CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 5-15-26

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review three new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, May 15th, 2026.

1) IN THE GREY

I am not a Guy Ritchie fan. I have never been a Guy Ritchie fan. I missed the boat completely when everybody lost their minds over Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch back in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

People were acting like this guy was some sort of revolutionary crime filmmaker reinventing the gangster movie, and I sat there wondering if I had accidentally walked into a completely different movie than everybody else.

Because what I saw was a filmmaker knocking off Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, David Mamet, and every British gangster cliché imaginable, then wrapping it all in hyperactive editing, fake cleverness, and dialogue that thinks it’s much smarter than it actually is.

And here we are again with In the Grey, another Guy Ritchie movie that feels exactly like every other Guy Ritchie movie. Same smug tone. Same faux-clever banter. Same roguish criminals and morally ambiguous tough guys talking endlessly about loyalty and money and honor while explosions occasionally happen in the background.

It is the same meal over and over and over again. The only difference this time is that the portions are smaller because the movie is shorter. And honestly? That’s probably the best thing about it.

In the Grey stars Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal as Sid and Bronco, elite covert extraction specialists who operate in the murky space between legality and organized crime. They’re hired to recover a stolen billion-dollar fortune from a ruthless despot named Manny Salazar, played by Carlos Bardem.

Eiza González plays Rachel Wild, the strategist and negotiator who’s actually the brains of the operation, which immediately makes her the most interesting character in the movie because everybody else is just doing the same Guy Ritchie nonsense we’ve seen a thousand times before.

So the team infiltrates compounds, navigates betrayals, uncovers hidden agendas, exchanges sarcastic insults, fires machine guns, survives explosions, and occasionally stops to explain convoluted financial schemes and tactical plans in dialogue-heavy scenes that go on forever.

It’s a suicide mission. There are shifting loyalties. There are double-crosses. There are secret communications. There’s a private army. There are islands and fortified compounds and stylishly photographed gunfights and all the stuff Guy Ritchie always throws into these movies.

And none of it is remotely original.

Now, I should mention that this movie had a notoriously troubled production. It sat on a shelf for a while. It got recut and rewritten. There were reshoots. The release date kept moving around.

And you can absolutely feel all of that while watching it. This thing feels stitched together from multiple versions of itself. The pacing is weird. Scenes feel truncated. Character motivations suddenly shift.

Entire chunks of exposition sound like they were added later to clarify plot points that no longer make sense after edits. And the weirdest thing about it is just how dialogue-heavy it is.

If you’re going into a Guy Ritchie movie expecting wall-to-wall action, you’re actually going to be surprised by how much talking there is in this thing. Endless talking. Endless supposedly witty banter. Endless conversations where characters explain plans while trying to sound cooler than they actually are.

And the problem is that Guy Ritchie has always thought he was much funnier and much smarter than he really is. His dialogue has always sounded like somebody doing an impression of Tarantino after three vodka tonics.

And when you put that dialogue into the mouths of actors who either can’t pull it off or clearly don’t believe in it, the whole thing collapses.

Henry Cavill continues to be one of the stiffest leading men working in movies today. I know people love this guy. I know he’s become this internet darling. But outside of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, where I actually thought he was terrific, I have never understood the appeal. He’s wooden. He’s lifeless.

He delivers Guy Ritchie’s faux-clever dialogue like he’s reading cue cards through clenched teeth. The movie desperately wants Sid to come off as charming and dangerous and cool, but Cavill simply does not have that kind of charisma.

Jake Gyllenhaal at least seems aware of how ridiculous all of this is. He looks bored for most of the movie, like he knows these lines are idiotic but is trying to push through them professionally.

He throws out sarcastic one-liners with this exhausted deadpan energy that occasionally works simply because it feels like Gyllenhaal himself is annoyed to be there.

But the one person who actually rises above the material is Eiza González.

She’s genuinely good in this movie. She takes a character that could’ve easily been another generic “cool mastermind” cliché and injects actual personality into it. She’s charismatic, funny, sexy, sharp, and alive in ways the rest of the movie simply is not.

She somehow survives the terrible Guy Ritchie dialogue and manages to create a character who feels human instead of a collection of affectations. Every time she’s on screen the movie briefly improves.

And then it cuts back to Henry Cavill squinting while delivering another painfully overwritten line about loyalty or leverage or honor or some nonsense.

What’s especially frustrating is how repetitive all of this feels within Guy Ritchie’s own filmography. In the Grey is basically a remix of The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Wrath of Man, The Covenant, and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. all blended together.

You’ve got the same “quirky” criminals. The same smug tone. The same supposedly stylish action scenes. The same fashion-magazine aesthetic. The same rapid-fire editing. The same forced coolness.

It’s like Guy Ritchie keeps remaking the same movie over and over again hoping one of them will magically become Goodfellas.

And look, I understand that Guy Ritchie has fans. A lot of them. If you like his style, if you enjoy his endless smart-ass dialogue and his pseudo-clever crime structures and his British-gangster-by-way-of-Tarantino aesthetic, you’ll probably enjoy this.

It’s shorter than some of his recent movies, which helps. And there are occasional moments where something explodes or somebody gets shot in an entertaining way.

But even those moments feel half-hearted here. There’s actually less action than you’d expect. The explosions are fewer. The action scenes are shorter. The emphasis is overwhelmingly on dialogue, and the dialogue just isn’t good enough to sustain the movie.

So what you’re left with is another Guy Ritchie exercise in derivative coolness. A movie assembled from pieces of other, better movies by better filmmakers. It’s smug without being clever. Stylish without being exciting. Violent without being thrilling. Funny without actually being funny.

And after all these years, Guy Ritchie still hasn’t evolved. He’s still making the same knockoff crime movies he’s been making since the late ’90s. The only difference now is that they somehow feel even more tired.

So yes, In the Grey is another reminder of why Guy Ritchie remains one of my least favorite writer-directors working today. It is repetitive, shallow, derivative, and forgettable.

And no, I absolutely do not recommend it. - ⭐️1/2

2) OBSESSION

There are horror movies that get hyped to the moon every single year. Every year there’s a new one that comes out of a festival screening (usually Midnight Madness at Toronto or Sundance at midnight or Fantastic Fest) and suddenly the Internet loses its collective mind.

“Scariest movie of the decade.” “Most original horror film in years.” “A game changer.” “A future classic.” And after a while you start to build up a resistance to it because most of the time the movie doesn’t live up to the insane hype machine that starts churning months before the thing even hits theaters.

And that is absolutely the case with Obsession, the new supernatural horror film written, directed, and edited by Curry Barker, which has been receiving nonstop praise ever since it premiered at TIFF last fall.

People have been going nuts over this movie for months. I missed the press screening because I had other stuff going on, so I finally caught it during an afternoon matinee on opening day after hearing all this endless chatter about how it was one of the best horror movies of the year, one of the funniest horror movies of the year, one of the bloodiest horror movies of the year, and that Curry Barker was this brilliant new horror voice destined to become the next big thing.

And honestly? Public Enemy said it best decades ago: don’t believe the hype.

Now, to be fair, Obsession is not a terrible movie. I’ve seen much worse horror films this year already. But it is absolutely not the groundbreaking masterpiece people have been making it out to be. In fact, the biggest problem with the movie is that there is not one original bone in its body.

This is derivative horror filmmaking from top to bottom. Every single idea in this movie has been done before, and done better, by other filmmakers.

The premise itself is basically the oldest supernatural cautionary tale in the book. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a shy, awkward music-store employee hopelessly in love with his best friend and co-worker Nikki, played by Inde Navarrette.

Bear finds a magical object called the “One Wish Willow” in a creepy occult shop. You make a wish, snap the wooden piece in half, and the wish comes true. Bear wishes that Nikki will love him “more than anything else in the world,” and of course the wish backfires in horrific fashion because this is essentially just a modern Monkey’s Paw story dressed up in Gen Z horror aesthetics.

And by the way, Curry Barker openly admitted that the inspiration for this movie came from a Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode where Homer gets a monkey’s paw. Which is kind of hilarious because the monkey’s paw story has existed for over a century. But apparently The Simpsons was the gateway drug here.

So Nikki falls obsessively in love with Bear, but the love quickly mutates into violent supernatural possession-level insanity. She becomes clingy, unstable, horrifying, grotesque, manipulative, and increasingly dangerous.

There are dead animals, screaming fits, vomiting, urinating, self-mutilation, brutal murders, parties that spiral into chaos, and gallons of blood. Sound familiar? Yeah, because it should.

This movie feels like it was assembled from pieces of about fifteen other recent horror movies. The biggest influences are impossible to miss. Barker is very clearly ripping off the Philippou brothers’ Talk to Me and Bring Her Back. The visual style, the sound design, the sudden bursts of shocking violence, the awkward party scenes, the emotional trauma mixed with grotesque gore, all of it feels lifted from those movies.

There are scenes in Obsession that feel almost directly borrowed from Talk to Me, especially a centerpiece party sequence involving a twisted truth-or-dare style game where Nikki completely loses her mind in front of everybody.

And then there’s Parker Finn. Oh man, does Barker borrow heavily from Parker Finn. The visual compositions, the sound cues, the jump-scare rhythm, the unnerving smiling-and-staring imagery, the loud blasts of noise, the score by Rock Burwell, it all of it feels like a knockoff version of Smile and especially Smile 2, which is a vastly superior movie and one of the best horror films of the last fifteen years.

Barker doesn’t really have his own cinematic voice yet. He’s remixing other filmmakers’ work and hoping people don’t notice.

And on top of all that, there are direct nods to The Exorcist. There’s vomiting. There’s urination. There’s disturbing physical behavior. There are scenes where Nikki twists herself around the room and screams in ways that are absolutely channeling Regan MacNeil. The movie just keeps pulling from better horror films over and over again.

Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t moments that work. There absolutely are. Some of the gore gags are genuinely funny. There’s a dead-cat subplot that leads to one scene that got a huge laugh out of the audience I saw it with.

The centerpiece party sequence is entertaining even if it’s derivative. Andy Richter shows up as the music-store owner and delivers a couple of funny deadpan lines.

There are a handful of moments where the movie touches on something genuinely interesting involving toxic relationships, emotional manipulation, misogyny, and the ways men can selfishly exploit vulnerable women while pretending they’re in love.

There are scenes where Bear realizes Nikki is clearly psychologically and supernaturally unraveling… and yet he continues sleeping with her because his fantasy has technically come true. That’s actually interesting.

The movie briefly brushes up against ideas about abusive dynamics and emotional selfishness. But every single time the movie threatens to become thoughtful or profound, Barker immediately undercuts it with screaming, blood splatter, head smashing, or some cheap joke. The movie never commits to the deeper ideas.

And honestly, what saves the movie from being completely forgettable are the two lead performances, both of which are terrific.

Michael Johnston does a really good job as Bear because he has to play an enormous emotional range. He starts as this lonely, awkward, heartbroken guy mourning his dead cat and pining after his best friend, but then he slowly transforms into someone who becomes terrified, selfish, guilty, panicked, manipulative, and emotionally shattered as the consequences of his wish spiral out of control.

Especially in the last fifteen minutes (where the movie becomes completely ridiculous and over-the-top) Johnston somehow manages to ground the insanity emotionally. He’s very good.

But the standout here without question is Inde Navarrette. She is fantastic in this movie. Absolutely fantastic. She is operating on a completely different level than the material deserves. She’s funny, creepy, heartbreaking, terrifying, bizarre, sympathetic, and physically fearless.

She has to swing wildly between vulnerable sweetness and total supernatural madness, and she absolutely commits. There are moments where she’s genuinely unsettling. There are moments where she’s hilarious. There are moments where she’s deeply sad. It’s a remarkably strong performance in a movie that frankly doesn’t deserve her.

This actress has a huge future. Both leads do, honestly. I can’t wait to see what Michael Johnston and especially Inde Navarrette do next. I just hope the next thing they do is with filmmakers who actually have original ideas.

Because Curry Barker? I don’t get the hype. I really don’t. There’s already talk about him getting huge franchise jobs and possibly directing a new Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Nightmare on Elm Street. And honestly, I hope that doesn’t happen.

If this movie proves anything, it’s that Barker is really good at copying the style of other filmmakers. But that’s not the same thing as having your own voice.

So yes, there are a few laughs. There are a few good gore moments. There are two terrific lead performances. But at the end of the day, Obsession is just another derivative 2020s horror movie assembled from pieces of better horror movies.

You’ve seen this before. You’ve seen it done better. And despite all the endless hype, that’s exactly why I can’t recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️

3) IS GOD IS

There are movies that wear their influences on their sleeve, and then there are movies that practically tattoo their influences across their forehead with a Sharpie while screaming, “Hey! Remember Kill Bill? Remember grindhouse movies? Remember blaxploitation? Remember Tarantino?”

And Is God Is, the feature directing debut from playwright Aleshea Harris, falls squarely into that second category. This is one of those movies that thinks volume equals originality, that camera tricks equal style, and that screaming dialogue and buckets of blood somehow automatically add up to depth. They do not.

What’s fascinating is that this is the second movie in about two weeks that feels trapped in the aesthetic leftovers of the early 2000s, back when every filmmaker on earth was trying desperately to imitate Quentin Tarantino after Pulp Fiction changed independent cinema forever.

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed RZA’s One Spoon of Chocolate, which was basically a cosplay tribute to kung-fu movies, blaxploitation films, revenge thrillers, and grindhouse cinema filtered through somebody who watched too many DVDs and misunderstood all of them.

Well, now we get the female-centered version of that same exact impulse with Is God Is. Different perspective, same problem.

Based on Harris’ stage play from 2018, Is God Is tells the story of twin sisters Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, who are horribly scarred from a childhood fire caused by their abusive father.

The movie opens with Racine brutally beating the hell out of a bully for insulting her sister, and that immediately establishes the dynamic: one sister is rage and violence, the other is quieter and more hesitant.

They are summoned to visit their estranged dying mother, played by Vivica A. Fox (hey, she was in Kill Bill...remember??) in a performance pitched somewhere between Greek tragedy and community theater fever dream. Wrapped in blankets, burned beyond recognition, the mother (referred to as “God”) gives her daughters one final command: “Make your daddy dead. Real dead.”

And off they go into a Southern Gothic revenge odyssey full of telepathic conversations, weird editing gimmicks, grindhouse-style title cards, blood-soaked confrontations, and increasingly over-the-top acts of vengeance.

Their father, known only as “The Man,” is played by Sterling K. Brown, who discovers that his past has finally come calling. He’s remarried now, living with a new wife played by Janelle Monáe (who, by the way, is easily the best thing in this movie by several thousand miles) and their children. Naturally, all hell breaks loose.

Now look, I understand what Harris is going for here. This is supposed to be a heightened revenge fantasia. It’s trying to fuse Afropunk aesthetics with spaghetti westerns, Southern Gothic melodrama, exploitation cinema, theatrical performance, and surrealism.

It wants to be this bold, confrontational fever dream about inherited trauma, cycles of violence, misogyny, abuse, race, rage, and vengeance. I get it. I really do. But the problem is that almost none of it works.

The movie constantly mistakes imitation for invention. Every frame feels borrowed from another, better movie. There’s Kill Bill all over this thing. There’s Tarantino everywhere.

There’s 1970s exploitation cinema all over it. There’s grindhouse stylization, blaxploitation influence, western iconography, cartoon violence, theatrical monologues, split screens, hyperactive editing, weird zooms, pop-up text, bizarre camera angles, and none of it feels organic.

It feels desperately assembled. Like a filmmaker frantically throwing visual tricks at the screen hoping you won’t notice how thin the material underneath actually is.

And the visual style becomes exhausting after a while. There’s so much camera trickery, so much LOOK HOW STYLIZED THIS IS filmmaking, that it becomes distracting instead of immersive. Every scene screams for attention. Every edit wants applause. The movie is so busy trying to convince you how cool it is that it forgets to actually be compelling.

Now, I will say this: the prosthetic makeup effects are very good. The burn scars are convincingly horrifying. Some of the violence lands with genuine impact. There are moments where the brutality is so over-the-top that it gets a shocked laugh.

And there’s something admirable about the complete sincerity of the performances. Nobody’s winking at the audience here. Everybody is fully committed to this material.

But commitment alone doesn’t save bad writing.

The performances are wildly uneven. Vivica A. Fox goes so enormous and theatrical that she practically wanders in from another movie entirely. Sterling K. Brown, who is one of the best actors working today, tries desperately to inject some life into an underwritten role by leaning into the grotesque absurdity of the character.

He goes huge because there’s really nowhere else to go with material this shallow. Kara Young and Mallori Johnson are fine, but their characters are mostly symbolic constructs instead of actual people.

And then there’s Janelle Monáe, who walks away with the entire movie. She’s magnetic. She has presence, mystery, danger, charisma. She feels like she wandered in from a much smarter, much better film and decided to class up the joint for a few scenes before leaving the rest of the cast behind. Every second she’s on screen the movie suddenly comes alive.

But one great performance can’t save a movie this derivative.

And derivative is really the key word here. Because Is God Is ultimately feels like a collection of aesthetic choices assembled from cooler movies made by better filmmakers.

It feels late. It feels dated. It feels like a movie that would’ve played as “edgy” in 2004 during the peak of post-Pulp Fiction indie crime/revenge movie mania. But here in 2026? It just feels tired.

And again, I grew up watching the real thing. I saw blaxploitation movies in grindhouse theaters in downtown Chicago with predominantly Black audiences when I was a kid. I watched those movies in their original context.

I understand their energy, their anger, their humor, their political undercurrents, their rough-around-the-edges brilliance. Is God Is doesn’t understand those movies. It imitates their surface aesthetics without understanding what made them vital in the first place.

So what you’re left with is a loud, self-conscious, wildly inconsistent revenge thriller that mistakes style for substance and chaos for power. It’s annoying more often than it’s engaging.

It’s derivative more often than it’s original. And despite the presence of some genuinely talented people, it becomes one of the most frustrating and irritating movies of the year.

Just like One Spoon of Chocolate before it, this is another knockoff of better films pretending to be groundbreaking while borrowing every single trick from somebody else’s playbook.

And honestly, after sitting through both of these movies within two weeks of each other, I’m really hoping this particular trend dies quickly. Because Is God Is is not just bad. It’s exhausting. - ⭐️1/2

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