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CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 5-29-26

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, May 29th, 2026.


I didn’t know much about the Backrooms web series before seeing this movie. I had heard about it in passing. I knew it was a YouTube thing, a Creepypasta thing, part of this whole Liminal horror movement that has exploded online over the last several years.


I knew people were obsessed with it. I knew it had this cult following built around these weird, empty yellow hallways and this sort of unsettling feeling of being trapped in places that look vaguely familiar but completely wrong. But I had never watched the videos. I never really dove into the mythology.


So when A24 announced that they were making a feature film version directed by Kane Parsons (the guy who created the original web series) I was curious, but cautious. Well, let me tell you something: Backrooms is one of the most astonishing feature debuts I have seen in years.


Not “good for a young filmmaker.” Not “impressive considering the budget.” I mean legitimately astonishing. One of the best horror films of the year. One of the best science fiction films of the year. One of the best movies of the year, period.


And the most unbelievable part of all of this is that Kane Parsons is twenty years old.


Twenty.


That fact is almost impossible to process while you’re watching this movie because there is a level of confidence and control here that filmmakers twice or three times his age never achieve.


Especially in horror. Especially now, in an era where horror movies are coming out practically every week and so many of them feel interchangeable, derivative, and assembled from bits and pieces of better films.


We just recently had another horror movie made by a very young filmmaker, Obsession, which everybody seems to think is the second coming for some reason. I thought it was wildly overrated and completely derivative.


You could point to five or six better movies that it was shamelessly ripping off at every turn. It felt like a young filmmaker showing all of his influences without yet understanding how to develop his own voice.


Kane Parsons, meanwhile, already has a voice. A distinct one. A disturbing one. An original one. Backrooms doesn’t feel like a copy of anything else. It feels wholly unique. And that alone is enough to make it stand out in modern horror.


The movie stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark, a failed architect and furniture store owner who accidentally discovers a portal to another dimension hidden beneath his showroom. This alternate dimension (the Backrooms) is an endless maze of ugly yellow office spaces, fluorescent lights, empty hallways, industrial corridors, strange rooms that stretch on forever, and spaces that feel simultaneously artificial and deeply personal.


Clark becomes obsessed with it. He starts disappearing into these rooms, documenting them, wandering deeper and deeper into this impossible labyrinth until eventually his therapist, Dr. Mary Kline, played beautifully by Renate Reinsve, follows him inside.


Now on the surface, yes, this is a creepy sci-fi horror movie about weird alternate dimensions and terrifying entities lurking in impossible spaces. And on that level alone, the movie absolutely works. It is creepy as hell. The imagery is extraordinary. The jump scares are fantastic. The tension is relentless. There are sequences in this movie that are genuinely nerve-shredding.


But what makes Backrooms so remarkable is that underneath all of the horror and all of the weirdness, it is fundamentally a movie about trauma. This is a movie about the architecture of the human mind.


The Backrooms themselves are essentially manifestations of memory, repression, guilt, loneliness, addiction, depression, childhood trauma, and emotional decay. Clark is an alcoholic. His marriage has collapsed. His life has collapsed. He keeps sabotaging relationships. He keeps hurting people.


There are repeated references throughout the movie to the idea that he is “wired wrong,” that he exists in a loop where he keeps repeating destructive patterns over and over again. The deeper he goes into the Backrooms, the deeper we go into his psychology.


And then Dr. Kline enters the space and her own trauma begins surfacing as well. Through flashbacks and dreamlike sequences, we learn about her mentally unstable mother, her childhood home being demolished, the emotional scars she carries with her. She’s a therapist who sells self-help tapes and tries to help people heal, but she herself is emotionally hollowed out and disconnected.


The movie becomes this incredible psychological excavation where the Backrooms function as physical manifestations of damaged minds. That alone would make the movie impressive.


But then Parsons layers in this whole corporate conspiracy subplot involving ASYNC, this mysterious corporation experimenting with the Backrooms as a means of solving overpopulation and real estate shortages.


At first, this material feels slightly jarring because the movie is so emotionally intimate and psychologically focused. Suddenly we’re cutting to retro corporate training videos, scientists in hazmat suits, government secrecy, and strange industrial experiments. But eventually it clicks.


Because corporations invade everything. Even our minds. Even our trauma.

And suddenly the movie expands beyond personal horror into commentary about capitalism, corporate exploitation, bureaucracy, technology, surveillance, and eventually even artificial intelligence.


One of the smartest things Parsons does is set the movie in 1990. Which is incredible when you remember again that this filmmaker is twenty years old. This movie takes place years before he was even born, and yet he recreates the analog textures of that period beautifully.


The old video cameras, the grainy footage, the primitive technology, it all adds enormously to the atmosphere. The older technology makes everything feel more vulnerable and isolated. And visually? This movie is unbelievable.


The production design is extraordinary. The yellow rooms become increasingly abstract and surreal the deeper the characters travel. Furniture melts into floors. Corridors stretch unnaturally. Entire sequences look like moving surrealist paintings. Parsons combines practical sets, digital effects, Blender-generated imagery, and traditional cinematography in ways that feel seamless and genuinely innovative. There are images in this movie that I will not forget.


There’s a horrifying dinner sequence late in the film featuring these grotesque distorted figures sitting in this impossible room that feels like a nightmare version of a family memory. There’s a scene where a character is lowered by rope into a lower level of the Backrooms that is almost unbearably suspenseful.


There are creatures lurking in shadows that barely register visually but still become terrifying because of how Parsons stages them. And the sound design, my God. The buzzing fluorescent lights alone become psychologically oppressive.


What really floored me though was how emotionally heavy the movie is. There’s sadness hanging over every frame of this film. Clark drinking alone inside his furniture store. Dr. Kline’s inability to connect with other people. The endless looping spaces reflecting emotional loops people can’t escape from. It all builds toward something that is genuinely moving in addition to being terrifying.


And then there’s the sly AI commentary layered underneath everything.


The Backrooms themselves function almost like an AI-generated memory of reality. Familiar but distorted. Incomplete. Wrong in subtle ways. The rooms feel like a machine trying to recreate human spaces without fully understanding them.


Parsons is making observations here about technology, memory, and perception that go way beyond what you normally expect from horror films, let alone from a twenty-year-old filmmaker making his first feature. This is not just a creepy internet meme stretched into a movie.


This is a deeply thoughtful, psychologically rich, visually groundbreaking horror film made by someone who clearly understands cinema on a profound level. And on the most basic level? It’s just terrifying.


I was locked into this thing from beginning to end. I genuinely had no idea where it was going next, and after more than 40 years of watching horror movies, that is incredibly rare.


The movie constantly surprised me. The imagery overwhelmed me. The atmosphere got under my skin. It’s suspenseful, sad, unsettling, weird, funny in strange ways, emotionally devastating at times, and completely hypnotic.


I’ve already seen it twice. I plan to see it again.


Backrooms is one of the most remarkable feature debuts I’ve seen in years and it announces Kane Parsons as one of the most exciting young filmmakers working today.


If this is what he’s doing at twenty years old, then honestly, the possibilities for this guy are endless. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️


One of the things that I always find fascinating is when a stand-up comedian makes the jump to movies. Sometimes it works spectacularly well. You get somebody like Albert Brooks or Steve Martin or Richard Pryor or Eddie Murphy and they become genuine movie stars and really interesting actors.


Sometimes you get somebody who is funny on stage, funny in a club, funny doing stand-up, but when they are asked to carry a feature film, it just completely falls apart. And after seeing The Breadwinner, I can now officially say that Nate Bargatze belongs very firmly in that second category.


Now look, I never had a strong opinion about Nate Bargatze before this movie. I’d seen some of his stand-up. It’s fine. Mildly amusing. He’s clearly got an audience. He sells out arenas. He hosted the Emmys and did a perfectly serviceable job.


The times he hosted Saturday Night Live, he was okay. There’s that George Washington sketch that’s become kind of a modern recurring classic and it works because of his dry delivery and his aw-shucks demeanor.


Fine. I never disliked the guy. I never loved him either. I just sort of existed neutrally with Nate Bargatze somewhere in the comedy universe.


Well, after The Breadwinner, I now have a very strong opinion of Nate Bargatze: I do not want him making movies anymore. This thing is awful.


Directed by Eric Appel, who made the genuinely funny and inventive Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, and co-written by Bargatze himself, The Breadwinner is basically a shameless, stale, moldy, reheated remake of Mr. Mom. That’s really all it is.


You take the exact same premise from the 1983 Stan Dragoti comedy written by John Hughes, remove whatever charm that movie had, flatten all the characters, suck out every ounce of personality, update it badly for 2026, and then jam it full of product placement and sitcom-level chaos. That’s the movie.


Bargatze plays Nate Wilcox, a wildly successful Toyota salesman in Nashville. He’s the king of the lot. He sells the most cars. He gets Titans tickets. He’s beloved at work. Meanwhile his wife Katie, played by Mandy Moore (who is slumming here in a way that honestly feels charitable) invents a product that gets picked up on Shark Tank. Literally. The actual Shark Tank people are in the movie. Lori Greiner shows up as herself because apparently this movie needed even more corporate branding smeared all over it.


Katie gets an opportunity to travel overseas and oversee manufacturing of her invention, which means Nate has to stay home and take care of the kids. And here’s where the movie immediately collapses.


The entire premise depends on the idea that this grown man, this husband, this father of three daughters, has absolutely no idea how to function as a human being. And I don’t mean “he struggles with parenting.” No. I mean he literally doesn’t know how groceries work. He doesn’t know what eggs are. He doesn’t know how milk works.


He doesn’t know how laundry functions. He apparently has never seen a towel before. He doesn’t know the names of his daughters’ schools. He has no idea who their friends are. He cannot cook eggs. He wanders around grocery stores like an alien who crash-landed from another galaxy and was handed a shopping cart.


And the movie expects this to be charming.


This character would have been outdated in 1983. In 2026 he feels like a fossilized sitcom stereotype dug out of a tar pit. Even old television shows like Father Knows Best or My Three Sons had more nuance than this nonsense. This guy is so catastrophically clueless that it becomes impossible to buy into the movie at all. He’s not lovable. He’s not relatable.


He’s just an idiot.


And Bargatze, unfortunately, cannot carry the material. Or elevate it. Or really do anything with it. His performance is basically just stand-up delivery with widened eyes. Every line reading feels the same.


There’s no modulation, no character development, no emotional texture. He mugs. He stares blankly. He reacts loudly. That’s the performance.


Now to be fair, the movie does have talented people scattered throughout it trying desperately to survive this thing.


Mandy Moore is terrific because Mandy Moore is always terrific. She’s wasted, but she at least behaves like she’s in a real movie. Colin Jost gets a few laughs as an overly enthusiastic stay-at-home dad who keeps trying to be friends with Nate.


Kumail Nanjiani shows up as Nate’s rival car salesman and gets a couple of decent moments. Martin Herlihy, surprisingly, gets probably the biggest laughs in the movie as a food delivery guy.


And somehow (unbelievably) this movie achieves the impossible: it makes Will Forte unfunny.


I didn’t think that could happen. I genuinely did not think it was possible to put Will Forte in a movie and not get laughs. He’s one of the funniest people alive. But here he plays a roof repairman who becomes entangled in the family chaos and somehow even he can’t make this material work.


The only consistently good thing in the entire movie are the three young actresses playing the daughters. Stella Grace Fitzgerald, Birdie Borria, and especially Charlotte Ann Tucker as the youngest daughter are all genuinely charming.


They actually have chemistry together. They feel believable as sisters. They deliver their lines naturally. They are, without question, the best performances in the movie. Unfortunately, they are trapped inside this disaster.


For about the first hour, the movie is just recycled sitcom junk. Wet towel jokes. Grocery store jokes. Cooking disaster jokes. Dad doesn’t know laundry jokes. Endless scenes of Bargatze staring at eggs like they’re radioactive artifacts from another planet. It’s all stuff you’ve seen before and done much, much better in other movies and television shows.


Then the last half hour arrives and the movie completely loses its mind. A horse enters the plot. I’m serious.


There’s suddenly a horse running around destroying the house. Walls collapse. Cars crash. Nate rides the horse. Parties erupt. Children revolt. The family starts swapping houses around to fool Mandy Moore before she returns home with the Shark Tank people to livestream the product launch from the house. The movie becomes loud, chaotic, idiotic mush.


Now weirdly enough, once the movie goes completely off the rails, at least something is finally happening. Up until then it’s just stale sitcom recycling. Once the horse starts destroying the house, the movie at least becomes actively insane instead of merely boring. It’s terrible. Completely terrible. But at least you’re awake.


And then comes the final insult.


After the movie ends, during the credits, we are treated to several uninterrupted minutes of Nate Bargatze doing stand-up comedy. Not the character. Nate Bargatze himself.


Performing routines about the exact material we just sat through in the movie. The eggs. The milk. The horse. The laundry. We literally watch the jokes get repeated again during the credits, now in stand-up form.


It is one of the most bizarrely egotistical post-credit sequences I’ve seen in a comedy.

It’s like the movie stops and says, “Hey, remember all those unfunny scenes you just watched? Well here they are again!” And by that point I had absolutely had it.


The amount of product placement in this movie is also astonishing. Shark Tank gets endless promotion. Walmart gets praised. Toyota basically financed the film with how much screen time their vehicles get. And the Tennessee Titans?


My God. I have never seen a football team receive this much accidental advertising in a feature film. Titans shirts, Titans posters, Titans games, Titans stadium scenes, this thing feels sponsored by the AFC South.


By the end, the movie pretends to learn lessons about family and parenting and appreciating your children and work-life balance and blah blah blah. But none of it lands because the movie itself is so hollow, so recycled, so unbelievably outdated that it never earns any emotional payoff.


The Breadwinner feels like a movie made by people who haven’t watched a modern comedy in 25 years. It’s loud, stale, obvious, derivative, badly written, badly structured, and anchored by a lead performance that simply does not work.


Again, the kids are good. Mandy Moore deserves better. A couple of supporting performances squeeze out a laugh or two. But this is a terrible knockoff of Mr. Mom wrapped inside product placement and sitcom chaos and topped off with an unbelievably self-indulgent stand-up reel during the credits.


I didn’t really have an opinion on Nate Bargatze before this movie.


Now I do. - ⭐️1/2


So here’s a perfect example of why I still love doing this after more than forty years of reviewing movies. Every once in a while a film comes along that completely proves you wrong.


You walk into it with preconceived notions, maybe even a little bit of an attitude, and the movie just grabs you by the throat and says, “Nope, you got this one wrong.” And honestly, I love when that happens because it reminds you not to get too cynical.


That was absolutely my experience with Tuner.


This was not a movie I was particularly excited about seeing. The premise sounded okay, maybe mildly interesting at best, it is a thriller about a piano tuner with hyperacusis who becomes a safecracker. Fine. Whatever.


And the director, Daniel Roher, is primarily known for documentaries, including one earlier this year called The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocalopimist, which I really disliked. I thought that documentary was sloppy, self-important, and irritatingly narrated, particularly because Roher inserted himself into it in ways that drove me crazy.


So absolutely nothing about this project suggested to me that I was about to watch one of the most emotionally satisfying and suspenseful crime thrillers of the year.


But wow, was I wrong.


Tuner is terrific. It’s smart, beautifully acted, emotionally involving, incredibly suspenseful, technically impressive, and anchored by what I genuinely think is one of the best performances of the year from Leo Woodall. And I’ll tell you right now: this is the movie where Leo Woodall officially announces himself as a major actor.


Now, he’s been good before. Anybody who saw The White Lotus remembers him immediately because he played one of the biggest jerks imaginable in that show, and he was terrific at it.


He’s been good in One Day, Prime Target, the Bridget Jones movie...he’s clearly talented. But this? This is another level entirely. This is a real movie-star performance combined with genuinely nuanced character work.


The setup itself is deceptively simple. Niki White was once this gifted piano prodigy with an incredible future ahead of him, but he develops hyperacusis, a condition that makes ordinary sound painfully amplified. Every little noise becomes unbearable.


He wears protective ear coverings constantly, can no longer perform publicly, and instead works as a piano tuner in New York alongside Harry Horowitz, an old-school tuner played magnificently by Dustin Hoffman, who was friends with Niki’s late father.


Now first of all, Dustin Hoffman is having an absolute blast in this movie. And honestly, it’s wonderful to watch. He’s funny, foul-mouthed, warm, charming, cranky, human, and completely believable.


Every line reading feels lived in. Every scene he’s in has this wonderful loose energy to it. It’s probably the most relaxed and entertaining Hoffman performance in years. He gives the movie its soul.


So one day Harry forgets the combination to a client’s safe, and Niki (because of his heightened hearing) realizes he can hear the microscopic clicks inside the locking mechanism. Suddenly he discovers he has this incredible ability to crack safes. Which sounds ridiculous when you say it out loud.


Honestly, the plot of this movie has no business working as well as it does. If you wrote this premise down on paper (a hearing-disabled piano tuner becomes a criminal safecracker to pay medical bills) it sounds like one of those mid-level thrillers that would come and go in theaters in two weeks. But Roher and co-writer Robert Ramsey somehow make all of it work because the movie is grounded emotionally from beginning to end.


That emotional grounding comes largely from Niki’s relationships. His relationship with Harry and Harry’s wife Marla, played beautifully by Tovah Feldshuh, is incredibly touching. You really feel the history and affection there.


Harry becomes sick after suffering a major heart attack, the hospital bills pile up, and Niki (desperate to help the people who basically became family to him) accepts an offer from Uri, a dangerous criminal played by Lior Raz, to use his safecracking skills professionally.

And that’s where the movie shifts into full crime-thriller mode.


The heist sequences and safecracking scenes are outstanding. They’re tense, detailed, and beautifully directed. The movie actually reminded me at times of Michael Mann’s Thief. There’s that same attention to process, to professionalism, to the mechanics of crime.


It also weirdly reminded me a little of Straight Time, the old Dustin Hoffman crime film, because there’s a gritty humanity running underneath all the criminal activity.


And then there’s the romance.


Havana Rose Liu is terrific as Ruthie, a driven pianist and composer who becomes emotionally involved with Niki. The chemistry between Woodall and Liu is excellent. It feels authentic and fragile and complicated. You root for them immediately.


Their scenes together have a tenderness that gives the movie real emotional stakes. Without that relationship, Tuner would just be another slick crime movie. But because you care so much about these characters, every dangerous situation actually matters.


And man, some of these sequences are incredibly intense.


There’s a fantastic sequence involving Korean gangsters and a cryptocurrency password hidden in a safe that becomes genuinely terrifying. The uncle showing up with the gun, forcing Niki to eat the password, the escalating chaos, it’s brutal and suspenseful.


There are scenes where Niki’s hearing condition is weaponized against him using air horns and overwhelming sound attacks that are almost unbearable to watch because the movie does such an incredible job placing you inside his perspective.


The sound design in this movie is phenomenal.


And it has to be, because the entire film depends on us understanding what hyperacusis feels like. Roher absolutely nails that aspect. The sound mixing, the amplification of ordinary noises, the way sounds become violent and overwhelming, it is incredibly intense. You feel physically uncomfortable during some scenes. It’s one of the best uses of sound as subjective experience that I’ve heard in a long time.


Now yes, people are inevitably going to compare this movie to Baby Driver. And I get it. Both movies involve protagonists with hearing-related conditions who become involved in crime while navigating romantic relationships.


Sure. The comparisons are there. But honestly, being compared to Baby Driver is a compliment because Edgar Wright’s movie is one of the best and most entertaining action films of the past twenty years.


The difference is that Tuner takes a much more grounded, emotional, character-driven path. Baby Driver is all about kinetic energy, style, and rhythm. Tuner is quieter, sadder, more intimate. It’s more about damaged people trying to survive emotionally while getting dragged into terrible situations.


And somehow even the movie’s biggest coincidence works.


There’s a subplot involving a stolen watch tied to Holocaust survivors and Jean Reno’s composer character that, on paper, absolutely should derail the movie. If you described it to somebody, it would sound way too convenient and melodramatic.


But because the performances are so strong and the movie earns its emotional beats, it completely works. I bought every second of it. That’s the thing about Tuner. You care.


You care about Niki. You care about Ruthie. You care about Harry. You want these people to survive. You want them to find peace. So when Niki gets tortured, when his hearing disability is exploited, when he’s physically damaged, it’s genuinely upsetting.


My heart was pounding during several sequences because Woodall makes you feel every ounce of this guy’s desperation and pain. And then there’s the ending.


The entire movie builds toward the idea that Niki was once this extraordinary pianist, and we spend the whole film hearing about his talent without ever truly seeing it. Then finally, at the end, after everything he’s endured physically and emotionally, he sits down at the piano and plays. And it’s beautiful.


It’s emotional without being manipulative. It’s cathartic. It’s earned. And then the movie lands on one final line (a funny, moving, perfect final line) that wraps the entire film together beautifully. I absolutely loved this movie.


It’s a terrific crime thriller, a really effective safecracking movie, a genuinely moving romance, and a strong character study all rolled into one. Daniel Roher completely surprised me here.


This is only one of his first narrative features, and he directs the hell out of it. Tight pacing, strong performances, excellent use of sound, terrific suspense, and it’s incredibly assured filmmaking.


But above all else, this movie belongs to Leo Woodall. This is a major step forward for him as an actor. A star-making performance. He carries the emotional weight of the movie completely, and because of him, every moment lands harder.


One of the biggest surprises of the year and absolutely one of the better films of the year. I was completely won over by Tuner. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️


Anthony Maras’s Pressure is one of those movies that, when you first hear about it, you kind of laugh at the premise. I know I did. A World War II thriller about weather forecasts? A D-Day movie centered around meteorologists arguing over barometric pressure? Based on a stage play?


Honestly, when I first read the synopsis, I thought, “There is absolutely no way this works.” I mean, D-Day has been portrayed so many times in movies and television that it practically has its own cinematic subgenre at this point.


The Longest Day. Saving Private Ryan. The Big Red One. Band of Brothers. Hell, even movies like Overlord use D-Day as a launching pad for their stories. We know the history. We know the outcome. We know the stakes. So how do you make a suspenseful war drama out of weather reports?


Well…surprisingly, Pressure actually works far more often than it doesn’t.


Not perfectly. Not by a long shot. But enough that I walked out of the theater kind of impressed that Anthony Maras managed to pull this thing off at all.


Maras, who directed the really terrific Hotel Mumbai back in 2018, clearly knows how to build tension in enclosed spaces and create a ticking-clock atmosphere, and that’s exactly what saves this movie.


Structurally, it’s very tight. The whole thing unfolds over the 72 hours leading up to D-Day, and because it originated as a stage play by David Haig, there’s a claustrophobic, dialogue-heavy quality to it that actually benefits the material.


Most of the movie is people standing around maps, staring at weather charts, arguing over forecasts, and trying to decide whether or not thousands upon thousands of men are about to die in the English Channel. And somehow, a lot of it is genuinely suspenseful.


The movie opens with the aftermath of Exercise Tiger, the disastrous D-Day rehearsal that killed over 700 soldiers. Right away, Maras establishes the pressure hanging over everybody involved, particularly Dwight D. Eisenhower, played here by Brendan Fraser in a truly fine performance. Fraser is terrific in this movie.


There’s a heaviness to him, a weariness, but also an enormous sense of responsibility. You really feel the weight of command on his shoulders. He understands that if this invasion goes wrong, history changes completely.


Into this situation walks James Stagg, played by Andrew Scott. Stagg is the British meteorologist brought in to coordinate the weather forecasts for the invasion, and according to his readings, the weather is going to be catastrophic.


Everybody else (particularly the confident American forecaster Irving Krick, played by Chris Messina) is predicting clear skies and smooth sailing. Stagg says they’re all wrong. Now, here’s where the movie almost shoots itself in the foot.


Andrew Scott gives a good performance. The problem is that for the first two-thirds of the movie, Stagg is such an unbelievably unpleasant human being that it becomes difficult to care about him. He’s rude, arrogant, confrontational, dismissive, antisocial, and just generally acts like a complete jerk to everybody around him.


He humiliates people. He talks down to them. He’s constantly angry. And the movie takes way too long explaining why he behaves this way. So for a huge chunk of the film, you’re sitting there going, “Why is this guy such an asshole?”


Chris Messina’s character, Irving Krick, actually comes across as far more likable initially. He’s confident, charismatic, upbeat, and his previous forecasts have apparently helped Eisenhower succeed before. So when Andrew Scott barges in acting like everybody else is an idiot, it creates an immediate resistance, not just among the characters, but with the audience too.


Eventually, the movie reveals that Stagg’s wife is pregnant, hospitalized, and potentially dead after bombings back home, and suddenly his emotional state starts making sense.


Suddenly the pressure he’s under becomes personal. But that revelation comes way too late. The movie waits until deep into the second half to humanize him, and by then the damage is kind of done.


Still, once that emotional connection finally clicks into place, Scott becomes much more compelling.


The supporting cast really carries the film during those rougher stretches. Kerry Condon is excellent as Kay Summersby, Eisenhower’s assistant and confidant. She brings warmth and humanity into what could have been a very cold procedural. Her scenes with Fraser are terrific.


Damian Lewis is outstanding as Bernard Montgomery, giving the character intelligence and urgency without turning him into a caricature. And Chris Messina is really good too, even though the screenplay occasionally reduces him to “the overly optimistic American guy.”


What surprised me most is how well the movie maintains tension despite the inherently ridiculous premise. Because let’s be honest: this is still a war movie about weather forecasts. People are arguing about clouds and pressure systems while maps are spread across tables. On paper, this should be unbearably dry.


But Maras directs it with real intensity. The editing is sharp. The pacing is tight. The war-room confrontations are staged effectively. There are moments where the movie almost plays like a courtroom drama or a political thriller. The stakes feel real even though we already know the historical outcome.


There’s one particularly heavy-handed scene late in the movie where Eisenhower and Stagg stand outside a church in pouring rain after everybody finally realizes Stagg was right about the storm. It’s very “SEE? HE WAS RIGHT!” in giant flashing neon letters.


The symbolism is laid on incredibly thick (it happens during a church service...get it?). But by that point, the movie has earned enough goodwill that I mostly went along with it.


And I do appreciate that the film doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s only about 100 minutes long. Thank God. I walked in expecting some sprawling three-hour World War II epic, but instead it’s compact and focused, which is exactly what this material needed.


There are also a couple of really effective battle sequences, particularly toward the end. The final D-Day material is staged very well. Even though we’ve seen these events dramatized countless times before, Maras still finds ways to make the invasion feel visceral and consequential.


Ultimately, what makes Pressure worth seeing is the cast. Watching actors this good chew through dialogue-heavy material is genuinely enjoyable. There were multiple moments during the movie where I caught myself thinking, “This should not be working as well as it is.” And yet, scene by scene, performance by performance, it mostly does.


It’s not a great movie. It has some major flaws. The central character is too unlikable for too long, the premise still occasionally borders on absurd, and some of the emotional beats are handled with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.


But the craftsmanship is solid, the performances are strong across the board, and Anthony Maras directs the hell out of it.


So yes, surprisingly enough, I’m recommending Pressure. A war movie about weather forecasts has absolutely no business being this effective, but against the odds, it mostly pulls it off. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️


Irish writer-director John Carney has really carved out his own very specific niche over the last twenty years. At this point, he’s basically created his own subgenre. Nobody quite makes movies about music and musicians the way Carney does.


His films are always deeply romantic (not necessarily in the traditional love-story sense, although there’s usually some romance involved) but romantic in the way they look at creativity itself. The act of making music. The act of collaboration. The way songs connect people emotionally. The way music can completely define periods of your life. That’s his thing.


And it all really started with Once back in 2007, which remains a lovely little miracle of a movie. Tiny budget, shot on the streets of Dublin, starring Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová from The Swell Season playing struggling musicians falling in and out of love through songwriting.


That movie just quietly snuck into theaters and became this massive word-of-mouth hit. The songs were beautiful, the performances were real and raw, and suddenly John Carney became “the music movie guy.”


Then he followed it with Begin Again, which I like quite a bit, and then Sing Street, which I absolutely adore. Sing Street is probably still my favorite of his films because it captures the excitement and desperation and imagination of being young and discovering music better than almost any movie I can think of. Then there was Flora and Son, which was another small, warm, music-centered film that worked really well.


Now we get Power Ballad, which is probably Carney’s most high-profile movie so far simply because the cast is loaded with recognizable stars. Paul Rudd. Nick Jonas. Havana Rose Liu. Jack Reynor. It’s got a much bigger commercial feel than some of his earlier work.


And while I don’t think it’s one of his best films (in fact, I’d probably say it’s his weakest music-centered movie) it’s still absolutely worth seeing because even minor John Carney still has a warmth and sincerity and love of music that elevates the material.


The premise itself is pretty straightforward. Paul Rudd plays Rick Power, an American expat living in Dublin who many years earlier gave up his dreams of rock stardom. Back in the day he was in a band called Octagon that had a little bit of buzz, but life happened.


He stayed in Ireland, got married, had kids, settled down, and now fronts a wedding band called The Bride & Groove. He’s basically accepted his role as a working musician grinding through wedding receptions and pub gigs.


Nick Jonas plays Danny Wilson, a fading former boy-band superstar desperately trying to revive his career. And honestly, casting Nick Jonas here is pretty inspired because the movie cleverly uses the audience’s real-world perception of him.


Danny is a guy who still has fame and wealth and recognition, but you can feel the panic creeping in. He knows the spotlight is fading. His manager Mac, played by Jack Reynor, is constantly screaming at him about needing a hit song to stay relevant.


One night at a wedding gig, Danny gets invited onstage with Rick’s band, and they launch into a terrific cover of Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish.” It’s one of the best scenes in the movie because Carney absolutely knows how to shoot musical performances.


The energy feels spontaneous and joyful and real. Afterwards the two guys end up drinking, smoking weed, jamming together, and talking honestly about music and failure and success and creativity. And that long guest room jam session is fantastic. Really fantastic.


That’s the movie at its best right there. Two musicians staying up all night bouncing ideas off each other, discovering melodies, sharing regrets, finding common ground through music. Carney absolutely understands creative collaboration.


The intimacy of it. The excitement of it. The vulnerability of it. Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas have wonderful chemistry in these scenes, and both actors are really terrific in the movie.


Rudd especially surprised me a little bit because this is a very restrained performance. He’s not leaning into the sort of goofy, self-aware comedy persona that Judd Apatow turned into a career for him. This is quieter work. Sadder work. More grounded. There’s genuine melancholy underneath Rick’s easygoing exterior. You really feel the regret of a guy who wonders whether he gave up too soon.


And Nick Jonas is honestly kind of a revelation here. I’ve always thought he was perfectly fine as an actor, but he brings a lot more depth and sadness to Danny than the script necessarily gives him. Because the truth is, the screenplay itself is actually pretty generic.


A lot of these characters are thinly written archetypes. Danny’s sleazy manager is mostly just a loud guy yelling business jargon and threats. Rick’s supportive wife is underwritten.


The loyal best friend Sandy, played by Peter McDonald, is pretty stock. Havana Rose Liu (who’s excellent in everything lately) is mostly wasted in a small role as someone working inside Danny’s operation in Los Angeles. Even Danny himself isn’t written with tremendous complexity.


What elevates the movie are the performances and the music. And the music is really good.


That’s always Carney’s secret weapon. The songs matter in his movies. They’re catchy. Emotional. Memorable. The musical sequences have authenticity to them. Whether it’s the wedding-band performances of cheesy reception staples like “Celebration,” the intimate songwriting sessions, or Danny’s giant pop-star concerts, the musical material comes alive beautifully.


And the central song itself (“How to Write a Song Without You”) is legitimately terrific. It’s a genuinely strong pop song. You completely buy why it would become a giant hit. Watching the evolution of the song from this raw acoustic ballad Rick plays in a guest room to the polished massive pop anthem Danny eventually releases is one of the smartest things in the movie.


I’ll tell you right now: that song is getting nominated for Best Original Song at the Oscars. Absolutely. And deservedly so.


Where the movie starts wobbling badly is the third act.


After Rick realizes Danny has essentially stolen the song and cut him out completely, the movie shifts into this legal and emotional confrontation storyline. Rick becomes obsessed with reclaiming ownership and proving his artistic worth.


That part actually works conceptually. There’s something interesting there about aging musicians, regret, artistic validation, and the difference between authentic creativity and corporate pop machinery. But then the movie starts getting sillier and sillier.


Rick and Sandy fly to Los Angeles to confront Danny directly, and the whole climax completely loses the warm, grounded tone that Carney usually handles so beautifully.


There’s a ridiculous sequence at a giant Hollywood house party where Rick confronts Danny in a hot tub, which somehow escalates into a physical fight where the two of them literally tumble off a hillside and roll around in the dirt punching each other while arguing over songwriting credits. It's absurd. And not in a good way.


It feels like a completely different movie suddenly crashed into this one. The emotional realism disappears. The characters start behaving like sitcom caricatures. The confrontation goes on way too long. Police show up. Arrests happen. It’s all just incredibly contrived and kind of dumb.


And honestly, for a while there, the movie completely loses me.


But then (because this is John Carney and he fundamentally understands emotional payoff better than most filmmakers) the last five minutes rescue the whole thing. There’s a beautiful final moment involving Rick’s daughter Aja, played wonderfully by Beth Fallon, who’s actually one of the better-written characters in the movie.


Earlier scenes between Rick and his daughter are terrific because she sees her dad as hopelessly uncool while he desperately tries to convince her he once represented something edgy and important musically. Those scenes are funny and sweet and painfully relatable.


And in the final moments, Carney finds a really lovely emotional resolution through that character that suddenly reconnects the movie to all the warmth and humanity that had temporarily disappeared during the ridiculous climax.


So by the time the credits rolled, I found myself forgiving a lot.


Because even though Power Ballad is messy and occasionally generic and sometimes frustratingly conventional, the music works, the performances work, and the emotional sincerity mostly works. And honestly, sincerity matters. Especially in movies about music.


You can tell John Carney genuinely loves musicians. Loves songs. Loves the process of people sitting together in rooms trying to create something meaningful. That passion is all over this movie. Even when the script falls into clichés, the music sequences still feel alive.

And that’s why the movie ultimately succeeds despite its flaws.


Again, this is not top-tier Carney. It’s nowhere near as magical as Once or Sing Street. But minor John Carney is still better than most filmmakers trying to make music-centered movies because he actually understands how music feels emotionally to people.


And with terrific performances from Paul Rudd and especially Nick Jonas, a genuinely excellent central song, and enough warmth to overcome a really clunky third act, Power Ballad ends up being a charming, entertaining, heartfelt little movie.


Flawed, absolutely. But still worth seeing. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️



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