CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 4-10-26

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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, April 10th, 2026.

1) YOU, ME & TUSCANY

There are bad romantic comedies, there are lazy romantic comedies, and then there is You, Me & Tuscany, which feels like it was assembled in a lab where the only directive was: “What is every single cliché we can possibly cram into 100 minutes and how quickly can we do it?” The answer, apparently, is all of them. Immediately. And repeatedly. With absolutely no shame.

The setup is the kind of thing you’ve seen a thousand times, and this movie doesn’t just follow that formula, it practically worships it. Anna, played by Halle Bailey, is a struggling young cook from New York who impulsively flies to Tuscany after meeting a charming Italian guy, Matteo.

Through a series of idiotic contrivances, she ends up squatting in his villa, pretending to be his fiancée when his family shows up, and (because of course) falls in love with Matteo’s handsome cousin Michael, played by Regé-Jean Page.

Lies pile up, misunderstandings ensue, there’s wine, there’s food, there’s a big climactic event, and you already know exactly how it ends within the first five minutes. If you’ve seen one romantic comedy (hell, if you’ve seen half of one) you’ve seen this movie.

But knowing where it’s going isn’t even the biggest problem. The problem is how aggressively, relentlessly awful the journey is.

Let’s start with the screenplay by Ryan Engle, who has previously specialized in loud, dumb action movies. Guess what, that limited skill set does not translate well to romantic comedy.

What you get here is a script that feels like it was generated by feeding a computer every bad rom-com ever made and asking it to spit out something even more generic. Every single beat, every single “twist,” every single line of dialogue is recycled, predictable, and painfully artificial.

Characters don’t talk like human beings, they narrate, they explain, they monologue to themselves like they’re in a bad acting class exercise.

And then there’s the voiceover. Oh my God, the voiceover. Anna explains everything. Constantly. Who she is, what she’s doing, what she’s feeling, because apparently the filmmakers don’t trust the audience to understand anything unless it’s spelled out in the most obnoxious way possible.

Halle Bailey, who showed some promise elsewhere, is just completely out of her depth here. The performance is one note: overly cute, overly perky, and completely devoid of any real character. Any time the movie asks her to do something beyond smiling and being adorable, it collapses.

And her character is one of the most grating, irritating leads I’ve seen in a long time. She lies constantly, makes terrible decisions, talks to herself like a lunatic, and somehow the movie expects you to root for her.

Then you’ve got Regé-Jean Page, who, look...he’s a very attractive guy. The movie knows it, the camera knows it, and that’s pretty much the extent of what they do with him. He’s shirtless, he’s wet, he’s brooding, he’s…not acting. He’s a walking cliché, and the film doesn’t even pretend otherwise.

The only person who seems to be trying at all is Lorenzo de Moor as Matteo, but he’s stuck playing a character so inconsistently written that it doesn’t matter. He starts off angry about Anna invading his life, then suddenly he’s fine with it because the plot demands it, and everything about his arc feels like it was rewritten five minutes before shooting.

And then you have the setting, which is Tuscany. Beautiful, gorgeous, postcard-perfect Tuscany. And even that can’t save this thing. It’s just window dressing for a parade of ethnic stereotypes so broad and so outdated that it’s almost shocking.

Every Italian character talks like they’re auditioning for a parody, there’s a wacky taxi driver who exists solely to dispense advice and eat sandwiches, there’s a wacky subplot involving a sexy plumber named Luigi (yes, Luigi, a plumber, because apparently his brother Mario wasn't available) and the whole thing feels like it was written by someone whose entire knowledge of Italy comes from watching bad sitcoms.

Speaking of ethnic stereotypes, Nia Vardalos (the writer/star of My Big Fat Greek Wedding) shows up at the beginning of the movie for one scene, and it feels like some symbolic "passing of the rom-com baton" to a new generation of creators of lousy, ethnically insulting farces about weddings.

The culinary angle is another disaster. Anna is supposed to be this passionate, talented chef, but neither the writing nor the performance sells it for a second. The cooking scenes are laughable.

She handles food like someone who has never held a knife before, or even stepped foot in a kitchen, and yet the movie treats her like she’s some kind of genius chef because she wipes a plate after putting food on it.

There is literally a moment where a seasoned restaurateur watches her do the most basic thing imaginable and reacts like he’s witnessing the second coming of Julia Child. It’s unintentionally hilarious.

And of course, because no cliché is left behind, we get the big final event, a food and wine festival, a kitchen crisis, a last-minute redemption, and all the lies coming to light in the most predictable way possible. You could write the ending yourself before the opening credits are over.

Oh, and yes: there’s a blooper reel. Because why not? After sitting through this thing, you are rewarded with outtakes of women laughing, flubbing lines, and making jokes about how attractive Regé-Jean Page is. It’s like the movie itself is admitting, “Yeah, we know this is garbage, but hey, look, everyone had fun!”

Look, I’m not the biggest romantic comedy guy in the world, but I do like a good one. When they’re done well, they can be charming, funny, even insightful. This is none of those things.

This is a painfully lazy, aggressively stupid, cliché-ridden mess that wastes a decent cast, insults your intelligence, and somehow manages to make one of the most beautiful places in the world feel boring.

You, Me & Tuscany is not just bad, it’s exhausting. It’s one of the worst moviegoing experiences I’ve had all year.

But hey…at least it had a blooper reel. - 1/2 star

2) FACES OF DEATH

For those of you old enough to remember the original Faces of Death from 1978 (and I am very much one of those people) you know exactly what kind of grimy, controversial, ridiculous piece of exploitation junk that thing was.

It wasn’t even really a movie in the traditional sense. It was a stitched-together collection of supposed “real” death footage, presented as some kind of documentary, which of course it wasn’t. Most of it was fake, cheaply staged nonsense, and yet it developed this massive reputation, especially during the VHS boom of the early and mid-‘80s.

This was peak “video nasty” territory. The kind of movie you couldn’t keep on the shelves at your local video store. The kind of movie you had to sneak behind the counter to rent if you were a teenager.

The kind of movie that people whispered about (“Is it real? Are those actual people dying?”) and of course, anybody with half a brain knew it wasn’t. It was exploitative garbage, but it had a reputation, and that reputation kept it alive.

So naturally, because we live in a world where every piece of IP, no matter how disreputable, must be dug up, dusted off, and repackaged…here we are with a 2026 version of Faces of Death.

And on paper (on paper) this actually sounds like it could be interesting.

The film follows Margot, played by Barbie Ferreira, who works as a content moderator for a TikTok/YouTube-style platform called Kino. Her job is to sift through endless streams of videos and flag anything that’s too violent or offensive.

Sex is fine, apparently, but violence is where they draw the line, which, by the way, is already kind of an interesting commentary if you want to dig into it.

Anyway, Margot starts noticing a series of videos that appear to be recreations of the infamous death scenes from the original Faces of Death.

And now we’re in meta territory, because of course we are...every movie now has to be meta in some way. So the question becomes: are these just elaborate recreations, or are they real murders being staged and uploaded for an audience that’s too desensitized to care?

That’s a good idea. That’s a really good idea.

You’ve got commentary there about social media, about content moderation, about the commodification of violence, about the blurred line between real and fake in the digital age, about how people consume this stuff endlessly on their phones.

That’s rich territory. That’s something you can really explore. That’s something you can really sink your teeth into.

And for about twenty minutes, the movie seems like it might actually do that. And then it just completely abandons it. Because what this movie ultimately becomes is just another stupid, by-the-numbers, blood-soaked slasher.

All of that setup (the commentary, the ideas, the potential satire, the psychological angle involving Margot’s past trauma with her sister, the ethical questions about the platform itself) all of it gets tossed aside so we can watch a bunch of repetitive, moronic kill sequences that aren’t even particularly inventive or scary.

It’s like the movie forgets what it wanted to be about.

Daniel Goldhaber, who co-wrote and directed this, clearly had something on his mind. There are flashes of it in the early going. You can see the influence of better films that actually tackle these ideas with intelligence and purpose.

But instead of following through on that, the film takes the easiest possible route and just turns into a generic slasher with a “look how edgy we are” coating.

And the irony (the big, glaring irony) is that this movie ends up being exactly the kind of empty, exploitative garbage that it seems to want to critique. It becomes the thing it’s supposed to be analyzing.

The cast is reasonably solid. Barbie Ferreira does what she can, but the character is thinly written and never develops in any meaningful way. Dacre Montgomery plays the killer, Arthur, and he’s given nothing interesting to do.

He’s just another bland, tech-savvy psycho with no real personality. He is also saddled with a terribly written (and seemingly endless) confession explaining his psychosis.

Jermaine Fowler, who I really like, shows up as the boss and is completely wasted. And yes, Charli XCX is in the movie (briefly, very briefly) so if you’re going in for that, you’ll get about two minutes and that’s it. Everybody here is better than the material.

And that’s kind of the story of the whole movie.

Because we’ve seen films tackle these themes before, and we’ve seen them do it better. Wes Craven was doing this kind of commentary decades ago. The Last House on the Left, A Nightmare on Elm Street...those movies understood the audience’s relationship with violence.

Michael Haneke’s Funny Games flat-out confronts the viewer and implicates you in what you’re watching. Red Rooms more recently explored the obsession with violent content in a way that was actually unsettling and thought-provoking.

Even Eli Roth’s first Hostel (and I know that’s not everybody’s cup of tea) had something to say about voyeurism and commodified violence.

And then there’s the obvious comparison: David Cronenberg’s Videodrome.

Now that is a masterpiece. A film that came out in 1983 (before cable was even widespread in a lot of places) and nailed the idea of being addicted to violent, deviant media. James Woods literally becomes part of the machine. The television consumes him. It’s grotesque, it’s brilliant, it’s prophetic.

This movie wants to be that. It wants to be Videodrome for the TikTok generation. But it doesn’t have the guts, the intelligence, or the follow-through to pull it off. Instead, it just devolves into noise and blood and stupidity.

And that’s the biggest disappointment. Because there is something here. There is a version of this movie that works. There is a version that really digs into how we consume violence, how platforms profit from it, how people become desensitized, how reality and performance blur together online.

But this isn’t that version.

This is just another forgettable reboot, another piece of recycled IP that takes a potentially interesting concept and flattens it into something generic and disposable.

So no, I can’t recommend Faces of Death.

If you’re curious about the original, go watch it as a piece of weird exploitation history. If you want a movie that actually says something about media, violence, and obsession, go watch Videodrome.

But this? This is just empty content about empty content. - ⭐️1/2

3) BEAST

There isn’t a single moment in Beast (not one frame, not one line of dialogue, not one plot turn) that you haven’t seen before if you’ve watched even a handful of sports movies in your life.

This is the definition of a comeback story. The washed-up champion. The broken family. The reluctant return. The grizzled trainer. The big, brutal final fight. It’s all here, laid out exactly the way you expect it, beat for beat, from the opening scene.

And yet…this thing works. Not because of the script (because the script is about as original as a photocopy of a photocopy) but because of how it’s made.

The story centers on Patton James, a once-legendary MMA champion who has left the cage behind and is now working as a commercial fisherman, living a quiet, miserable life, underpaid, disrespected, trying to hold things together with his pregnant wife and young daughter. Of course, that peace doesn’t last long.

His younger brother, a reckless wannabe fighter with a talent for bad decisions, gets tangled up in the fight world and ends up nearly killed by the current champion, Xavier Grau, who is a ruthless, unstoppable force who exists in this movie purely to be the guy you want to see get his face rearranged.

So what happens? Exactly what you think happens. Patton is pulled back into the cage for one last fight...to save his brother, to save his family, to redeem himself, to reclaim his legacy. You could write the rest of the movie yourself from there, and you’d probably be about 95 percent correct.

We get the estranged trainer, Sammy, played by Russell Crowe, who initially refuses to help because of past betrayal. We get the makeshift training team, including Sammy’s daughter stepping in as a trainer.

We get the training montages (oh yes, we get the montages) set to pounding music, with sweat and pain and determination. We get the tragedy in the middle of the film that sends Patton spiraling into booze and self-pity before he pulls himself together for the big fight.

Every single one of these elements is predictable. Every single one of them.

And yet, I’ll tell you this: I was into it.

Because director Tyler Atkins knows exactly what he’s doing. This is only his second feature, and he directs the hell out of this thing. He takes a screenplay that is, frankly, recycled from a dozen better movies and elevates it through pure craftsmanship.

The camera work is sharp, the pacing is tight, the sound design is fantastic (every punch lands with a thud that you feel in your chest) and the fight choreography is absolutely top-notch.

There are two standout sequences that really sell the movie. One is an underground fight staged in a warehouse, lit only by car headlights. It’s brutal, claustrophobic, and genuinely tense, with a raw, dangerous energy that makes it feel like anything could happen. It’s one of those sequences where you lean forward in your seat a little bit.

And then there’s the final fight. About 15 minutes of sustained, brutal, bloody, no-holds-barred action that is choreographed and edited beautifully. It’s violent, it’s intense, it’s occasionally over the top, but it’s exactly what you want from a movie like this. It delivers.

The cast helps a lot, too. Daniel MacPherson is very convincing as Patton, he is physically imposing, emotionally believable, and when he needs to turn on the intensity, he does it very well.

Russell Crowe, who also co-wrote the screenplay, is clearly having a good time as the grizzled trainer, and not surprisingly, he gets the best lines in the movie. His monologues, his speeches, the little bits of character detail, they all feel like they came straight from him, and they give the movie a little extra weight.

Luke Hemsworth is a blast as the slick, morally questionable MMA promoter, a guy who will do absolutely anything for money, including setting up illegal, potentially deadly fights. He’s charming, he’s smarmy, he’s funny, and he brings a nice bit of energy every time he shows up.

Not everything works. The writing for the wife character is pretty weak, and the performance doesn’t help much.

Her entire pregnancy is basically communicated by touching her stomach a lot, which is…not exactly nuanced storytelling. Some of the emotional beats feel forced, especially the mid-movie tragedy that exists mainly to justify another montage of drinking and brooding.

And yes, the clichés pile up. The montages, the speeches, the redemption arc...it's all very familiar. You’ve seen it all before, and you’ll know exactly where it’s going every step of the way.

But here’s the thing: sometimes execution matters more than originality. And Beast is executed really, really well.

This is a movie made by a filmmaker who understands rhythm, understands action, understands how to build a scene and pay it off. Tyler Atkins takes a very standard, very predictable story and turns it into something that is genuinely exciting to watch.

So yeah, the script is weak. Yeah, it’s derivative. Yeah, it’s basically every fight movie ever made rolled into one.

But it’s also well-acted, sharply directed, beautifully shot, and packed with some terrific fight sequences that make it worth your time.

If you like boxing movies, if you like MMA movies, if you like underdog stories where you know exactly what’s going to happen but you still want to see how it plays out, well, Beast delivers.

And more importantly, it announces Tyler Atkins as a director to keep an eye on. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️

4) HUNTING MATTHEW NICHOLS

Hunting Matthew Nichols is about as dreary, dull, and derivative as horror movies get.

And look, I know that sounds harsh right out of the gate, but sometimes there’s just no elegant way to ease into it. This is a movie that is so nakedly, so relentlessly, so completely indebted to The Blair Witch Project that it almost feels like a parody of a parody, except it’s not funny, it’s not clever, and it’s not scary.

It’s just there. Sitting there. Existing in that very specific found-footage/mockumentary space that so many filmmakers keep returning to as though The Blair Witch Project came out last week instead of twenty-seven years ago.

And by the way, The Blair Witch Project is still fresh. It still works. It still has atmosphere and mystery and that creeping sense of dread that most of these knockoffs never even come close to capturing.

So making a movie in 2026 that is this directly inspired by Blair Witch is about as fresh as leaving a gallon of milk out on the porch for four months.

That’s the level we’re dealing with here.

The setup is familiar to the point of exhaustion. Two teenagers, Matthew Nichols and Jordan Reimer, disappeared back in 2001 while filming a video project in the forests of Vancouver Island.

They vanished, their camcorder was recovered, and now, twenty-three years later, Matthew’s sister Tara, who is an aspiring filmmaker, thinks there may be new evidence suggesting her brother could still be alive.

So she assembles a crew and heads out to investigate what happened, retrace the boys’ steps, dig into local legends, and inevitably stumble into the same kind of danger that swallowed them up in the first place.

You’ve seen this movie before.

Not just because it owes everything to The Blair Witch Project, but because it also tries to piggyback off the endless stream of Netflix true-crime documentaries that people seem to inhale by the dozen now.

So it wants to be both things. It wants to be a found-footage forest horror movie and a satire or commentary on the polished, overproduced, overly serious true-crime doc format that has become its own mini-industry. And if that sounds like maybe there could be something there, yeah, there could be.

But there isn’t. Because the movie never does anything fresh with either format.

When it’s doing the documentary stuff, it uses all the same tricks, the interviews, solemn narration, archival material, fake gravitas, the same sort of visual language and color grading and pseudo-investigative structure that you’ve seen in about eight thousand streaming docs.

And when it shifts into found footage, it becomes just another trudging-through-the-woods, people-whispering-in-the-dark, “did you hear that?” movie that has no new angle, no personality, and no real scares. It just kind of sits there and drips grayness at you.

And that’s really the word for this movie: gray. Not just literally, because yes, it’s set in rainy, gloomy Vancouver Island terrain and everything looks wet and miserable, but spiritually gray. Creatively gray.

There’s no spark to it. No urgency. No energy. No sense that anybody involved found a way into this material that would justify making yet another one of these.

The film stars Miranda MacDougall as Tara Nichols, the sister at the center of the investigation, and she does the best she can. She’s got some screen presence, and she at least seems to understand that she’s supposed to be carrying the emotional weight of the piece.

But there’s only so much you can do when the material is this thin and this familiar. Markian Tarasiuk, who co-wrote, directed, and stars in the movie as himself, and Ryan Alexander McDonald, also playing himself, are part of the crew documenting the search, and none of it ever really gels.

The self-aware angle doesn’t work, the commentary doesn’t work, and the interplay among the crew never becomes interesting enough to make you care whether any of them make it out of the woods. That’s kind of the fatal flaw here. You just don’t care.

You don’t care about the mystery. You don’t care about the missing brother. You don’t care about the crew. You don’t care about the mythology. There’s supposedly some satanic cult element, some woodland evil, some cursed footage, some dark local legend involving the disappearance, and none of it lands with any force at all.

The “cursed” final stretch, which is clearly supposed to be the big payoff, just sort of arrives out of nowhere and feels desperate rather than earned. It’s like the movie realizes it has to become a horror film eventually and scrambles to throw something sinister at the screen in the last twenty minutes.

But by then, it’s too late.

There are no real scares here. No memorable set pieces. No atmosphere beyond the generic “it’s wet and gloomy in the woods” vibe. No formal cleverness. No tonal freshness.

Nothing about the way it’s made stands out. And for a movie that is supposedly trying to comment on both found-footage horror and true-crime obsession, it has almost nothing to say about either.

That’s the frustrating part. If you’re going to make something this derivative, at least bring some insight to it. At least twist the formula in a way that feels specific. At least have a point of view. This movie doesn’t. It just borrows. It lifts. It echoes. It imitates. And badly.

Now, is it the worst movie I’ve seen this year? No. Not even close. It's not even the worst movie I've seen this week!

I’ve seen more offensive movies, more incompetent movies, more aggressively terrible movies. This isn’t one of those. It’s not a disaster on that level. It's worse in a different way. It's boring. And boring is death in horror.

You can forgive a horror movie for being silly, or messy, or too ambitious, or even kind of ridiculous if it has energy, if it has scares, if it has some gonzo quality that makes it worth watching.

Hunting Matthew Nichols has none of that. It is a slog. A gray, soggy, tedious slog that feels like it was assembled out of leftover parts from better movies and streaming docs. So no, I absolutely cannot recommend Hunting Matthew Nichols.

If you want found-footage dread, go watch The Blair Witch Project again. If you want a satire of true-crime obsession, there are sharper and smarter versions of that too.

This one just sits in the middle, doing neither well, and droning on until you start checking your watch and wondering how much longer you have to stay lost in the woods with it. - ⭐️1/2

5) EXIT 8

Well, at least the rats were cool.

That’s probably the cleanest, simplest, most accurate way I can sum up how I felt about Exit 8, a Japanese psychological horror film that became a sensation overseas and is based on the 2023 video game The Exit 8, which I have never played because, as I have now established many, many times in these reviews, I do not play video games.

I have never been a video game person. The only home video game system I ever owned was Pong in the 1970s, and the last game I played with anything resembling regularity was Galaga in high school in like 1981 or 1982. That’s it. That’s my history.

So when it comes to modern gaming, gaming mythology, game mechanics, or why people get emotionally invested in wandering around subway tunnels looking for anomalies, I am not the guy.

But I can talk about the movie.

And the movie is interesting in concept, frustrating in execution, technically impressive in spots, and ultimately another example of a film that never quite escapes the fact that it is based on a video game gimmick.

Now, the gimmick itself is actually kind of clever. The original game, from what I understand, traps you in this underground subway corridor, and the whole point is that you have to pay attention. If there is an anomaly, you turn back. If there is no anomaly, you keep moving forward. If you miss something, you get sent back to Exit 0 and have to start all over again.

So it’s about memory, repetition, awareness, and that incredibly specific kind of aggravation that games seem to thrive on now, where the whole appeal is apparently that they frustrate the hell out of you until you get better at them.

And to make a movie out of that? That’s a weird idea. But then again, they’ve made movies out of everything at this point. I’m shocked there hasn’t been a three-hour epic called Pong yet.

The film, directed by Genki Kawamura, starts out in a way that made my heart sink a little bit, because I didn’t know anything about it before the screening. I try not to know much going in. But right before it started, someone in the screening room mentioned, “Oh yeah, this is based on a video game,” and immediately I thought, “Well, here we go.” Because let’s be honest, the track record of movies based on video games is overwhelmingly terrible.

So the lights go down, and the first several minutes are done in one long, subjective point-of-view take. We are seeing only what the main character sees, hearing what he hears, moving through the subway with him.

And for a minute I thought, oh no, is this going to be another Hardcore Henry situation? Is this going to be one of those gimmick movies where the entire thing is told from a first-person perspective and the trick wears off after fifteen minutes and then you’ve still got an hour left to go?

Thankfully, it doesn’t stay there. It opens up a little bit. And Kawamura, to his credit, has some real visual skill. There are some really effective long takes in this movie, and while the one-take “oner” has become kind of the annoying hipster default now, the camera movement here is actually pretty good.

It glides well, the editing is sharp, and there is a real attempt to make the corridor feel cinematic even when what you are watching is, essentially, a guy walking through the same hallway over and over again.

So the movie takes the basic game mechanic and then adds subtext. The main character, known as The Lost Man, gets a phone call from his girlfriend telling him she is pregnant. He panics. He has an asthma attack.

He is already in a state of emotional paralysis because, right before all of this, he witnessed a man on the subway berating a mother because her baby was crying, and he did nothing. He just stood there, listened to his music, and let it happen.

So now, trapped in this looping subway corridor, he is also trapped in guilt. Guilt over not helping. Guilt over the possibility of fatherhood. Guilt over responsibility. Guilt over making the wrong choice. That is the psychological engine of the movie, and it is not subtle. Not remotely.

In fact, it is slammed into your face every chance the movie gets. Crying babies on the soundtrack. Images of childhood. Posters with eyes that follow him. The Möbius-strip symbolism. The endless loop as metaphor for anxiety, guilt, paralysis, adulthood, fatherhood. It’s all very obvious.

And obvious would be fine if it led somewhere deeper. But it doesn’t.

The movie splits into chapters and begins giving points of view to other characters, including The Walking Man and a little boy who may or may not represent the child The Lost Man could someday have.

And the moment it starts doing that, the film loses what little psychological integrity it has. Because now it’s not really about this one guy’s guilt anymore. Now it’s trying to incorporate more elements from the video game, more playable perspectives, more lore, more symbolic echoes, and instead of becoming richer, it just becomes more scattered.

It starts to feel like the screenplay is trying desperately to turn game mechanics into emotional narrative, and it never really works.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t effective moments. There are. The corridor itself is creepy. The Walking Man is unnerving.

There are some nice horror touches, like blood pouring down from the ceiling, the subtle changes in the hallway, the weird tension of noticing that something is just slightly off. The film has atmosphere. It has craft. It knows how to create dread in small spaces.

And then there are the rats.

At one point, the lights go out in the tunnel, and suddenly these rats come barreling out of the vents, but they have human body parts (human ears, human mouths, human teeth, human noses) and they’re shrieking like babies. It is bizarre, grotesque, and genuinely memorable.

That sequence is fantastic. It’s the one point in the movie where I really sat up and thought, okay, now this is doing something. This is weird and upsetting and fun in a very specific horror-movie way.

But the problem is, outside of those moments, the movie never becomes more than what it is at its core: a video game adaptation trying to pretend it has deeper ideas than it actually does.

The Lost Man is afraid of becoming a father. That’s the movie. He feels guilty. That guilt manifests as anomalies in a hallway. He learns, by the end, that maybe when a guy is yelling at a woman with a crying baby on the subway, you should say something. That’s the big lesson. That’s the giant emotional revelation.

And while there’s nothing wrong with that as an idea, the film treats it like this profound psychological odyssey when really it’s pretty thin.

This also makes for an odd little pairing with Undertone, that other horror-adjacent movie recently where pregnancy and the anxiety around whether to have a child or not becomes wrapped up in punishment and dread and heavy-handed symbolism.

So apparently we’re in a mini-cycle now of horror movies where reproductive anxiety is being literalized into supernatural torment. Great. Just what everybody needed.

What I kept thinking while watching Exit 8 was that it reminded me a little of Silent Hill, which is still the only video game movie I’ve ever kind of liked. I never played Silent Hill either, and when I watched that movie, I had no idea what the hell was going on most of the time. But it was creepy. It had atmosphere. It felt like a nightmare. It didn’t make much sense, but it worked as a horror experience.

Exit 8 has some of that. Some. But not enough.

It’s technically well made. The cast does fine. The direction has style. The tunnel becomes oppressive in the right ways. There are some really effective visual ideas. But every time it tries to become profound, it falls flat.

Every time it tries to be about more than just a guy stuck in a looping hallway, it reveals how simplistic the underlying concept really is.

So yeah, at least the rats were cool.

Beyond that, there’s not much to recommend here.

It never rises above being exactly what it is: another movie where, as you’re watching it, you completely understand why it was a video game in the first place, and why maybe it should have stayed one. - ⭐️⭐️

6) HAMLET

There have been many, many film versions of Hamlet, and I mean many. It’s one of those plays that filmmakers just keep going back to, like it’s some kind of cinematic Mount Everest they feel compelled to climb over and over again.

You’ve got the 1948 Laurence Olivier version, which for a lot of people is still the gold standard. You’ve got Tony Richardson’s take with Nicol Williamson in 1969, Franco Zeffirelli’s 1990 version with Mel Gibson, Michael Almereyda’s modern Ethan Hawke version in 2000, and then of course Kenneth Branagh's four-hour, no-cuts, ego-trip extravaganza where he basically decided, “I will do the entire play and you will sit there and watch all of it.”

And now we get another one. This time it’s Aneil Karia directing, Riz Ahmed starring, and the whole thing reimagined in a contemporary London setting within a wealthy South Asian family and corporate empire.

And I gotta tell you…to say this version of Hamlet is a disaster is actually kind of being generous.

Now look, I am not one of those people who thinks Shakespeare should be locked in a glass case and never touched. I like reinterpretations. I like modernizations. I like when filmmakers take risks with classic material.

Some of the best adaptations of Shakespeare have done exactly that: twisting the setting, updating the themes, recontextualizing the story in ways that make it feel immediate and alive.

But here’s the thing: those adaptations still understand the core of what makes the play work. This one doesn’t.

The basic story is still there. Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) returns home after his father’s death, discovers that his mother has married his uncle Claudius, and then is visited by his father’s ghost, who reveals that he was murdered. Revenge is demanded, madness sets in, relationships unravel, and tragedy follows. All the bones are there.

But what Michael Lesslie’s script does to that material in terms of cuts and alterations is, frankly, unforgivable.

I understand that Hamlet is long. Everybody understands that. That’s why cuts are inevitable unless you’re Branagh and you’ve got four hours and an ego the size of Denmark. But the choices here (the things that are removed, the characters that are sidelined) are baffling.

Especially when it comes to Ophelia.

Morfydd Clark is a very good actress. We know this. She’s proven it. And here, she gets almost nothing to do. Ophelia is one of the most important, tragic figures in the play, and in this version she’s basically reduced to a footnote.

She shows up, she has a couple of moments, and then she’s just kind of…gone. Same goes for Polonius, Laertes, even Claudius to a certain extent. These are rich, complicated characters, and here they’re flattened into background noise.

And why? So the movie can focus on being “stylish.” And oh boy, does it want to be stylish.

This is one of those films that is absolutely convinced of its own cleverness. The shaky camera never stops. The grainy digital photography is relentless. The editing is jittery and aggressive.

It’s all very hip, very now, very “look at me, I’m doing something bold,” but it feels completely forced. It’s style for the sake of style, with no real purpose behind it.

There are sequences that replace traditional dramatic moments with choreographed dance or stylized movement, and instead of feeling inventive or inspired, they just feel awkward. Like the movie is trying way too hard to convince you that it’s fresh and edgy when in reality it’s just distracting.

And then there’s Riz Ahmed.

Now, Ahmed is a talented actor. He’s been terrific in certain things, The Sound of Metal is a great performance. But he’s also wildly inconsistent, and here he is not good. Not good at all.

The biggest problem is that there’s no arc to his performance. When you play Hamlet, there has to be a build. There has to be a progression. You start at one place and you slowly, methodically descend into something darker, something more unstable. That’s the tragedy of the character.

Ahmed starts at eleven.

Three minutes into the movie, he’s already twitching, already intense, already emotionally maxed out. There’s nowhere for him to go. So the performance just becomes this one-note barrage of tics and outbursts and overwrought emotion. It’s exhausting, and not in a good way.

And he’s not helped by the direction, which is frankly terrible. Aneil Karia makes one questionable choice after another...visually, structurally, tonally. The whole thing feels like a Cliff’s Notes version of Hamlet filtered through a hyperactive, self-consciously “modern” lens that strips away the depth and replaces it with noise.

And that’s really what this movie is: noise.

It takes one of the greatest plays ever written, one of the richest, most psychologically complex, most beautifully constructed pieces of drama in the history of storytelling, and turns it into this empty, jittery, over-stylized exercise that thinks it’s saying something profound but never actually does.

It reminded me, more than anything, of that absolutely disastrous 1991 film Men of Respect, which tried to turn Macbeth into a modern mob story with John Turturro and Dennis Farina. That movie was an embarrassment, it is an object lesson in how not to adapt Shakespeare.

This version of Hamlet is right there with it. It's the Men of Respect of 2026. And that is not a compliment.

So no, this didn’t work for me on any level. Not as an adaptation, not as a piece of filmmaking, not as a performance showcase.

I know there are people out there who are going to admire the ambition, who are going to respond to the stylistic risks, who are going to appreciate the attempt to reframe the material in a modern context.

That’s fine.

But for me, this is a massive disappointment, it is an overcooked, underthought, stylistically obnoxious misfire that does a disservice to the material and wastes a talented cast in the process.

There are plenty of Hamlets out there. This is not one you need to see. - ⭐️

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