CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 4-17-26
- Nick Digilio
- 15 minutes ago
- 24 min read
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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, April 17th, 2026.
I’m still kind of baffled that Warner Bros. and New Line decided this was a good idea as a title: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.
Because let’s be honest, most people are going to look at that title and go, “Who the hell is Lee Cronin?” And that is a completely legitimate response.
Now, I know who Lee Cronin is because I’m a horror fanatic and I pay attention to this stuff.
He made The Hole in the Ground, which was a decent little horror movie, and then he made Evil Dead Rise, which I thought was terrific, it was gory, nuts, wildly entertaining, and totally in tune with the insane, blood-soaked, camera-whipping, Sam Raimi-inspired madness that defines the Evil Dead universe.
Evil Dead Rise understood the assignment. It knew exactly what it was. It was over-the-top, gross, funny, vicious, and filled with the kind of kinetic visual insanity that made those original Raimi films such classics.
So apparently somebody at the studio decided that Lee Cronin had enough name value now to slap his name above the title like he’s John Carpenter in 1982 or Dario Argento in 1977. And maybe within horror circles that means something. To the average moviegoer? Not so much.
But even stranger than that is the second half of the title: The Mummy. Because this is not a mummy movie. It just isn’t.
And I say that as someone who has seen all the mummy movies. The original Universal stuff with Boris Karloff, the Kharis movies from the ’40s, the Hammer versions with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, the silly but entertaining Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weisz adventure movies from the late ’90s. None of the stuff that defines those movies is really here.
Yes, there are sarcophagi. Yes, there are ancient scrolls. Yes, there are Egyptian references, curses, and wrappings and all that. But those things are props. Flavor. Set dressing.
What this movie actually is (what it should have been called, honestly) is Lee Cronin’s The Evil Dead Exorcist.
Because that’s what it is.
The story itself is a good, nasty setup. A journalist named Charlie, played by Jack Reynor, is working in Cairo with his family when his young daughter Katie disappears into the desert after being lured away by a creepy woman who has clearly got something supernatural going on. The family is shattered.
Cut ahead eight years later, Charlie’s been demoted, the family is now living in Albuquerque with his wife’s mother, everybody is still wrecked by grief and guilt, and then (miracle of miracles, or nightmare depending on how closely you’re paying attention) Katie comes back.
Only she’s not really Katie anymore. Or not entirely.
She’s been found in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus, hasn’t aged the way she should have, looks wrong, moves wrong, and is clearly carrying something ancient and evil inside her. So what starts as a family trauma story becomes a full-on domestic horror siege picture, where the returned daughter slowly infects the house, the family, the architecture, the whole emotional ecosystem of the movie.
That’s a terrific idea. And I’ll say this right away: there is a lot in this movie that I really enjoyed. But there are also some big problems.
First, it is way too long. There is absolutely no reason this thing should be over two hours. None. It feels bloated, especially because there is a whole detective subplot involving May Calamawy (which, to be fair, she’s very good in) but it drags the movie down and doesn’t add much.
Every time the film cuts away from the central family nightmare to deal with procedural stuff, you feel the momentum sag. This needed to be tighter, meaner, and at least 30 to 40 minutes shorter.
Second, anytime the movie tries to get serious about family trauma, guilt, loss, grief, and all that, it kind of falls apart. You can see what Cronin is trying to do. He’s channeling real pain.
There’s clearly personal stuff in this. But whatever serious emotional points the movie wants to make get obliterated by how insanely over-the-top and ridiculous everything becomes. And I mean ridiculous in a way that I enjoyed a lot of the time.
Because once Katie gets home and the possession stuff really kicks in, the movie turns into a gore carnival. This is not subtle horror. This is not “did you hear a noise in the attic?” This is toenails being clipped off in one of the grossest, funniest, nastiest sequences I’ve seen in a studio horror movie in years.
This is teeth being ripped out, false teeth showing up in horrifying and hilarious ways, blood spraying everywhere, bodies contorting, vomit flying, heads splitting, skin tearing, eyes going bad, and one family member after another becoming infected with whatever this ancient evil actually is.
At one point, the younger daughter rips out all of her own teeth and jams her dead grandmother’s dentures into her mouth. That is the level we are operating on here.
And yes, it is as funny and as disturbing as it sounds.
There’s also a funeral scene (good Lord, this funeral scene) that turns into one of the most insane, blood-soaked, scream-laugh horror set pieces in the whole movie.
The grandmother dies, there’s a wake in the house, the kids are already possessed or on their way there, and the whole thing escalates into this unbelievably chaotic swirl of dead bodies, flying blood, missing teeth, levitating madness, and possessed-child mayhem.
By the way, the reanimated corpse of the grandmother, is a full-on rip-off of Henrietta Knowby, the legendary Ted Raimi character from Evil Dead II. Clearly, Cronin knows that, and gloriously revels in it.
That wake sequence is like The Exorcist, Evil Dead, and Hereditary all got drunk at the same party and started smashing furniture.
And honestly? I had a blast during a lot of that stuff.
Cronin really does know how to stage gore. He knows how to push a disgusting idea one step further than you think he will. He knows how to make a crowd squirm and then laugh because the image is so outrageous that your only response is nervous hysterics.
There’s a lot of classic rock on the soundtrack, which works surprisingly well, and there are some line deliveries in this movie that got huge laughs because of how dryly they underplay total insanity.
There’s a moment where, after absolute carnage, Charlie says something incredibly practical and calm about needing to move Katie somewhere else, and the audience I saw it with lost it.
Because that’s the tone here. Total domestic catastrophe, treated with just enough seriousness that the absurdity becomes hilarious.
But again, this is where the “mummy” stuff really falls away. Once Katie is back in the house, this thing is The Exorcist. She levitates, contorts, spits, vomits, writhes in bed, does the creepy-child voice stuff, terrorizes the family, and becomes the center of a possession narrative that is much more demonic than mythological.
Then, in the final stretch, it becomes full-on Evil Dead, with infection spreading between family members, grotesque body horror, exaggerated gore, frantic camera work, people turning one after another, everything escalating into a possessed-family bloodbath.
So no, this is not a mummy movie. It’s an Exorcist riff with Evil Dead DNA and some Egyptian décor. And I don’t mean that as an insult, necessarily. I just think people should know what they’re getting.
Jack Reynor is fine, although as a father he’s kind of terrible and weirdly hard to root for, which is funny because he was also the worst boyfriend ever in Midsommar, so maybe he’s building a very specific résumé.
Laia Costa is good. Verónica Falcón is very memorable. The excellent Natalie Grace, as Katie, does exactly what this kind of role requires, she is unsettling and physically committed and weird in all the right ways.
Technically, it’s very well made. Cronin has style. There are sequences in broad daylight that are genuinely upsetting, which I respect. The makeup effects are terrific. The gore effects are old-school enough to be satisfying.
There’s a lot of liquid in this movie. I mean a lot. Blood, bile, spit, ooze, rot, all of it. This thing is wet in the way the best gross-out horror movies are wet.
So where do I land?
It’s too long. It has subplots that don’t need to be there. Its serious themes don’t really connect. It borrows very heavily from better horror movies. And it is absolutely not a mummy movie no matter what the title says.
But.
If you are a horror fan, and I mean a real horror fan, somebody who likes gore, likes possession movies, likes practical nastiness, likes seeing a major studio release go way harder and way grosser than you’d expect...then yeah, I think you’ll probably have a very good time.
I did.
Not a great movie. Not even close. But an entertaining one. A very funny, very gross, very chaotic horror movie that should have had a different title and been shorter by about half an hour.
So Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (which again should really be called Lee Cronin’s The Evil Dead Exorcist) gets a recommendation from me, but only for horror freaks.
Everybody else might want to stay out of the tomb. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Morgan Neville is a really fine documentary filmmaker. He made the wonderful Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the terrific music documentary 20 Feet from Stardom, and more recently the great Man on the Run, his film about Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles years with Wings, which I thought was excellent.
He’s made smart, informative, entertaining documentaries about some very rich and sometimes very complicated subjects. But I’m not sure he’s ever tackled a subject more difficult than the one he takes on in Lorne, his new documentary about Saturday Night Live creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels.
And the reason is obvious almost immediately. Lorne Michaels does not want to make this movie.
That becomes clear from the very first moments. The opening footage shows a microphone being clipped onto him, and right away he seems uncomfortable, annoyed, resistant. He is short with his answers. He’s curt.
There are scenes early in the film where he literally sees the camera and walks away from it. He ducks it, avoids it, and clearly wants no part of being pinned down for some warm, revealing, soul-baring portrait.
And if you know anything about Lorne Michaels, that makes perfect sense. The guy is notoriously private. He hates interviews. He hates talking about himself. He’s 81 years old, and it has taken this long for anyone to make a full-length documentary about him because he simply does not want to let people in.
Now, before I go any further, let me make this very clear: I am not an unbiased viewer here. I am a complete Saturday Night Live freak. I host That Show Hasn’t Been Funny in Years: An SNL Podcast on the Radio Misfits Podcast Network.
I have watched every single episode of Saturday Night Live since the first one aired on October 11, 1975, when ten-year-old Nick Digilio sat in front of the TV and watched it. I have eaten, breathed, slept, read, watched, studied, and obsessed over Saturday Night Live for decades.
So if there is anybody walking into this movie with an unreasonable amount of knowledge and expectation, it’s me.
Which means I have to acknowledge something right away: there was not a lot in Lorne that I didn’t already know. That is not really the movie’s fault. That’s my sickness.
For a lot of people, this movie will probably be more illuminating, more informative, and more surprising than it was for me. But even with all that said, I still think the movie has a very specific problem, and it’s kind of built into the premise.
This is sold as a documentary about Lorne Michaels, and it really isn’t. What it actually is, more often than not, is another very solid documentary about Saturday Night Live. And there have already been a lot of those.
Especially lately. Last year, with the 50th anniversary of SNL, we got multiple documentaries, behind-the-scenes specials, retrospective pieces, and of course that terrible narrative film Saturday Night, which was one of the worst movies of 2024 and wildly inaccurate besides.
There have been books, special features, James Franco’s behind-the-scenes documentary, all kinds of material about how the show is made, what happens in the writers’ room, how the host meeting goes, how the all-night writing sessions work, how the cue cards get put up, how crazy the week is.
If you have even a passing interest in SNL, you already know a lot of how that machine works.
And Lorne gives you more of that. Some of it is very entertaining, some of it is genuinely great, and some of it is brand new footage from more recent shows, which I absolutely loved.
You get behind-the-scenes material from weeks hosted by Emma Stone, Ayo Edebiri, Shane Gillis, and Timothée Chalamet, and yes, I will absolutely watch endless footage of Lorne Michaels walking through the halls of Studio 8H, eating popcorn, listening to pitches, pacing around, and quietly orchestrating the madness. I’m a sucker for that stuff.
The narration, by the way, is terrific. Chris Parnell is the perfect choice. He has that great voice, that very dry, funny authority, and he also has his own complicated history with Lorne, considering Lorne fired him and then rehired him. So there’s a little extra bite there, and he does a really wonderful job guiding the whole thing.
Now, the clever conceit that Neville uses to get around Lorne’s refusal to cooperate fully is genuinely inspired, at least some of the time. Since Lorne won’t really tell him certain things about his childhood, his family, his upbringing, or some of the more personal details of his life, Neville just starts making things up in deliberately absurd ways.
He uses fake newspaper headlines, phony historical footage, and, best of all, animated sequences featuring Robert Smigel doing a Lorne Michaels impression. Smigel, of course, is a longtime SNL writer and the creator of TV Funhouse, so having him provide the voice and the animated sensibility makes perfect sense.
Sometimes those sequences are hilarious and really clever. They feel like SNL sketches, which is obviously the point. But sometimes they’re also frustrating, because they are reminders that the movie can’t really get at the truth of its subject.
Every time it has to detour into animation or a fake bit of mock history, you are reminded that Lorne Michaels is not really opening up. He’s still hiding. He’s still shaping the story by refusing to tell it.
There are some nice details in here. There’s footage from his Canadian TV work in the late ’60s and early ’70s that even I hadn’t seen before. There’s some terrific material involving Lily Tomlin and his early work with her.
Paul Simon, who is one of Lorne’s closest lifelong friends, tells great stories, including a really fascinating one about taking a road trip through the South with Lorne after he left SNL in 1980, and how that trip helped inspire Graceland. That stuff is terrific.
And the talking heads are impressive. Tina Fey, Chris Rock, Conan O’Brien, Maya Rudolph, Andy Samberg, John Mulaney, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Mike Myers, Paul Simon, Rosie Shuster, Al Franken, Steve Higgins, Alan Zweibel, all of these people show up and, to a person, they all say some variation of the same thing: good luck getting Lorne to tell you anything.
Every one of them talks about how private he is, how guarded he is, how difficult it is to know him, and how strange it is to even attempt a documentary about him.
The best material in the entire movie might be the roundtable with Bill Hader, John Mulaney, Fred Armisen, and Andy Samberg. That group is hilarious, and Mulaney in particular gets some of the best stories.
There’s a fantastic bit about why Lorne always accepts any script handed to him in a restaurant because he’s afraid that if he refuses, something like what happened to Sharon Tate might happen to him, which is both morbid and very, very funny.
Mulaney also tells a great story about Lorne receiving a letter from Squeaky Fromme with a smiley face on it. It’s exactly the kind of bizarre, specific backstage anecdote that makes this stuff so entertaining.
But here’s my biggest issue, and it’s a big one.
The omission of The Kids in the Hall is, to me, kind of unforgivable.
They barely mention it. Barely. And that is a huge hole in a documentary that is supposedly about Lorne Michaels and his contribution to comedy. The Kids in the Hall is one of the greatest sketch comedy series ever made.
Lorne, a Canadian, helped bring that brilliant Canadian comedy troupe to the world, and those guys are some of the most gifted sketch comedians ever. Dave Foley, Kevin McDonald, Bruce McCulloch, Scott Thompson, Mark McKinney, these are giants. And the documentary almost ignores them.
Bruce McCulloch gets maybe a couple of lines. Mark McKinney is the most visible, but largely because he was also on SNL. They show a couple of clips from Brain Candy, and really only because Mark McKinney is doing a Lorne Michaels impression in that movie.
There’s even a montage in Lorne of people doing their Lorne impressions, which is great, because everybody who has ever worked with Lorne has one, but to reduce Kids in the Hall to that is just ridiculous. That is a major omission. A really major omission.
And ultimately, that’s kind of the story of the whole documentary. It claims to be a portrait of Lorne Michaels, but it never really cracks him open.
What it gives you instead is a very entertaining, very professionally assembled, often funny and occasionally revealing documentary about Saturday Night Live, and about how this mysterious, private guy at the center of it all has shaped American comedy for 50 years.
If you are hoping to find out what really makes Lorne tick, you won’t get that. You’ll get a few details. You’ll hear that he throws ice when he’s angry. You’ll learn that he eats an incredible amount of popcorn.
You’ll watch him stare at monitors from beneath the bleachers while the live show happens. You’ll hear everyone talk about how powerful and strange and influential he is. But you are not really going to know him any better by the time the credits roll.
Still, I’m recommending it.
I can’t pretend I wasn’t entertained. I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy hearing all of these people talk about what they owe to Lorne Michaels, because the truth is they owe him a lot. A lot of those careers do not exist without him.
And as someone who will watch just about anything related to the making of Saturday Night Live, this movie absolutely works on that level.
So no, it’s not really a great documentary about Lorne Michaels. But it is a really solid documentary about Saturday Night Live.
And for me, that was just enough. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
There’s a moment when you’re watching a movie like Normal where you stop and go, “Wait a minute…haven’t I seen this before?” And then about five minutes later you realize, no, you haven’t just seen it before, you’ve seen it done better. Repeatedly. And by filmmakers who actually understood what they were doing.
That’s kind of the overriding feeling I had sitting through this thing, which is frustrating because there’s enough in the ideas here, that it almost feels like it should work. It just…doesn’t. At all.
So here’s the setup. Bob Odenkirk plays Ulysses (yes, Ulysses, hold that thought) who shows up in the small, snow-covered town of Normal, Minnesota as a kind of fill-in sheriff after the previous one dies under suspicious circumstances.
At first, it’s all very “gee whiz, nice to meet ya,” with quirky locals, friendly deputies, and that familiar Minnesota nice vibe that immediately makes you think of Fargo, and not in a subtle way, by the way, but in a “hey, remember this Coen Brothers movie?” kind of way.
Then, almost immediately, a bank robbery goes sideways, and Ulysses walks into a situation where his own deputies start shooting at him. Surprise! The whole town is in on a massive criminal conspiracy involving hidden gold, weapons, and a connection to the Yakuza, because why not?
Ulysses teams up with the robbers, there’s a whole bunch of betrayals, shifting alliances, and eventually the movie devolves into a long, loud, bloody stretch of shootouts, explosions, and hand-to-hand combat that seems to go on forever. Heads explode, limbs get mangled, bullets fly, and by the end, you’re just kind of numb to it.
Now, before I get into the problems (and there are many) let me just say this: I like Bob Odenkirk. A lot. I mean, this is a guy who came out of Second City, who did Mr. Show with David Cross, which is one of the smartest, weirdest, most inventive sketch comedy shows ever made. His instincts, his timing, his sensibility...that’s where he shines. That’s where he’s great.
He received critical acclaim, popularity, and gained a rabid fanbase for his work on Better Call Saul (a show that I never actually watched...for reasons that are too dumb and complex to get into now). Yeah, he's got some serious credibility.
So it continues to baffle me that for the last several years, he’s been leaning into this whole “hey, look at me, I’m an action star now” thing. It started as kind of a novelty. “Oh, the guy from Mr. Show is beating people up? That’s kind of funny.”
But the joke wears off fast. And now we’re just left with a series of these hyper-violent, John Wick-lite knockoffs that are neither as stylish nor as inventive as the movies they’re clearly imitating.
Normal is the latest entry in that unofficial series, and it’s maybe the most frustrating because it feels like it thinks it’s doing something clever.
Directed by Ben Wheatley (who, let’s be honest, has made a couple of passable things but is mostly responsible for a lot of noisy, derivative nonsense) this movie is basically a mash-up of Fargo and Hot Fuzz. And I don’t mean “inspired by.” I mean flat-out lifted.
The small-town Minnesota setting, the accents, the rhythms of the dialogue, it's all Fargo. And not just a nod, not just an influence, it’s mimicry. You’re constantly aware of it. It’s distracting. It’s like watching a cover band that’s not quite hitting the notes.
And then the big twist, with the whole town being in on the conspiracy, the smiling faces hiding murderous intent: that’s Hot Fuzz. Directly. Completely. The difference is that Edgar Wright understood satire. He understood rhythm, escalation, character. Hot Fuzz works because it’s funny, it’s smart, and when it goes into action mode, it earns it.
Here? It’s just noise.
The action scenes (there are a lot of them) are loud, bloody, and completely unremarkable. We’ve seen all of this before. The shootouts, the explosions, the ridiculous survivability of the main character (Odenkirk gets shot multiple times but shrugs it off because of a conveniently placed vest) it’s all standard issue.
There’s nothing inventive about the choreography, nothing memorable about the staging. The majority of the action sequences are just ineptly directed, and it is all just listless repetition.
And then there’s this bizarre attempt to layer in The Odyssey. The character is named Ulysses, there are vague parallels to the journey, the idea of a man without a home, the return, the feast, the deception.
Yeah, it's all sort of there, floating around, like somebody read a summary of Homer and thought, “Hey, let’s sprinkle this in.” It never coheres. It never deepens the material. It just sits there, like a half-formed inside joke.
Or maybe they were just trying to beat the overrated Christopher Nolan to the punch before his version of The Odyssey lumbers into theaters in July...just a thought, I dunno.
The supporting cast doesn’t fare much better. There are glimmers of something interesting (Jess McLeod as Alex, for instance, has presence and could have been compelling) but the script gives them nothing. They’re all just pieces on a board being moved around to get to the next explosion.
Henry Winkler shows up as the mayor, and look, I love Henry Winkler. He’s one of the greats. But if you’re going into this thinking you’re going to get something substantial from him, forget it. He’s barely in the movie, and what he does have feels like a watered-down echo of the jerk high school principal he played in Scream, and the darker comedic work he did so brilliantly in Barry.
There’s also this whole Yakuza subplot that feels like it wandered in from another movie entirely (complete with finger-chopping and over-the-top violence) and it adds absolutely nothing except more chaos.
And then there are the little things that pull you out of it. Characters who get seriously injured and then just keep going with no consequences.
A pair of robbers who leave a dog in a car for most of the movie, and honestly, I was more worried about the dog than anything else happening on screen. When that’s where your attention goes, you’ve lost the audience.
What really gets me, though, is that this is exactly the kind of movie that Bob Odenkirk, the guy from Mr. Show, would have absolutely shredded in a sketch 30 years ago. This is self-parody. This is him becoming the thing he used to make fun of. And that’s kind of sad.
So yeah, Normal is anything but. It’s a derivative, noisy, overly violent, completely unoriginal mash-up that takes better movies (Fargo, Hot Fuzz, even the John Wick stuff) and strips away everything that made them work.
If you want this kind of thing done right, go watch those movies again. Seriously. You’ll have a much better time.
As for this? Skip it. - ⭐️
It’s always interesting (at least to me) to watch a movie about critics. You know, people who write about art for a living. I’ve been doing it for a long, long time, and whenever a filmmaker decides to tackle that world, I lean in a little bit. I’m curious. I want to see how they get it right, how they get it wrong, and what they think that life actually looks like.
Mile End Kicks, written and directed by Chandler Levack, is one of those movies. It’s clearly personal, clearly drawn from her own experiences, and it follows Grace Pine, a 24-year-old music critic who moves from Toronto to Montreal with dreams of writing a book about Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill.
Instead, she gets pulled into the local indie rock scene, becomes the publicist for a scrappy band called Bone Patrol, and finds herself tangled in a messy love triangle with two of its members. Along the way, she makes bad decisions, alienates people, sabotages her own ambitions, and (eventually) learns a few lessons about who she is and what she wants.
It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s a romantic comedy. It’s a “figure your life out in your twenties” movie. And it’s also, very clearly, a companion piece to Levack’s earlier film I Like Movies.
You can feel it. The same DNA is all over this thing, just swap film criticism for music criticism and drop it into the Montreal indie scene circa 2011.
Now, the best thing about the movie (easily) is Barbie Ferreira. She’s charming, she’s watchable, and she’s got real presence. I didn’t like Faces of Death at all, but she was the best thing in that movie, and she’s the best thing here too.
There’s something very natural about her. You believe that she’s this kind of slightly self-involved, slightly lost, trying-to-be-cool young critic who’s still figuring things out.
The problem is…she’s pretty much the only fully realized character in the movie.
Everybody else? Not so much.
The guys in the band (Archie and Chevy) are basically sketches. One’s the sweet, awkward guy, the other’s the brooding, narcissistic frontman. That’s it. That’s the whole deal. Jay Baruchel shows up as her former editor, literally referred to as “scummy boss,” and that’s all he is. There’s no shading, no depth, just a label and a performance to match it.
Even the roommate, who should have more dimension as the voice of reason, feels like she’s been pulled from a list of “indie movie archetypes.”
Now, I will say this: there’s something oddly refreshing about seeing men written this way for a change. Usually it’s the female characters in male-written movies who get flattened into clichés. Here, Levack flips that dynamic. It doesn’t make for great screenwriting, but it is kind of an interesting reversal.
Still, it doesn’t solve the bigger issue, which is that the movie feels thin. It feels surface-level. It touches on things (bad jobs, toxic work environments, artistic ambition, identity, relationships) but it never really digs into them. It gestures at those ideas without fully exploring them.
And as someone who has actually been a critic (who was a critic in his twenties) I can tell you there are universal truths about that life, about that age, about trying to find your voice and your place in the world.
The movie brushes up against those truths, but it doesn’t quite get there. It doesn’t feel as authentic or as insightful as it wants to be.
There are moments that work. Some of the party scenes, some of the interactions in the music world, they ring true. The film captures the vibe of 2011 pretty well: the technology, the music, the look.
Which, by the way, is kind of hilarious and a little disturbing, because apparently 2011 is now a period piece. That makes me feel ancient, but here we are.
But then there are things that just don’t land. The dialogue can feel forced, like characters are delivering little speeches instead of actually talking to each other. There’s a weird stylistic choice where Grace is followed by a spotlight in one scene that feels completely out of place.
And there’s a whole argument about Hüsker Dü that is just…wrong. Factually wrong. And it feels like name-dropping a band is supposed to give the movie credibility, which it doesn’t.
Ultimately, the biggest issue is that this story feels familiar. Not just because we’ve seen this kind of coming-of-age, messy-twenties narrative before, but because Levack herself already told a version of it in I Like Movies. The beats are similar, the themes are similar, even the tone and style feel recycled.
So you end up with a movie that isn’t bad. It’s not terrible by any stretch. It’s just…kind of there. Kind of insignificant. A pleasant enough way to spend some time, anchored by a strong lead performance, but lacking the depth, originality, or insight to really stick with you.
If it pops up on streaming in a few months and you’re folding laundry or killing time, sure, throw it on. Barbie Ferreira will keep you engaged.
But Mile End Kicks never quite finds its own voice. And for a movie about a critic trying to find hers, that’s a pretty big problem. - ⭐️⭐️
There was a time (not that long ago, although in Soderbergh years it feels like several lifetimes) when Steven Soderbergh said he was going to retire. And like everything else Soderbergh says or does, that turned out to be…flexible.
Since that “retirement,” the guy has cranked out movies, TV projects, experiments, genre pieces, tiny chamber films, big slick entertainments, you name it. He’s one of the most restless filmmakers alive, and frankly, one of the most consistently interesting.
From sex, lies, and videotape (which, back in 1989, basically kicked the door open for the indie boom) to the Ocean’s movies, to weird little side projects and bold genre swings like Presence and Black Bag last year, the guy just doesn’t stop.
And now we get The Christophers, which might be one of the most deceptively simple and, ultimately, one of the most moving things he’s ever done.
On paper, it sounds like a caper. A bit of a heist. A con. The setup is terrific: Julian Sklar, played by Ian McKellen, is a once-legendary London painter, who was huge in the ‘60s, made millions, burned bridges, alienated everyone, and now lives like a cranky ghost in a crumbling house, making a living doing Cameo videos.
Yeah, that’s where he is now. From art world titan to personalized video messages for a couple hundred pounds a pop. That alone is a great, bitter joke.
His estranged children, Sallie and Barnaby (Jessica Gunning and James Corden) are circling like vultures. They know about a stash of unfinished paintings, “The Christophers,” hidden away in the attic. If those canvases could be “completed” and “discovered” after Julian kicks the bucket, they’d be worth a fortune.
So what do they do? They hire Lori Butler, played by Michaela Coel, a struggling artist and skilled restorer (someone who can also forge if necessary) to infiltrate Julian’s house, pose as his assistant, finish the paintings in his style, and set up the ultimate art-world scam.
That’s the hook. That’s the heist. But this isn’t really a heist movie.
About halfway through, the con gets blown open. Julian figures out what’s going on (he’s not an idiot, just a bitter genius) and instead of turning this into a thriller about who double-crosses whom, the movie pivots into something much richer, much deeper, and honestly kind of beautiful.
Because what this really is…is a two-hander. It’s about Julian and Lori.
It’s also about an aging, furious, disillusioned artist who has lost whatever spark made him great, and a younger artist who once worshipped him, was humiliated by him on a reality show (one of the film’s many sharp jabs at modern art culture), and now finds herself face-to-face with the man who both inspired and crushed her.
And what follows is just…electric.
The dialogue that Ed Solomon gives these two actors is phenomenal, it is smart, biting, funny, brutally honest, and then, out of nowhere, deeply emotional. These conversations about art, ownership, legacy, criticism, commerce (who art belongs to, whether it even means anything once it leaves the artist’s hands) it’s all here, and it never feels like a lecture.
This is the best thing Solomon has ever written. And yeah, I know, Bill & Ted is fun, Innerspace, Now You See Me, all that stuff, it's all fine, entertaining, disposable. This is something else entirely.
And then you’ve got McKellen and Coel.
Ian McKellen…what do you even say? He’s one of the greatest actors ever, period. Stage, screen, everything. But his performance as this cranky, sad, furious, regret-filled old man who slowly, almost against his will, rediscovers something resembling purpose...it's extraordinary. It’s funny as hell, it’s heartbreaking, and there’s a late-career vulnerability here that just sneaks up on you.
There’s a scene (and it’s one of the best scenes of the year) where Julian finally touches one of those abandoned canvases again. Paint on his hands for the first time in decades.
He starts smearing it, throwing glitter, feathers, just going nuts. Soderbergh never shows you the painting. He focuses on McKellen—the movement, the energy, the rediscovery of creation. It’s about the act, not the result.
It’s stunning.
Michaela Coel is just as good. She’s got to hold her own opposite McKellen, and she does it effortlessly. There’s anger there, admiration, pain, intelligence, and she’s terrific. The way she navigates Lori’s complicated feelings about Julian, about art, about herself, it’s all layered, it’s all real.
And then you’ve got the supporting players. Jessica Gunning is hilarious, and yes, I’m going to say something I never thought I’d say: James Corden is really good in this movie. Why? Because he’s playing an absolute jerk. Perfect casting. Lean into it. It works.
There’s a running gag involving Sallie’s attempt at forging one of the “Christopher” paintings that is laugh-out-loud funny every single time it shows up. It’s just so aggressively terrible.
But again, all of that is flavor. The core is this relationship.
What’s fascinating is how Soderbergh takes something that could easily become pretentious (art, legacy, meaning, blah blah blah) and makes it feel alive. The movie moves. It’s funny. It’s sharp. There’s even a bit of that Soderbergh heist energy in the structure and pacing. It’s never dull, even though, yeah, a lot of it is just people talking.
And what they’re talking about matters.
As a critic, this movie hit me in a very specific way. There’s stuff in here about criticism (about writing about art, tearing things down, the responsibility of having a voice) that really lands. When Julian reads what Lori once wrote about him, and you see how that affects him…that’s powerful stuff.
Because art doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It belongs to the artist, sure. But it also belongs to the people who experience it, who interpret it, who are changed by it. And this movie gets that.
It’s about meeting your heroes… and realizing they’re human, flawed, sometimes awful. It’s about whether you can separate the art from the artist. It’s about whether it even matters.
And somehow, it’s also just really entertaining.
It’s brisk, at about an hour and forty minutes. It’s funny. It’s got momentum. It never feels heavy, even when it’s dealing with big ideas.
Bottom line: The Christophers is one of the best movies of the year so far. Easily.
It’s a reminder that Soderbergh, decades into his career, is still one of the most versatile, inventive filmmakers working. And it’s a showcase for two incredible performances, especially Ian McKellen, who absolutely deserves to be in the awards conversation for this.
If Soderbergh wants to “retire” again after this, fine. Let him announce it. Because apparently, that just means we’ll get ten more great movies. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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