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CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 7-3-26

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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review four new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, July 3rd, 2026.


I'll admit something right up front: before I walked into Minions & Monsters, I actually had to stop and remember how many of these things they've made.


Seriously. I had completely lost count.


Then I looked it up. Four Despicable Me movies. Three Minions movies, including this one. Seven movies altogether. That's an awful lot of little yellow guys speaking gibberish.


It's also hard to believe that it's been sixteen years since Despicable Me came out in 2010. I remember liking that first movie well enough. It was funny, Gru was an entertaining character, the Minions were charming in small doses, and the whole thing worked because it had some heart behind the silliness.


What I never could have predicted was that these odd little comic relief characters would become one of the biggest animated franchises on the planet, beloved by kids and adults alike, spawning six additional movies and becoming cultural icons.


Personally? I've always found these movies pretty interchangeable.


The formula rarely changes. The Minions run around screaming in their high-pitched voices, speaking incomprehensible Minionese, hitting each other, falling down, blowing things up, getting smacked in the face, and engaging in endless slapstick. Some have one eye, some have two. They've all got the denim overalls. It's loud, frantic, goofy chaos from beginning to end.


If that's your thing, this franchise delivers exactly what you're expecting. Which is why I was genuinely surprised by the first twenty or thirty minutes of Minions & Monsters.


It actually starts out...really smart.


Set in 1920s Hollywood, forty-eight years before the events of the first Minions movie, the story follows three Minions (James, Henry and Ed) as they stumble into the early movie business, accidentally become silent film superstars, lose everything when talking pictures arrive, and decide to create their own giant monster movie. Unfortunately, their production accidentally unleashes actual monsters, forcing the Minions to save both Hollywood and the world.


That's the broad plot. But what makes the opening stretch work isn't the story itself, it's the genuine affection for film history.


The movie opens with one of the cleverest studio logo gags I've seen in years. The familiar Universal logo suddenly begins traveling backwards through time, morphing through decades of studio logos until we arrive in the earliest days of cinema. It's a terrific visual joke that immediately tells you this movie is interested in something beyond random slapstick.


Then we get a framing device narrated by Allison Janney, who plays a museum guide leading tourists through a museum dedicated to film history. Everywhere you look are wonderful little details. Classic Universal Monsters. Orson Welles references. Silent movie memorabilia.


My favorite gag involves George Lucas, who actually voices himself as an exhibit trapped inside a glass display case. It's a wonderfully absurd cameo.


Janney introduces us to the forgotten cinematic pioneers James, Henry and Ed, three Minions who supposedly helped invent the movies. And that's when the film really comes alive.


The opening historical montage is terrific. We watch the Minions wandering through centuries trying (and repeatedly failing) to serve history's greatest villains. Along the way, they're inserted into classic moments from movie history, including a hilarious recreation of Georges Méliès' landmark silent masterpiece A Trip to the Moon. If you know your film history, these references are an absolute blast.


Then comes the sequence that absolutely won me over.


The Minions witness what appears to be a train robbery and chase after it, only to discover it's actually a movie being filmed. What follows is a spectacular action montage that moves effortlessly through silent-era genres. Westerns. Train chases. Aviation adventures.


Physical comedy. Buster Keaton. Harold Lloyd. Charlie Chaplin. Every few seconds there's another visual reference, another loving homage, another perfectly timed joke aimed directly at classic movie fans.


It's one of the best sequences Illumination has ever produced.


Once the Minions become silent movie stars, the satire continues. Director Max (voiced wonderfully by Christoph Waltz) embraces these bizarre little performers, while studio bosses Frank and Elwood, both voiced with marvelous laid-back charm by Jeff Bridges, turn them into worldwide celebrities.


Then sound arrives. The "talkies" completely destroy the Minions' careers because...well...they speak Minionese. The parallels to Hollywood history are unmistakable, and they're very funny.


In fact, for about the first third of the movie I kept thinking Pierre Coffin had watched Damien Chazelle's Babylon and decided to make a family-friendly animated comedy inspired by it.


Like Babylon, this movie explores the transition from silent films to sound, careers destroyed overnight, Hollywood reinventing itself, and the changing nature of fame.

Ironically, it shares something else with Babylon.


They're both fantastic for about the first third...and then they gradually lose their way.

Once the Hollywood satire takes a back seat, Minions & Monsters becomes another Minions movie.


James, Henry and Ed decide to make their own monster picture using a magical spellbook. They accidentally summon Goomi, who is a wonderfully sneaky little monster voiced by Trey Parker, who sounds delightfully like Cartman from South Park, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment.


Goomi eventually unleashes giant monsters, including the massive blob creature Irene, while another storyline follows Jesse Eisenberg's alien robot Dort, who inexplicably falls in love with Zoey Deutch's suffragette Debbie. That entire subplot never really works.


It's underdeveloped, oddly paced and nowhere near as entertaining as everything happening inside the Hollywood storyline. Once giant monsters start attacking cities and everyone begins yelling and smashing into things, the movie settles into the familiar Illumination formula of loud slapstick, frantic action, repetitive gags and nonstop chaos.


At that point, you've seen most of it before.


The humor becomes increasingly generic, relying on the same physical comedy and screaming that every Minions movie eventually falls back on. It never becomes bad, exactly, it just becomes ordinary. Which is disappointing because the first act suggests something far more ambitious.


Still, there are plenty of positives.


The voice cast is excellent. Pierre Coffin continues to somehow wring personality out of gibberish. Trey Parker steals nearly every scene he's in. Allison Janney gives the framing device real warmth and wit. Christoph Waltz is terrific. Jeff Bridges is especially funny as the studio executives. Bobby Moynihan and Phil LaMarr provide strong support as Goomi's monstrous accomplices.


Visually, it's gorgeous.


Illumination continues to produce some of the slickest animation in the business, and the recreation of 1920s Hollywood is packed with wonderful details. Every frame is filled with background jokes, movie references, and Easter eggs that reveal filmmakers who genuinely love classic cinema.


That's ultimately what surprised me the most. For a while, Minions & Monsters is about something.


It's a loving tribute to silent movies. It's a satire of Old Hollywood. It's filled with affectionate nods to film history that cinephiles will absolutely appreciate. There's genuine intelligence behind the jokes.


Unfortunately, it eventually abandons most of that in favor of giant monster battles and the same noisy slapstick we've gotten from this franchise for years.


So where does that leave it? Well...it's actually better than I expected.


I'm not giving it a full recommendation. If you don't have kids, I'd probably wait until it shows up on streaming someday. It makes for decent Saturday afternoon viewing while you're folding laundry or half-paying attention.


But if you have children who love the Minions, this is actually one of the easier entries in the series for adults to sit through. Parents will probably enjoy all of the Hollywood jokes, classic movie references and film history much more than they're expecting.


I certainly did.


I only wish the movie had trusted that smarter version of itself for the entire running time.

Because for one glorious half hour, Minions & Monsters isn't just another Minions movie.

It's actually a pretty terrific love letter to the movies themselves. - ⭐️⭐️1/2


Actress Olivia Wilde has now directed three feature films, and unfortunately her filmmaking career is moving in the wrong direction.


Her directorial debut, Booksmart, was a genuinely charming teen comedy. I never thought it was particularly well-directed, but it was very well-written, funny, energetic, and anchored by terrific performances. It worked.


Her second film, Don't Worry Darling, was a considerably shakier effort. Despite a fantastic performance by Florence Pugh, it was stiff, lifeless, and far more interesting because of the behind-the-scenes tabloid drama than because of anything that actually happened on screen.


Now comes The Invite, and I'm sorry to say it's the weakest of the bunch.


Based on the Spanish film The People Upstairs, which itself was adapted from a stage play by Cesc Gay, The Invite is a chamber comedy-drama that unfolds almost entirely inside a single apartment. Joe (Seth Rogen) and Angela (Olivia Wilde) are a deeply unhappy married couple whose relationship has long since curdled into passive-aggressive resentment.


He is a frustrated former musician who never achieved the success he dreamed of and now teaches music while quietly nursing disappointment. She is obsessed with appearances, desperate to be perceived as sophisticated, cultured, and successful despite mounting evidence to the contrary.


Their upstairs neighbors, Pína (Penélope Cruz) and Hawk (Edward Norton), seem to represent everything Joe and Angela are not. They are attractive, confident, sexually adventurous, and apparently incapable of keeping their enthusiasm for one another quiet.


Their nightly lovemaking reverberates through the building to such a degree that it becomes a source of constant irritation for the couple downstairs.


Eventually, Angela invites them over for dinner. As you might imagine, this is not a good idea.


What begins as an awkward evening intended to address a neighborhood grievance slowly evolves into a wine-soaked marathon of confessions, resentments, revelations, sexual tension, and increasingly uncomfortable truths.


Eventually it is revealed that Hawk and Pína are swingers, and before long Joe and Angela find themselves confronted with possibilities that force them to examine the fractures in their own relationship.


At least that's the idea. The problem is that absolutely none of this feels fresh. Not one second of it.


Every conversation in this movie feels borrowed from better movies. Every revelation feels familiar. Every marital argument, every discussion about sex, every observation about class anxiety, masculinity, jealousy, insecurity, or social performance has been explored more effectively somewhere else.


The central theme (that people often pretend to be something they are not in order to impress others) is hardly groundbreaking. Neither is the notion that one couple might envy another couple's apparent happiness, sexual confidence, or financial success. These ideas have been around forever. That's not necessarily a problem if the writing brings new insight or a fresh perspective.


It doesn't.


Instead, what we get is nearly two hours of four thoroughly unpleasant people talking in circles.


The screenplay, credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, is loaded with pseudo-intellectual dialogue that constantly mistakes talking for insight. Characters endlessly discuss their feelings, their desires, their frustrations, and their insecurities, but very little of it feels authentic.


The conversations rarely sound like anything actual human beings would say to one another. They sound like screenwriters desperately trying to convince us that their characters are profound. They're not. They're exhausting.


One of the film's biggest issues is the amount of improvisation Wilde reportedly encouraged during production. Seth Rogen, in particular, has built an entire career around improvisation, and while that approach can occasionally produce gold, it can also produce exactly what happens here: rambling conversations, repetitive jokes, and scenes that feel as though they have no destination.


Rogen remains one of the most limited major movie stars working today. Once again, he plays some variation of the same marijuana-scented doofus he's been playing for years. The familiar laugh shows up repeatedly. The same rhythms show up repeatedly. The same reactions show up repeatedly. And because so much of the material feels improvised, scenes often drift into nowhere.


The irony is that the original Spanish film runs only about eighty minutes. This version runs nearly two hours, and you feel every extra minute.


The original is tighter, sharper, and significantly more focused. It understands that the concept itself is enough. This remake keeps piling on unnecessary subplots, digressions, and conversations that add little beyond additional running time.


As a director, Wilde doesn't help matters. Since the film takes place almost entirely in one location, visual inventiveness becomes essential. Look at what Mike Nichols did with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or what Roman Polanski accomplished with Carnage. Those films transformed confined spaces into cinematic battlegrounds.


Wilde never figures out how to do that. The movie often feels exactly like what it is: a stage play that somebody pointed a camera at. The visual staging is flat. The editing lacks rhythm. The camera placement is unimaginative. Aside from repeated close-ups of Wilde's increasingly exaggerated facial reactions, there is very little cinematic energy on display.


Performance-wise, it's a mixed bag.


Olivia Wilde's own performance is wildly unconvincing. She spends much of the movie twitching, mugging, widening her eyes, and overplaying Angela's anxieties to the point of distraction. Seth Rogen fares no better. His character never feels believable for a second.


Penélope Cruz does what Penélope Cruz always does: she works hard, commits fully, and attempts to elevate the material through sheer talent. Unfortunately, there is only so much an actor can do when saddled with dialogue this weak.


Edward Norton, meanwhile, is the one performer who emerges relatively unscathed. In fact, he is responsible for the only scene in the movie that truly comes alive.


Late in the film, Norton delivers a monologue explaining aspects of his character's history and worldview. It's funny, strange, revealing, and genuinely engaging. Suddenly the movie has energy. Suddenly the dialogue feels alive. Suddenly you're paying attention.


After the screening I learned something fascinating. Olivia Wilde apparently revealed during a Q&A that Norton wrote and improvised the monologue himself.


That explains everything. The one scene in the movie that feels spontaneous, intelligent, and surprising wasn't actually in the screenplay, it was Edward Norton. That fact alone says quite a bit about the film's larger problems.


And speaking of larger problems, The Invite invites comparisons it simply cannot survive.

The obvious blueprint is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the gold standard for marital warfare disguised as social interaction.


There are also echoes of Carnage, The Ref, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and perhaps most notably Mike White's wonderful Brad's Status and Beatriz at Dinner, films that explore class anxiety, social discomfort, and personal dissatisfaction with actual nuance.

The Invite desperately wants to sit at the same table as those movies.


It doesn't belong there. Not for a second.


To be fair, the audience I saw it with laughed quite a bit. They seemed to enjoy themselves. So clearly the movie connected with some people. I was not one of them.


I found the characters obnoxious, the conversations tedious, the direction unimaginative, and the writing relentlessly pretentious. By the time the film reached its climactic sexual revelations and potential swinger-party complications, I had completely checked out.


Mostly, I just wanted the dinner party to end.


And when a movie about a disastrous dinner party leaves you feeling exactly like a guest trapped at one, that's probably not a compliment.


The Invite is not a good film. - ⭐️1/2


John Early is a genuinely unique talent. As a stand-up comedian, actor, and performer, he has built a well-earned reputation as one of the funniest and most distinctive comic voices of his generation.


Whether it was his work on television series like 30 Rock, Portlandia, Girls5eva, and Life & Beth, or memorable appearances in films like Other People and Late Night, Early has consistently demonstrated sharp comic instincts and a willingness to take risks.


I've always enjoyed his work, which is why it pains me to say that his feature writing and directing debut, Maddie's Secret, is an absolute disaster.


Not only is it one of the biggest disappointments of the year, it is also one of the very worst movies I have seen all year.


The film stars Early as Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher working behind the scenes at a trendy Los Angeles culinary content company. After an unexpected viral video launches her into internet fame, Maddie becomes one of the company's featured food influencers, creating recipe videos and quickly attracting attention from television producers and online followers.


On the surface, Maddie's life appears to be thriving. She has a loving husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), a fiercely loyal best friend named Deena (Kate Berlant), and professional opportunities she never imagined possible.


Beneath that carefully curated online image, however, Maddie is struggling with bulimia, an eating disorder that resurfaces under the pressures of public visibility, social media scrutiny, and an overwhelming need to maintain perfection.


As her personal life begins to unravel, she attempts to navigate therapy, treatment, family trauma, and self-acceptance while continuing to project an image of success to the outside world.


That's the premise. Unfortunately, almost everything that follows is a mess.


What makes Maddie's Secret so frustrating is that it is attempting to be about fifteen different movies at the same time. It is clearly inspired by the earnest, message-driven television melodramas that populated network television throughout the 1980s and 1990s.


In fact, the title itself is an obvious reference to the 1986 TV movie Kate's Secret, one of the first mainstream productions to tackle bulimia as a serious subject. Early seems interested in satirizing those old made-for-TV issue dramas while simultaneously paying tribute to them.


But that's only one of the film's many competing influences.


The movie also wants to be a Douglas Sirk-style melodrama. It wants to be a John Waters-inspired camp comedy. It wants to be a social-media satire. It wants to be a commentary on influencer culture, celebrity, queer identity, body image, and modern performance.


There are even moments that seem designed to function as serious public-service announcements about eating disorders. Throw all of those influences into a blender and what comes out is not an interesting hybrid. What comes out is a tonal train wreck.


The very fact that I'm mentioning Douglas Sirk in the same review as Maddie's Secret feels absurd. Sirk understood exactly how heightened emotion, visual style, and social commentary could work together.


His films were melodramatic, yes, but they were also sincere, emotionally rich, and beautifully controlled. Filmmakers like Todd Haynes, Guy Maddin, and even Mike White have successfully drawn inspiration from that tradition while making it feel contemporary and relevant.


John Early doesn't come close.


His film mistakes excess for style and chaos for sophistication. It constantly confuses camp with wit and seems convinced that simply throwing contradictory tones together automatically creates something daring. Instead, the movie spends its entire running time fighting against itself.


One moment we're supposed to laugh at broad parody and exaggerated performances. The next moment we're expected to take a serious discussion of bulimia completely at face value.


Then we're watching intentionally bad Hallmark-style melodrama. Then we're watching surreal dance numbers. Then we're back to eating-disorder trauma. Then we're supposed to laugh again.


The transitions are so abrupt and so clumsy that neither the comedy nor the drama works.


That's ultimately my biggest problem with the film. If you want to make a serious movie about bulimia, then make a serious movie about bulimia. If you want to satirize old television movies about eating disorders, then commit to the satire.


What you cannot do is spend one scene mocking the subject matter and then immediately demand emotional investment in it moments later. The film wants to have it both ways, and it never earns either response.


Early's own performance sits at the center of many of the movie's problems. Maddie is played almost entirely as a wink. The character never feels like a real person because Early is constantly reminding the audience that he's performing.


The role is essentially built around the fact that he is a man playing a woman while everyone around him treats the situation as completely normal. That approach can absolutely work under the right circumstances. John Waters built a career proving that. Divine remains one of the most unforgettable screen performers in movie history.


The difference is that Waters understood camp. He understood how absurdity and sincerity could coexist. Early never figures that balance out.


Instead, the performance becomes increasingly self-satisfied and irritating as the movie progresses. There are cheap laughs built around the drag performance itself, there are endless knowing glances, and there is a constant sense that the movie is congratulating itself for being clever. I didn't find it clever. I found it exhausting.


The supporting cast fares little better because they are trapped inside a screenplay that never establishes consistent rules for its world. Kate Berlant, a performer I normally find very funny, is given little to do beyond participating in the film's increasingly desperate attempts at camp.


Eric Rahill is stuck playing a character who barely exists beyond plot function. Kristen Johnston is stranded in a role that seems designed solely to facilitate third-act revelations.


The one exception (the one genuinely good thing in the entire movie) is Vanessa Bayer.


Bayer plays a woman Maddie befriends during treatment, and she gives a performance that belongs in an entirely different film. She brings vulnerability, warmth, humanity, and emotional truth to every scene she appears in. While everyone else seems trapped in a tonal collision between parody and melodrama, Bayer somehow locates an actual human being underneath all the noise.


Her scenes are the only moments in the movie that feel authentic, and her performance is the sole reason I can't bring myself to give the film zero stars. Without Vanessa Bayer, there would be absolutely nothing here to recommend.


Visually, the film is equally unsuccessful. The direction is clumsy, the pacing is erratic, and the emotional beats never land. Scenes drag on long after they've exhausted their purpose.


The dance sequences, particularly a much-discussed queer movement class that is clearly intended to be both satirical and cathartic, are more awkward than funny. The social-media satire feels dated before it even arrives. The melodrama never achieves genuine emotional weight. The comedy rarely generates laughs.


To be fair, I saw the film at a festival screening, and a significant portion of the audience seemed to enjoy it. There were laughs throughout the screening, and some viewers clearly connected with its camp sensibility. I wasn't one of them. From beginning to end, I found the film irritating, self-indulgent, and deeply misguided.


Ambition alone doesn't make a movie worthwhile. Throwing every influence imaginable into a blender doesn't automatically create something original. Maddie's Secret reaches for satire, melodrama, camp comedy, social commentary, and emotional sincerity all at once. It fails at every single one of them.


The result is a misguided, offensive, tonally schizophrenic mess that never figures out what it wants to be and never earns any of the emotions it desperately tries to generate. Aside from Vanessa Bayer's admirable performance, there is virtually nothing here worth celebrating.


Maddie's Secret is one of the worst movies of the year, and sitting through it felt less like watching a film than enduring a punishment. - ⭐️


There have been plenty of movies made about George Washington over the years, but very few have focused on the years before he became the Revolutionary War hero, the first President of the United States, and one of the most recognizable figures in American history.


On paper, Young Washington is built around an angle that actually has a lot of dramatic potential. Rather than telling the story we've all learned in history class, it concentrates on Washington's formative years, when he was a young militia officer trying to prove himself during the French and Indian War.


That's fertile ground for a compelling historical drama because those early failures, miscalculations, and hard-earned lessons would eventually shape the leader history remembers.


Unfortunately, while the premise is genuinely interesting, the execution couldn't be more ordinary.


This is the latest original production from Angel Studios, a company that has carved out an enormously successful niche with audiences looking for inspirational, faith-based entertainment. To be fair, not everything released under the Angel Studios banner has been disappointing.


In recent years, they've acquired and distributed a handful of independently produced films that I thought were quite good. Their original productions, however, have almost always left me cold.


They tend to share the same characteristics: straightforward, unimaginative filmmaking, simplistic storytelling, heavy-handed messaging, and a visual style that rarely rises above competent. Young Washington fits comfortably into that pattern.


The film is written, produced, and directed by Jon Erwin, one half of the Erwin Brothers, whose career has largely been built around faith-based filmmaking through Kingdom Story Company.


Movies like I Can Only Imagine, October Baby, Jesus Revolution, and The Jesus Music have certainly found their audience, but they've also established a filmmaking style that favors earnest messaging over dramatic complexity.


That same approach dominates Young Washington, and the result is a historical drama that never feels particularly alive.


The story follows George Washington, played by William Franklyn-Miller, over roughly a dozen years of his young adulthood. Raised by his widowed mother Mary, Washington dreams of climbing Virginia's social ladder while proving his worth to the British Crown.


His ambitions lead him to Lord Fairfax, who hires him to survey the wilderness of the Ohio Territory. Those expeditions eventually place Washington at the center of the escalating conflict between Britain and France, culminating in the disastrous campaign at Fort Necessity, where his inexperience as a military commander leads to humiliation and defeat.


Along the way, the film also explores his infatuation with Sally Cary, his relationships with the officers who mentor him, and the lessons that ultimately begin transforming an ambitious young man into the leader history would come to know.


It's a perfectly solid blueprint for a movie.


The problem is that the screenplay never finds anything particularly interesting to do with it.

Every scene unfolds exactly as you'd expect. Every emotional beat is telegraphed long before it arrives.


The dialogue is stiff, the conflicts are simplified, and every character exists primarily to reinforce whatever lesson the film happens to be teaching at that particular moment.


Instead of exploring Washington as a complicated young man driven by ambition, insecurity, pride, and failure, the film presents him as a series of historical bullet points strung together into a very conventional narrative.


Watching it, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was sitting through one of those educational films teachers used to show in grade school. The lights go down, the projector starts humming, and for the next forty-five minutes you're presented with a dramatized history lesson that checks all the important boxes but never generates any genuine excitement.


That's exactly what Young Washington feels like. It isn't even particularly successful as a documentary-style history lesson because it reduces fascinating historical events into broad, simplistic scenes that barely scratch the surface of their significance.


The performances do little to elevate the material. William Franklyn-Miller certainly has the physical presence to play a young George Washington, but his performance is remarkably wooden.


To be fair, I don't think that's entirely his fault. Jon Erwin's direction gives him very little room to create a three-dimensional character, and the screenplay rarely allows Washington to become anything more than a collection of noble speeches and determined facial expressions.


Mary-Louise Parker, on the other hand, manages to bring some genuine authenticity to the role of Mary Washington. She's one of those actresses who almost always finds something human in even the thinnest material, and while her scenes are limited, she gives the movie a welcome sense of emotional honesty whenever she appears.


Andy Serkis is similarly committed as General Edward Braddock, doing his best to inject some energy into scenes that often feel dramatically inert.


Kelsey Grammer is another story altogether.


As Lord Fairfax, Grammer delivers a performance that is broad, theatrical, and surprisingly over-the-top. He's worked with Angel Studios before, and he seems perfectly comfortable embracing the studio's tendency toward oversized speeches and obvious messaging, but it simply doesn't work here. His performance feels less like a real historical figure and more like someone delivering dialogue at a historical reenactment.


Then there's Ben Kingsley.


Now, Ben Kingsley remains one of the finest actors of the past fifty years. His body of work speaks for itself, and when he's engaged, there are few performers who can match him. He's also reached the point in his career where he clearly has no problem accepting roles that appear to exist primarily to finance the next vacation home.


This is one of those performances.


Earlier this year, he wandered through Renny Harlin's gloriously ridiculous shark thriller Deep Water looking like a man who knew exactly why he was there. Here, as Governor Robert Dinwiddie, he mostly raises his voice, issues commands, and looks stern. It's a paycheck performance, and Ben Kingsley has become remarkably comfortable delivering them over the last decade. I don't necessarily blame him, but let's not pretend he's stretching himself artistically here.


Visually, Young Washington never distinguishes itself either. The production values are respectable enough, but there's no cinematic personality behind any of it. The battle scenes should feel chaotic, dangerous, and emotionally devastating.


Instead, they're competently staged but oddly lifeless, lacking both the scale and intensity that the material demands. Everything about the filmmaking feels safe, polished, and surprisingly anonymous.


That's really the word that kept coming to mind while I was watching the movie: anonymous.


This is exactly the kind of respectable, generic historical drama that Hollywood (and now studios like Angel) have been producing for decades. It wants desperately to be an important film about an important man, but it never earns that importance through its storytelling.


Instead, it simply assumes that because George Washington is an important historical figure, the movie automatically becomes important by association. It doesn't work that way.


By the time the closing credits rolled, I wasn't thinking about George Washington's remarkable journey. I was thinking about how much more interesting that journey actually is than the movie I'd just watched.


As I've said before, whenever I see the Angel Studios logo attached to one of their original productions, I instinctively become a little cautious. Too often their films mistake sincerity for depth and messaging for compelling storytelling.


Young Washington continues that trend. It's earnest, well-intentioned, and professionally assembled, but it's also dramatically flat, visually uninspired, and emotionally uninvolving.


I can't recommend it. - ⭐️1/2



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