voice work is excellent. The animation is often fun and occasionally striking. There are real laughs, and kids will probably have a good time with the chaos, the animals, and the action. You could certainly spend worse than an hour and forty-five minutes in a theater.

But don’t expect anything special. Don’t expect anything particularly original. And don’t expect classic Pixar. This is very far from classic Pixar. It's not bad. It’s just fine.

And I am recommending it, but not very enthusiastically. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️

3) DOLLY

So, here is the biggest surprise of 2026 so far...easily, and one of the best films of the year.

As a lifelong horror fan, I always appreciate it when modern filmmakers tip their blood-soaked hats to the movies that shaped my generation. When it’s done right, it’s not just homage, it’s a conversation with the past. When it’s done wrong, it’s cosplay with fake grit.

Rod Blackhurst’s outstanding Dolly (which he co-wrote and directed) is very clearly, unapologetically inspired by The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. And I mean clearly. Shot on Super 16mm, grainy, grimy, desaturated, with that faux-documentary, sun-baked backwoods aesthetic, it wants to live in that 1974 Tobe Hooper universe of sweat, rot, and terror.

It also pulls from the whole “video nasty” era of the late ’70s and early ’80s, you know, the kind of stuff you’d rent in 1987 from a dusty horror shelf and feel slightly guilty bringing home.

And here’s the thing: Dolly is actually a grand slam in that regard, and a truly great horror film.

The setup is simple, brutally simple, just like those old exploitation films. Macy (Fabianne Therese) and her boyfriend Chase (Seann William Scott) head into the Tennessee woods for a romantic hike. He’s planning to propose.

Instead, they stumble upon a clearing filled with hanging, filthy baby dolls — which, by the way, is one of those horror red flags where you immediately think, “Turn around. Leave. Go home.” But they don’t. Because it’s a horror movie.

They encounter Dolly (a towering, masked, non-verbal figure played by pro wrestler Max the Impaler) wearing a cracked porcelain doll face and radiating childlike menace. Chase gets taken out with a shovel in a nasty, brutal sequence (he's not dead, but he is basically left with no lower jaw), and Macy is abducted and hauled off to a rotting house in the woods where Dolly intends to raise her as her “child.”

What follows is chaptered, grindhouse survival horror. Macy is dressed in white, trapped in an oversized cradle, subjected to forced feedings, diaper changes, humiliations, and punishments. This is truly a grotesque parody of motherhood. It’s monstrous motherhood taken literally. And yes, it’s as uncomfortable as it sounds.

Now, let’s get this out of the way. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is one of the five greatest horror films ever made. Period. It is a masterpiece. It is grimy and relentless and feels like you stumbled onto something you weren’t supposed to see.

Marilyn Burns’ ordeal in that dinner table sequence is still one of the most harrowing things ever put on film. So if you’re going to evoke that, you better know what you’re doing.

A lot of filmmakers don’t.

The completely talentless Rob Zombie, for example, has spent his entire career trying to channel Tobe Hooper and utterly failing. He doesn’t understand what makes that style work.

It’s all surface noise with him. It’s shouting and ugliness without tension or atmosphere. Some of the worst horror movies I’ve ever seen have his name on them.

Blackhurst, however, completely understands the texture. There are sequences in Dolly that genuinely feel like lost ’70s exploitation footage. The 16mm photography works. The practical makeup effects (especially Dolly’s cracked porcelain mask) are terrific.

There’s a sequence involving a crib that’s genuinely nerve-jangling, another in which Dolly sews a severed ear back on, and the discovery of another "family" member in the house that is horrifying. The movie is only 84 minutes long, and it moves like a freight train. It’s loud, aggressive, sweaty, and mean in the way those movies were.

Max the Impaler (whom I know from the wrestling world) is an imposing, terrifying presence. Wrestling personas are all about physical storytelling, and that skill translates beautifully here.

Dolly barely speaks, but the body language, the looming physicality, the bizarre mix of childlike vulnerability and brute force is very unsettling. It works. It’s one of the movie’s biggest strengths.

The acting overall is outstanding, better than that of the grindhouse tradition. Seann William Scott knows exactly what movie he’s in. He plays it straight but with awareness and a keen sense of humor.

The absolutely terrific Fabianne Therese holds the center incredibly well as the survivor. Her final moments echo the final moments of Chain Saw beautifully. She completely carries the movie and, in fact, gives a horror performance that rivals some of the very best "Final Girl" roles ever.

The supporting performances are also stellar, particularly those of Ethan Suplee as a shockingly repellent character appropriately named Tobe (yeah...I love the joke), and the wonderfully amusing Russ Tiller a heavy metal loving forest ranger.

The film isn't just a loving and clever tribute to the B-movie/grindhouse world; it's also a potent and effective satire about family life, cruelty, and the terrible things we do to one another in honor of ancestry.

This movie will also make you think twice about proposing, getting married, and especially starting a family. It's filled with dark, twisted, and brilliant social commentary, without ever sacrificing the over-the-top joy of gory slasher mayhem.

And on that mayhem level, the practical gore works brilliantly. It’s nasty. It’s squishy. It’s in-your-face. And if you’re a fan of The Hills Have Eyes, Tourist Trap, Motel Hell, Wolf Creek, or even the better entries in the Wrong Turn series (movies that owe a blood debt to Hooper), you’ll recognize the lineage immediately.

Is it as good as Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Of course not. Nothing is. That movie is lightning in a bottle. But, this thing comes very, very close.

Dolly also doesn’t embarrass itself trying to stand next to it. It plays like a scrappy, enthusiastic descendant. It understands the grime. It understands the cruelty. It understands the grindhouse heartbeat, and it's also loaded with a virtuoso use of allegory and surprisingly deep ideas.

If you don’t like your horror loud, violent, grotesque, and soaked in backwoods insanity, stay away. This is not polite horror. This is sweat-and-blood horror. Oddly, it is also elevated horror, and that is the shocker here.

If you’re like me, and you grew up loving those grimy VHS-era exploitation shockers and you want to see a modern filmmaker spectacularly honor that spirit rather than misunderstand it... Then Dolly is a surprising treat.

It is also a legitimately exceptional horror movie, and one of the best films of the year so far. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

4) FOR WORSE

I really wanted to like this movie... I really did. This is the directorial debut of Amy Landecker, who has been a terrific actress for years. Consistently good. Always reliable. Sharp. Funny. Grounded.

And yes, for those of us here in Chicago, she’s the daughter of legendary radio DJ John “Records” Landecker, so there’s that built-in hometown rooting interest. I always pull for her. I like her. I think she’s terrific.

Which makes this a little painful.

For Worse is a "coming-of-late-age” romantic dramedy written, directed, produced by and starring Landecker. She plays Lauren, a newly divorced, newly sober mother navigating that midlife sucker punch when the marriage ends and the ex-husband has already moved on—with, of course, a much younger wellness influencer. Because of course he has.

Her ex, Chase (played by the always solid Paul Adelstein), is already living his best green-juice life while she’s still reeling from the emotional whiplash of mediation sessions and co-parenting logistics.

Trying to reboot her existence, Lauren signs up for an acting class. And honestly? The movie is at its best there. The acting class stuff is funny. Really funny. Gaby Hoffmann as the overly intense instructor absolutely nails every actor cliché in the book.

The breathing exercises, the emotional excavation, the “live your truth” intensity turned up to eleven, it’s all there, and it’s hilarious. Landecker has been around actors her whole life.

She knows the rhythms, the absurdities, the insecurities. Those scenes feel lived in and sharp and observational in a way that the rest of the movie doesn’t.

There’s a comfort and specificity there. You can feel that she knows this world, and Hoffmann is completely game, diving headfirst into the satire. Those early stretches have a nice bite to them.

They’re self-aware. They’re knowing. They feel like they’re building toward something honest about reinvention and performance—both onstage and in life. And then the rom-com machinery kicks in.

Lauren begins a fling with Sean, her much younger scene partner, played by Nico Hiraga. He’s charming, he’s hot, he’s sensitive in that Gen Z way. And the movie goes exactly where you think it’s going to go.

Older divorced woman. Younger hot guy. Insecurity. Misunderstandings. Ego bruises. Jealousy. The whole checklist. There’s nothing new here. We’ve seen this dynamic explored with more insight, more danger, more humor, and more honesty in a dozen other films.

The central set piece is a Gen Z wedding in Palm Springs, where Lauren and Sean head out into the desert for what becomes a chaotic, cringe-filled weekend. This is where the movie really slides into sitcom territory.

And I mean full-blown network sitcom territory. Broad gags. One-dimensional young people behaving like caricatures. Fish-out-of-water embarrassment stretched to the breaking point.

There are physical comedy bits. There are humiliations. There’s even an unglamorous bodily-fluid mishap during a hookup scene that’s meant to be brutally honest about aging bodies and sexual reality. I get what she’s going for (strip away the glossy fantasy and show the messy truth), but it plays more like a punchline than a revelation.

The wedding material has that flat, one-note sitcom feel. Everything feels slightly overpushed, slightly underdeveloped. Instead of sharp social observation, we get broad generational jokes. Instead of emotional depth, we get contrivances.

But then, Bradley Whitford shows up.

He plays Dave, the father of the bride, also divorced, also licking his wounds, also navigating the awkwardness of ex-spouses and cringey new partners.

Whitford, who in real life is Landecker’s husband, is a terrific actor. The guy can do anything. Comedy, drama, satire, political firestorms, heartbreak—you name it. And their chemistry is palpable. It’s real. It’s lived-in. Their scenes together are when the movie comes alive again.

Suddenly, there’s texture. Suddenly, there’s maturity. Suddenly, there’s an actual adult conversation happening onscreen. The movie feels grounded. You believe these two people. You believe their history even though they’ve just met. You feel the weight behind their jokes.

It’s frustrating because you can see the better movie lurking in those scenes.

Landecker the director does a solid job with actors. She’s clearly an actor’s director, but her direction of the material is unsure and choppy.

Tonally, it wobbles. It wants to be biting and honest, but it keeps retreating into easy jokes and formula. It feels like a sitcom script stretched into a feature film instead of a film screenplay that demands cinematic storytelling.

I admire the ambition. I appreciate the Chicago connection. I genuinely like Amy Landecker and think she’s a talented performer. The acting-class material shows real promise. The scenes with Whitford hint at a richer, more mature movie.

But the film can’t overcome its reliance on rom-com clichés, its sitcom-level wedding chaos, and a screenplay that feels undercooked. It pains me to say this because I was rooting for it. But I can’t recommend For Worse. - ⭐️⭐️

5) HEEL

Heel is a truly fascinating movie, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s one of the most interesting things I’ve seen in a long time. Now, is it fully successful? No. Some things work, some things don’t.

But when you’ve got a premise this confrontational, a script this weird and avant-garde, and a cast this ridiculously good committing to the bit with absolute seriousness, you’re already in territory that’s worth exploring if you’re any kind of adventurous moviegoer.

Here’s the setup. A 19-year-old criminal named Tommy, played by the terrific Anson Boon, lives in that modern-day nightmare zone of drugs, petty crime, violence, ego, and the need to document it all.

He’s running wild, getting loaded, making terrible choices, and then recording those choices like they’re trophies. It’s not just that he’s self-destructive, it’s that he’s broadcasting the self-destruction.

And one night, after a bender, he gets separated from his friends and wakes up chained in the basement of a quiet, isolated house.

His captors are a married couple: Chris, played by Stephen Graham, and Kathryn, played by Andrea Riseborough. They’ve also got a son, Jonathan, played by Kit Rakusen, who’s quiet in that unnerving way where you can’t tell if he’s terrified, complicit, or already damaged beyond repair.

The couple isn’t holding Tommy for ransom. That would be too simple. They’ve abducted him to “rehabilitate” him. To “reform” him. To turn him into a “good boy.” And the methods are not therapeutic.

This is DIY suburban psycho-reform. Rules, punishments, psychological games, forced compliance, humiliation, control.

So the movie becomes a battle of wills. Tommy, who’s used to being the predator out in the world, suddenly becomes prey in a home that looks normal on the outside.

That’s one of the film’s sharpest ideas: the banality of the setting versus the horror of what’s happening inside. It’s the nuclear family as a prison, the suburban home as a torture chamber with good manners.

And it’s not an accident that the producers here include Jerzy Skolimowski and Jeremy Thomas, a long-running director-producer duo who have been associated with strange, challenging, off-kilter work for decades.

This movie feels like it’s in the lineage of those kinds of unsettling, experimental thrillers where the premise is doing heavy lifting, yes, but the point is the discomfort. The point is the confrontation.

It even reminded me of The Shout, that bizarre 1978 experimental thriller Skolimowski directed and Thomas produced, where the whole vibe is “you are not safe in this reality and the rules are not the rules.”

And then you’ve got Jan Komasa directing. Komasa is a terrific filmmaker. Corpus Christi is a hell of a movie, and last year's Anniversary was one of the best films of 2025.

He has a knack for taking moral questions and making them feel like a pressure cooker. Heel is as uncomfortable as you can get, and I mean that as a compliment.

The closest comparison that kept popping into my head was Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan, which I love, where Samuel L. Jackson chains Christina Ricci to a radiator because he thinks he’s saving her from herself.

That movie is provocative and messy and loaded with moral complications. Heel plays in similar territory, but colder, more clinical, more nihilistic.

And it also echoes A Clockwork Orange at times, especially when it turns the social media element into something like forced conditioning. There are sequences where Tommy is confronted with the content he’s made, the persona he’s created, the violence he’s glorified, and you start asking, along with the movie, what the “lesson” is supposed to be.

Is this punishment? Is it salvation? Is it twisted love? Is it just control disguised as righteousness?

Stephen Graham is fantastic here. He can do anything, and in this, he’s terrifying because he’s calm. He’s not a raving lunatic. He’s a man who believes in what he’s doing. That’s always scarier.

Anson Boon is compelling because he’s forced to play layers: the swagger, the fear, the rage, the manipulation, the vulnerability. The movie keeps you watching him because you keep recalibrating who Tommy is, and whether he’s capable of change or just capable of adapting.

Andrea Riseborough is one of my favorite actresses in the world. If you haven’t seen her in To Leslie, you should, because it’s one of the best performances I’ve ever seen about alcoholism, full stop. She was Oscar-nominated for a reason.

Here, she’s cold and creepy and calculated, and yet she also seems like a victim of whatever rot lives inside this household. The only frustration I have is that she doesn’t get quite enough to do.

Her presence adds enormous depth and unsettling ambiguity, but I wanted more of her, more insight into Kathryn, more room for Riseborough to detonate the screen the way she can.

There’s also the inclusion of a character named Rina, a Macedonian refugee who cleans the estate, and that adds a whole other layer about class, culture, and perspective. Someone outside this family, outside this supposedly “civilized” suburban bubble, is witnessing pieces of this strange American nightmare.

The film throws a lot of ideas into the air, sometimes more than it can cleanly catch, and that’s where it occasionally gets heavy-handed or symbolic in ways that don’t fully land as “real.” But honestly, I didn’t mind, because the overall effect is so consistently unsettling and thought-provoking.

The big question the movie leaves you with is brutal. How damaging is this lifestyle Tommy is living, this drugged-out, crime-filled, attention-hungry spiral of performative destruction? Is the freedom to live that way actually “better” than being chained by the neck in a cellar?

The movie doesn’t hand you an answer. It just forces you to sit with the possibility that the modern world might be so broken, so empty, so corrosive, that captivity starts to look like structure, like meaning, like an alternative to chaos. That’s a bleak, potent, nihilistic idea, and some people are going to reject it outright. I found it fascinating.

And the ending? I loved it. I know some people will find it unsatisfying because it refuses to explain everything, refuses to wrap it up, refuses to give you the clean catharsis of a traditional thriller resolution.

But that final moment is stellar. It’s the kind of ending you will talk about in the parking lot. It’s the kind of ending that makes you argue with whoever you saw it with, not about plot mechanics, but about what it means, and what it says about identity, control, and the cycle of violence.

So yes, Heel is off-putting. It’s dark. It’s weird. It’s twisted. It’s confrontational. It’s not going to be everybody’s idea of a good time. But it is memorable, and it is challenging, and it has a great cast doing fearless work inside a premise that feels genuinely original in how ugly and current it is.

I absolutely recommend Heel for the more adventurous filmgoer. If you like your movies safe and comforting and easily resolved, run the other way. If you like walking out of a theater feeling a little poisoned and a lot intrigued, this one’s for you. -⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

6) YOUNGBLOOD

As a lifelong hockey fan, I’m always interested when someone decides to make a movie about the sport. Hockey is my favorite sport, has been for most of my life, and I tend to watch hockey movies with a much more critical eye than most people.

The reason is simple: Hollywood almost never gets hockey right. There are exceptions, of course. Slap Shot is the gold standard; it's not just the best hockey movie ever made, but one of the greatest sports films of all time. Every once in a while, you get something that captures the game, the rhythm, the physicality, the culture.

Most of the time, though, hockey movies are pretty bad.

Which brings us to Youngblood. The original 1986 film starring Rob Lowe has a certain nostalgic reputation, but let’s be honest: it was never a good hockey movie. It was basically a vehicle for a young, shirtless Rob Lowe at the height of his ’80s popularity.

It had Patrick Swayze lending some gravitas, Cynthia Gibb as the love interest everyone had a crush on, and a few moments that stuck in the cultural memory.

The most famous thing about that movie, honestly, is that it features Keanu Reeves in his very first film role, playing a French Canadian goalie who delivers the unforgettable line “He is an animal” in a hilariously exaggerated accent.

Beyond that? It’s a very cliché sports movie that gets a lot about hockey wrong.

So when I heard they were remaking Youngblood, I was curious. Not because the original is sacred (it isn’t), but because there was actually room to do something interesting with the concept. And the new version does make some big changes.

This time around, Dean Youngblood is played by Ashton James as a Black hockey prodigy who joins the Hamilton Mustangs in Canada while chasing his dream of making the NHL. In the original, Rob Lowe’s Youngblood was a soft-spoken Canadian farm kid who had to learn how to toughen up and fight.

In this version, Dean already has the aggression. In fact, that’s his biggest problem. He’s volatile, arrogant, and constantly getting into trouble on the ice, largely because of the tough-love philosophy drilled into him by his father, played by Blair Underwood.

That’s a significant shift in character dynamics. The original story was about a kid learning to become tougher. This one is about a kid learning restraint.

And there are other differences. The family backstory is heavier. Dean is dealing with the loss of his mother. His father pushes him relentlessly, insisting that toughness and dominance are the only ways to survive in the world.

The infamous “puck bunny” character from the 1986 film (the woman who sleeps with the players) is gone entirely. Instead, the female characters are more grounded, including Jessie (Alexandra McDonald), the coach’s daughter who becomes Dean’s love interest.

But here’s the thing: despite those changes, the movie still ends up following the exact same sports movie template.

The performances are solid across the board. Ashton James is good in the lead role and, importantly, he looks completely believable on the ice. That’s one of the biggest improvements over the 1986 film.

Back then, body doubles did most of the hockey work for the actors. In this movie, the cast actually trained to play, and some of them are experienced skaters. The difference shows.

The hockey scenes are easily the best part of the movie. They’re fast, physical, and exciting, and they feel authentic. Some of the game sequences are genuinely terrific, among the better hockey action I’ve seen in a sports film.

And a lot of that has to do with the director, Hubert Davis. Davis made the outstanding documentary Black Ice a few years ago, which explored systemic racism in hockey and the NHL.

It’s a brilliant film (one of the best documentaries about the sport ever made), and it digs deeply into the complicated relationship between race and hockey culture.

That’s why I was particularly interested in this remake. Given that the lead character is now Black and the director made such an insightful film about racism in hockey, it seemed like this movie might tackle those issues head-on. But it doesn’t. And that’s the biggest disappointment here.

The film almost completely ignores the racial element of the story. Instead of confronting racism in hockey, the conflict revolves entirely around Dean’s temper and his father’s philosophy that violence equals respect.

It becomes just another sports movie about learning discipline, trusting your teammates, and growing up. Which is fine, but it’s also incredibly familiar.

Blair Underwood does what he can with a fairly cliché role as the demanding father who shows up at games and lectures his son about toughness.

Shawn Doyle is quite good as the coach, bringing some weight to the dialogue that is otherwise pretty standard sports-movie stuff. Alexandra McDonald is perfectly fine as the love interest, but the romance is predictable and never especially engaging.

And that’s really the movie’s biggest problem. It’s not bad. It’s just completely stuck in sports-movie cliché territory. The mentorship arc, the rivalry with the goon opponent, the big climactic game — you’ve seen it all before.

Which makes the whole thing feel like a missed opportunity.

There was a chance here to make a hockey movie that explored identity, race, and the culture of the sport in a meaningful way. Instead, the film mostly rehashes the 1986 version with a few character tweaks and much better hockey sequences.

And to be fair, it is a better film than the Rob Lowe original. But the bar for that is pretty low.

If you’re a huge hockey fan like I am, there are moments here you’ll enjoy. The on-ice action is strong and authentically staged. But outside of those sequences, it’s just another very familiar sports drama.

I didn’t hate it. It’s certainly not terrible.

But considering the talent involved and the potential built into the premise, Youngblood ends up feeling like a wasted opportunity; it's a remake that improves the hockey but doesn’t really improve the movie.

And that’s a shame. - ⭐️⭐️

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