CAPSULE MOVIE REVIEWS: 9-18-26
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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, September 18th, 2026.
I dreaded going into the press screening of the new Resident Evil, and there were several reasons for that. First of all, I have never played a Resident Evil video game. I have never played ANY Resident Evil video game. I am not a gamer, I have never been a gamer, and the last actual video game system I owned was Pong when I was a kid in the ’70s.
So whenever I walk into a movie based on a video game, I immediately feel like I’m arriving halfway through a conversation everybody else understands.
I have, however, seen the Resident Evil movies, and they’re terrible. The Paul W.S. Anderson movies with Milla Jovovich were loud, stupid, increasingly ridiculous exercises in video-game filmmaking that usually left me wondering what the hell was happening and why I was supposed to care.
There was Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, another reboot that didn’t work, television got involved, and now here we are again because apparently somebody somewhere remains convinced that what the world desperately needs is another Resident Evil movie.
There is one fascinating chapter in the history of this franchise, though. George A. Romero, the godfather of the modern zombie movie and one of the greatest horror filmmakers who ever lived, was once attached to make a Resident Evil film.
He wrote a screenplay, developed his own approach to the material, and it ultimately fell apart. There is even a documentary, George A. Romero’s Resident Evil, about that unrealized project. Romero basically invented the modern cinematic zombie with Night of the Living Dead, and the idea of seeing what HE might have done with this material is infinitely more interesting to me than almost anything the actual Resident Evil movies have given us.
But Romero never got to make his version.
Zach Cregger did. And that was the second reason I dreaded this screening.
Cregger has somehow become one of the critical darlings of modern horror, which remains completely baffling to me. He came out of The Whitest Kids U’ Know, co-directed the dreadful comedy Miss March, and then suddenly reinvented himself as this supposedly important horror filmmaker with Barbarian and Weapons.
I thought Barbarian was insanely overrated, and I thought Weapons was even more overrated. Both films have the same fundamental problem: Cregger desperately wants to mix horror and comedy, and the shifts between the two are so awkward that neither side works.
The scary material isn’t scary enough, the comedy isn’t funny enough, and the movies constantly announce their influences without demonstrating much understanding of why those influences worked in the first place.
So now we have a Resident Evil movie directed by Zach Cregger, produced in association with PlayStation Productions. I’m sorry, but my heart sinks a little when a movie begins with a PlayStation Productions logo. I realize I’m not the audience for this stuff, but I don’t particularly want my movies to feel like two-hour advertisements for things I’m supposed to go home and play.
Having said ALL of that, I went in willing to give the thing a chance. And I will give it this much: of all the Resident Evil movies I have seen, this is probably the best one.
That is not a compliment. The bar has been buried approximately 40 feet underground.
This Resident Evil is reasonably terrible instead of catastrophically terrible, which apparently makes it the high-water mark of the franchise. Cregger at least tries something different.
Instead of simply recreating the games or centering the story around some unstoppable super-soldier, he follows an ordinary medical courier named Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, who finds himself accidentally stumbling through a viral nightmare in and around Raccoon City.
Abrams was, for me, easily the best thing about Weapons. He seemed to be the one actor in that movie who understood how to negotiate Cregger’s bizarre tonal shifts, and his character was considerably more interesting than most of the other goofy people wandering around that film.
Unfortunately, he is saddled with a truly awful character here. Bryan is aggressively unlikable.
This is a major problem because he is our guide through the entire movie. We are supposed to follow this guy into Raccoon City, through the Umbrella Corporation nightmare and eventually into increasingly insane biological horror, but within about 15 minutes I was actively rooting for one of the monsters to eat him.
He’s immature, irresponsible, irritating, constantly making smart-ass remarks and dropping F-bombs as though profanity itself constitutes a personality. Before his delivery even begins, his girlfriend tells him she is pregnant and his reaction establishes immediately that this guy is basically an asshole.
He works as a medical courier, and he is offered extra money to make one last urgent delivery through a brutal snowstorm to Raccoon City General Hospital. Oddly enough, this is the second movie in a couple of weeks built around somebody desperately transporting an important medical package against a deadline, after Runner with Owen Wilson and Alan Ritchson.
And Runner is better than this movie. Runner isn’t good either.
Bryan heads out onto the icy roads, accidentally hits a strange woman, puts her in his vehicle and tries to get her help. A police officer becomes involved, the woman ends up in the police cruiser, the cruiser crashes, and pretty soon she is revealed to be one of the infected creatures. Bryan shoots her, accidentally puts a bullet into his own car in the process, and is forced to continue on foot through the freezing wilderness.
Eventually he reaches an isolated farmhouse, and this is where the movie really starts turning itself into a live-action video game. Cregger has talked about wanting the story to function almost like a parallel downloadable chapter happening alongside the events of the games rather than directly adapting them.
Bryan isn't Leon Kennedy or some other established Resident Evil hero. He's basically some idiot who wandered into the wrong game and is desperately trying to survive it.
There are third-person, over-the-shoulder shots. There are first-person POV shots involving guns. Bryan constantly runs out of ammunition and frantically digs through drawers looking for bullets while monsters approach. There are first-aid sprays, green herbs and other references that I’m sure caused people who play the games to elbow each other knowingly.
And there are padlocks. My God, there are padlocks.
Apparently padlocks are a big thing in the Resident Evil games, because this movie keeps returning to them as a running joke. Once? Fine. Twice? Okay. By the tenth or twelfth padlock gag, I was ready to personally hand Bryan a pair of bolt cutters just so the movie would stop making the same joke.
That is indicative of Cregger’s comedy throughout the film. Bryan fumbles with weapons. He insults monsters. He swears constantly. He encounters bizarre things and responds with smart-ass remarks. None of it is funny, and because the comedy keeps interrupting the horror, the movie can never establish sustained tension.
Paul Walter Hauser eventually turns up as an Umbrella scientist, and I love Paul Walter Hauser. He can be hilarious, frightening, heartbreaking and deeply strange, sometimes within the same performance.
He isn't funny here because the material isn't funny. His character gets tangled up in the biological disaster and is eventually ripped apart by a tentacled mutation, and even that becomes another missed opportunity.
The movie eventually leads Bryan to an Umbrella laboratory, where we learn that the package he has been schlepping around contains biological material that may be used to create an antidote.
By this point Raccoon City has become a parade of zombies, tentacles, vomiting monsters, transforming bodies and creatures that refuse to stay dead no matter how many times Bryan blows their heads apart.
Some of the practical effects are actually quite good. I will absolutely give the movie that. There are creatures that have real physical presence because something was actually constructed and placed in front of the camera, and as somebody who will always prefer practical horror effects to generic CGI sludge, I appreciated those moments.
Unfortunately, once the CGI takes over, everything starts looking very familiar again. Slimy tentacles. Mutating bodies. Acid-spewing creatures. Swarms of monsters. We've seen all of this before, and Cregger once again wears his influences so openly that entire sequences feel less like inspiration than imitation.
The biggest influence here is John Carpenter’s The Thing, and it is EVERYWHERE. The snow, the isolation, the cold blue atmosphere, the body transformations, the way the infected woman contorts after being struck by the car, the low-angle compositions and the biological mutations all evoke Carpenter’s masterpiece.
But referencing The Thing is easy. Understanding why The Thing works is considerably harder.
Carpenter builds unbearable suspense out of distrust, isolation and character. You care about those men trapped at the Antarctic research station, and you understand the horrifying possibility that any one of them could already be the creature.
Resident Evil gives us Bryan, an irritating jerk I wanted dead before the movie had finished its first act, and then substitutes loud noises for suspense.
There are also obvious echoes of Alien and Aliens. Creatures spew corrosive material. Monsters descend from walls and ceilings. There are swarms of things coming after Bryan while his ammunition disappears. Even if some of those elements originated in the games, once they are translated into a movie, the cinematic references become impossible to ignore.
And then Cregger goes back to Magnolia. Now we're getting personal.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia is my favorite movie of all time, and Cregger has already cited it as an influence on Weapons, particularly in the segmented storytelling. That didn't work for me there, and now Resident Evil includes a sequence in which infected bodies begin falling from above, crashing onto cars and smashing into the pavement.
The staging, the sound, the tracking movement and the surreal interruption are so obviously evocative of the raining-frogs sequence near the end of Magnolia that I practically wanted to stand up and yell at the screen.
The frogs in Magnolia are not simply a cool weird thing falling out of the sky. The sequence has accumulated meaning through everything Paul Thomas Anderson has built before it. It is biblical, absurd, terrifying, funny, mysterious and emotionally transformative all at once.
Replacing the frogs with infected bodies crashing into automobiles does not magically transfer any of that meaning. It just reminds me that I would rather be watching Magnolia.
The biggest problem, though, is Cregger’s reliance on jump scares. This movie is absolutely overwhelmed by them. They are constant, cheap and exhausting.
Something suddenly appears in the frame—BANG! Something crashes through a door—BANG! A creature lunges toward the camera—BANG! The soundtrack explodes because apparently the audience needs to be informed that THIS IS THE SCARY PART.
Jump scares can work when they are earned. Here they become a substitute for suspense.
Every sequence seems to contain three or four of them, and after a while they stop being frightening and become irritating.
Cregger keeps reaching for the easiest possible horror technique: crank the sound, cut quickly to something grotesque and make everybody in the theater jump because their nervous system has been assaulted. That's not terror. That's somebody sneaking up behind you and popping a balloon next to your head.
The tonal whiplash makes everything worse. A creature does something grotesque, Bryan cracks a joke. A character is horribly killed, somebody makes a smart-ass observation.
There is even a sequence involving a little girl whose foot has mutated into tentacles that ends with Bryan blowing her head apart in an explosion of blood, and the movie tries to find a laugh inside the horror. It doesn't work.
Eventually Bryan himself becomes infected, which means the final stretch turns into a race to get the antidote before he transforms. We get more gunfire, more monsters, more ammunition problems, more creatures coming back after apparently being killed, more references for gamers and a giant climax involving collapsing structures and swarms of infected creatures.
At one point Bryan is stranded high above the ground with hundreds of things coming after him and basically one bullet left, which I assume is designed to recreate that classic video-game panic of realizing you're almost completely out of ammunition.
The movie ends in a way that clearly leaves the door open for more. A sequel, another movie, a streaming series, whatever. Because apparently Resident Evil must continue forever.
Mercifully, this one runs only about 90 minutes. It feels like five hours.
The frustrating thing is that I can recognize what Cregger is attempting. He doesn't simply photocopy the previous movies. He tries to structure the film like somebody actually moving through levels of a game, gives us an ordinary and completely overwhelmed protagonist instead of an action superhero, uses some effective practical creature work and peppers the whole thing with details intended for longtime players.
But none of that matters if the movie itself isn't scary, funny or suspenseful.
Resident Evil is repetitive, derivative and incredibly irritating. The protagonist is obnoxious. The comedy dies almost every time it is attempted. The horror relies far too heavily on cheap jump scares.
The movie borrows imagery from The Thing, Alien, Aliens and Magnolia without approaching the artistry, suspense or emotional power of any of them. And Cregger's continuing attempt to smash broad comedy into horror produces the same awkward tonal mess that bothered me in Barbarian and Weapons.
So congratulations, I guess.
Zach Cregger has made the best Resident Evil movie I've ever seen. And it's still terrible.
Maybe George Romero really was our only hope. - ⭐️1/2
I always look forward to anything that comes out of Aardman, because in an animation world increasingly dominated by CGI and computer-generated sameness, their work still feels handmade in the best possible way.
Aardman’s stop-motion and clay animation has this tactile quality to it that you simply do not get anywhere else, and part of the pleasure is knowing how much time, patience and actual physical labor goes into every movement, every expression and every little visual gag.
But the craftsmanship would not mean nearly as much if the material itself weren’t so consistently funny, clever and sweet.
This is, after all, the studio that gave us Wallace and Gromit, two of the greatest animated characters ever created. Nick Park introduced Wallace and his endlessly patient dog Gromit back in 1989, and those characters have survived beautifully through shorts and features because they are brilliantly simple, instantly recognizable and genuinely funny.
Aardman also made Chicken Run, still one of the best animated films of the last 30 years, along with the very enjoyable sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget. And then there is Shaun the Sheep, another Nick Park creation who spun off from Wallace and Gromit and became a massive character in his own right through television and movies.
The latest is Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom, directed by Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, and it is very much an Aardman movie from the first frame. It is charming, visually distinctive, filled with wonderful British comic timing and packed with little visual details that kids can enjoy immediately while adults catch all the references underneath.
It is also a horror-themed Shaun movie, which makes its late-September release absolutely perfect for spooky season.
The movie takes place in autumn as everyone around Mossy Bottom Farm prepares for a Halloween Hoedown. The colors are great, the pumpkins are everywhere, and Aardman clearly knows exactly how much fun it can have with the atmosphere. During the opening credits alone, there are references to zombies, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video and other bits of horror imagery, and the whole thing immediately establishes this playful monster-movie tone.
The main plot begins with something very important to civilization: male-pattern baldness.
The Farmer is worried about losing his hair, while Shaun is busy overseeing the flock’s secret pumpkin patch. When the Farmer accidentally destroys the pumpkins, Shaun decides to take matters into his own hooves and basically turns himself into Dr. Frankenstein.
He starts experimenting out of a windmill, trying to create a growth formula that can save the Halloween crop, and eventually produces this glowing pink concoction that, naturally, ends up in exactly the wrong bottle. The Farmer mistakes it for his hair-growth treatment.
At first, it seems like a miracle. He suddenly has a full head of hair. Then comes the mustache. Then comes more hair. Then a lot more hair. Before long, the stuff has completely transformed him into this huge, shaggy, Bigfoot-like creature roaming the woods, which of course sends the nearby villagers into panic.
Shaun, Bitzer and the flock now have to figure out what happened, track down the “beast” and somehow reverse the transformation before the whole situation gets completely out of control. There is also the matter of the Farmer’s budding romance with the visiting veterinarian, because turning into a giant woodland monster tends to complicate dating.
The setup is wonderfully silly, and the obvious comparison within the Aardman universe is Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. That movie came out more than 20 years ago now, and The Beast of Mossy Bottom would make a perfect double feature with it.
Both films take classic horror imagery and run it through the Aardman machine, where monsters, mad scientists, misunderstandings and elaborate chase scenes become excuses for incredibly precise visual comedy.
One of the things Aardman has always understood is how much comedy you can create without conventional dialogue. The Shaun the Sheep world relies heavily on grunts, squeaks, odd vocalizations, facial expressions and body language, and the animators are so good that you never feel like anything is missing. In fact, the lack of normal dialogue is part of the fun.
There is a very clear connection here to silent comedy. You can feel Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and that whole tradition of physical storytelling underneath the movie. There is even a brief fantasy sequence done in two-dimensional hand-drawn animation that stands out beautifully from the claymation around it, and it reinforces just how visually inventive these filmmakers can still be after all these years.
That is also why one of my complaints about the movie stood out to me so much: there are simply too many pop songs and needle drops. Aardman does not need them.
The movie already has such a strong visual rhythm and such an old-school silent-comedy spirit that stopping to underline scenes with lyrical pop songs sometimes works against what makes the material special.
There are several British songs scattered throughout the movie that feel unnecessary, and whenever the movie backs away from them and simply lets the characters, the animation and the physical comedy do the work, it becomes much funnier.
Fortunately, there are plenty of terrific visual gags. Bitzer has a wonderful bit involving smells that only he can perceive, and the movie actually finds a very funny visual way to represent that.
There is another gag involving waste disposal and plastic bags being carefully dropped into a ridiculously small bin that got a big laugh out of me. Those tiny, absurd observational jokes are exactly the kind of thing Aardman does so well.
And the sheep remain adorable.
The human beings in these movies always look vaguely deranged, which is part of the appeal, while the animal characters somehow manage to convey entire personalities with almost no language at all. Shaun is clever and resourceful, Bitzer is permanently overwhelmed, and the rest of the flock are basically walking chaos machines.
The action gets bigger as the movie goes along, including a large third-act chase that is beautifully animated and full of invention, although I do think it goes on a little too long. That becomes the movie’s main weakness in general.
At only about 80 minutes, it is certainly not bloated, but some of the jokes begin repeating themselves, and a few of the comic rhythms feel familiar if you have spent a lot of time with Aardman. That familiarity is both a strength and a weakness.
You know the timing. You know the kinds of misunderstandings that are coming. You know somebody is eventually going to pull the wrong lever, open the wrong door or cause some massive chain reaction that destroys half the scenery.
Aardman has been doing versions of these gags for decades, and The Beast of Mossy Bottom is not necessarily reinventing anything.
But here's the thing: they are still really good at it.
Even slightly recycled Aardman is more inventive, more charming and more carefully made than most animated movies coming out of much larger studios. There is a personality here. You can see fingerprints in the work, both literally and figuratively. Nothing looks factory-produced. Nothing feels assembled by committee.
Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is not Aardman at its absolute freshest. A few jokes run too long, the final chase could have been trimmed, and the constant music cues sometimes interfere with the wonderfully old-fashioned visual comedy. Cut it is still Aardman.
It is beautifully animated, genuinely funny, sweet without becoming syrupy and completely distinctive in a marketplace where far too many animated films look exactly alike.
I was entertained by it from beginning to end, and during spooky season, this is about as charming a little monster movie as you could ask for.
I’m recommending it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Quite simply, The Weight is one of the best films of 2026.
It is one of those movies that seems to come out of nowhere, grabs you almost immediately and then just keeps getting better. I had heard very good things about it from people who saw it at Sundance, but even knowing that, I was not prepared for how much I would love this movie. And I really do love it.
The Weight is gritty, exciting, emotional, suspenseful, beautifully acted and incredibly well made. It has the feel of a great American action-adventure film from the 1970s, but it never feels like a cheap imitation of one.
It takes those influences, understands them, respects them and then does something fresh with them. That distinction is important, especially this year, when we have seen way too many movies that confuse homage with copying.
The film is directed by Padraic McKinley, making his feature debut after working in television, and this is one hell of a debut.
It is set in Oregon in 1933, right in the middle of the Great Depression, and stars Ethan Hawke as Samuel Murphy, a widowed World War I veteran trying desperately to take care of his young daughter Penny. They are poor, very poor, and at the beginning of the movie they are evicted, leaving Samuel scrambling to find some kind of place for the two of them to live.
Their relationship is established beautifully and simply. Penny has this wonderful teddy bear she carries around, and there is a real warmth between father and daughter that immediately gives the movie emotional stakes.
Then everything falls apart. Samuel gets into a violent confrontation, is arrested and sent to a brutal prison labor camp. Penny is taken away and placed into state care, with the possibility that she could eventually be sent to an orphanage or adopted away permanently.
From that point forward, Samuel has one motivation and one motivation only: getting back to his daughter. Everything he does in this movie, every risk he takes and every violent or morally complicated choice he makes, is driven by that one goal.
The labor camp is run by Warden Clancy, played by Russell Crowe, and Crowe is terrific here. Clancy notices Samuel after he shows some ingenuity while working on the prison crew, eventually bringing him back to his house where Samuel repairs his car. That earns him a strange kind of respect from the warden, and before long Clancy makes Samuel an offer.
He wants him to lead a small group of prisoners on a secret mission through the Oregon wilderness, transporting an enormous amount of gold (roughly half a ton of it) through extremely dangerous terrain before federal authorities can get their hands on it.
The backdrop is FDR’s order requiring privately held gold to be surrendered, and the whole operation is illegal from top to bottom. If Samuel succeeds, he can earn his freedom. If he fails, he loses everything, including Penny.
So he chooses three other prisoners to go with him, including Singh, played by Avi Nash; Rankin, played by Austin Amelio; and Olson, played by Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen. They are accompanied by two hardened men connected to the prison, and eventually the group is joined by Anna, played by Julia Jones, an Indigenous woman who becomes absolutely essential to their survival.
From there, the movie becomes this incredible survival adventure. The group has to carry this unbelievably heavy gold through brutal terrain while dealing with hunger, exhaustion, paranoia, racism, shifting loyalties, betrayal and the growing realization that every person in the group may have a different idea about what should happen to the gold.
It is basically a movie about weight in every possible sense: the literal weight of the gold, the emotional weight of Samuel’s guilt and grief, the weight of history, the weight of poverty, the weight of survival and the weight of what people are willing to do when they have absolutely nothing left.
McKinley handles all of it beautifully. The wilderness sequences are terrific because the geography is always clear. You understand where these people are, where they need to go and what is standing in their way.
There is a countdown built into the journey, a deadline for when the gold has to reach its destination, and the movie uses that structure to create enormous tension without ever making it feel gimmicky.
There is a sequence where Samuel becomes trapped underwater beneath a fallen tree and comes very close to drowning. His leg is pinned, he is panicking, the water is closing over him and Anna eventually saves him. The sequence is incredibly intense, and later Samuel attacks one of the prisoners involved in the incident and beats him so badly that he breaks his own hand.
That leads to one of the most painful little scenes in the movie. Samuel’s fingers begin swelling around his wedding ring, and Anna has to help him remove it before the swelling gets worse. It is a small moment, but it matters.
The ring becomes symbolic in ways that do not feel forced, and there is a major payoff involving it late in the movie that makes the earlier scene even stronger. That is what good filmmaking looks like: setup, character and payoff, with nothing thrown away.
There is also an extraordinary bridge sequence that had me practically crawling out of my seat. The group reaches a rickety suspended bridge that cannot possibly hold the weight of the gold, so they have to cross without the bags and then figure out how to move the bars individually.
Samuel ends up standing in the middle of this collapsing bridge while the others throw gold bars to him one at a time. He has to catch them while balancing on a barely stable bridge suspended over a huge drop, and every additional piece of gold makes the whole thing more dangerous.
It is an absolutely terrific action sequence because it is built from character, geography and physical reality. There is no superhero nonsense and no giant CGI spectacle. It is just people, danger and weight, and the movie repeatedly understands that those simple elements are often much more exciting than visual-effects overload.
There are several scenes like that throughout The Weight: shootouts, nighttime fights, sudden attacks and moments where nature itself becomes the enemy. But the movie never loses the human element.
The tension between the prisoners is particularly strong because these are not generic supporting characters waiting to get killed. They have specific ideologies, prejudices, histories and reasons for being there.
Singh is outspoken and politically aware, Rankin is racist, and Anna has her own history involving forced assimilation and survival. Samuel, meanwhile, is not some perfect noble hero. He is a damaged man, a war veteran, a man with blood on his hands, a man who has made mistakes and a man who may very well kill again if that is what it takes to see his daughter.
Ethan Hawke is extraordinary. He has been on one of the great acting runs of the last decade, and year after year he keeps turning in remarkable performances. He somehow continues to find different kinds of broken, complicated men to play without ever repeating himself. Samuel Murphy could easily have become another grim, stoic survival hero, but Hawke makes him completely human.
You feel his exhaustion, his fear and his desperation. Most importantly, you believe completely that every terrible thing he endures is because he wants to get back to Penny. That relationship anchors the entire movie and gives every action scene emotional weight.
When Samuel is dangling over water, getting beaten or carrying gold through the wilderness, you are not just watching somebody survive an obstacle. You are thinking about his daughter, and that is why the movie works.
Julia Jones is outstanding as Anna. She is not there simply to guide the men through the wilderness or dispense wisdom. She is one of the strongest people in the group, physically and emotionally, and Jones gives her real authority.
Anna has her own history, her own anger and her own survival instincts. She can protect herself, she can protect others, and the scenes between her and Samuel are among the best in the movie.
Russell Crowe is also excellent. He does not dominate the movie, and that is exactly right. Clancy is mostly present at the beginning and then returns later, but Crowe makes every scene count.
There is humor in the performance, but also threat, charm, corruption and that peculiar intelligence Crowe can bring to a character where you are never completely sure how much he knows. It is one of his best supporting performances in quite a while.
Really, the entire cast is excellent, and the technical work is just as strong. The cinematography is gorgeous, the score is terrific, the sound design makes the wilderness feel dangerous and the action is brutal without becoming cartoonish. The movie looks and feels far more expensive than it obviously was.
This was an independently financed production with a whole collection of production companies involved (I think there are about ten logos before the movie even starts) and somehow they managed to make something that feels big, textured and cinematic. Which makes the way this movie is being released even more frustrating.
Vertical picked it up after Sundance, and unfortunately they do not exactly have a reputation for giving movies enormous theatrical pushes. This is not a movie that should be dumped into a handful of theaters with a screener link sent to critics.
This is a movie that should be on giant screens, with a real advertising campaign, positioned as one of the major films of the fall. Frankly, it deserves awards attention.
And I am telling you right now: if this movie is playing near you, go see it in a theater. The scale matters. The landscapes matter. The bridge matters. The nighttime sequences matter. The sound matters. This is a MOVIE, and McKinley clearly understands movies.
More specifically, he clearly understands the kind of American filmmaking that flourished in the 1970s. There is a lot of John Boorman in here. There is Sam Peckinpah. There is William Friedkin. There is Deliverance. There is Sorcerer and The Wages of Fear. But more than anything, there is Walter Hill.
I kept thinking about Southern Comfort: that same feeling of people moving through hostile terrain while the group begins to fracture internally, and that same sense of masculinity, violence, paranoia and survival.
And this is where The Weight becomes particularly interesting to me, because it shows exactly how you pay tribute to another filmmaker without simply stealing from them.
We have seen way too many movies this year that do the opposite. Adam Wingard’s Onslaught was a hollow John Carpenter imitation, a movie that basically screamed, “I HAVE SEEN JOHN CARPENTER MOVIES!” while proving that it did not understand what made those movies work.
There is a difference between copying a font, using a synth score and pointing a camera at somebody carrying a gun, and actually understanding composition, rhythm, tension and character. The Weight understands that difference.
We have also had movies like Crime 101 desperately wanting to be Heat, along with other films this year like the lazy monkey’s-paw knock-off Obsession, and Christopher Nolan's extraordinarily overrated derivation of Ray Harryhausen/David Lean The Odyssey. These things take familiar ingredients and reproduce them without understanding the soul underneath.
McKinley does the opposite. He takes the DNA of great 1970s survival thrillers and uses it to create something that feels completely alive in 2026. That is how you do homage. You learn from your influences. You do not photocopy them.
And The Weight is not simply an exercise in style anyway. It is about the Depression, desperation, class, racism, Indigenous survival and men who have been discarded by systems that no longer have any use for them.
Most importantly, it is about a father trying to get back to his child. All of those ideas are there, but the movie never forgets to be a great action-adventure story.
That matters too. Movies are allowed to be smart AND exciting. They are allowed to be meaningful AND badass. The Weight is both.
By the time the film reaches its final stretch, every relationship, every betrayal and every little object that has been established along the way begins paying off, even that wedding ring.
The opening and closing of the movie work beautifully together, and the final scenes have a real emotional impact because the movie earned them. Nothing feels cheap, manipulated or accidental.
I saw this with an audience, and during several sequences you could actually hear people breathing differently. People were tense and leaning forward, and that is one of my favorite things about seeing a great suspense movie with a crowd. You can feel the room change.
The Weight did that repeatedly.
Padraic McKinley directs the hell out of this movie. Ethan Hawke gives another terrific performance. Julia Jones is outstanding. Russell Crowe is wonderful. The supporting cast is strong. The action works, the drama works, the emotion works, and the whole thing is photographed and constructed with remarkable confidence.
This is one of the best surprises of the year, and it is also one of the best movies of the year. I just wish it were getting the release it deserves. So do not wait for streaming, do not watch this on your phone and do not tell yourself you will catch it later.
If you can find The Weight playing in a theater, go see it on the biggest screen you can.
I absolutely loved this movie, and I cannot wait to see it again. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
If I Go Will They Miss Me is a beautiful, lyrical, deeply moving film, and easily one of the best movies I’ve seen this year. It is the second feature from writer-director Walter Thompson-Hernández, and it feels like the work of somebody who already knows exactly what kind of filmmaker he wants to be.
There is confidence in the imagery, confidence in the silences, confidence in the way realism and fantasy are allowed to exist right next to each other without the movie ever feeling forced or self-conscious about it.
I first saw the film back in May at the Chicago Critics Film Festival at the Music Box, and it completely knocked me out. Thompson-Hernández grew up in Southeast Los Angeles, directly beneath one of the flight paths, and that personal history is essential to understanding the movie.
The planes that roar overhead aren't just background noise or some clever visual motif somebody came up with in a screenwriting lab. They are connected to his own childhood memories, and that autobiographical grounding gives the film an authenticity that makes even its most dreamlike moments feel completely real.
The movie is set in the Nickerson Gardens housing projects in Watts and centers on Lil Ant, a 12-year-old boy beautifully played by Bodhi Dell. Lil Ant is an artist, a daydreamer and something of a misfit at school, a kid trying to make sense of a difficult world through drawing, Greek mythology and imagination.
He lives in an environment filled with poverty, drugs, gang violence, police profiling and the constant threat of something going wrong, so fantasy becomes a kind of emotional protection for him.
Lil Ant's father, Big Ant, played wonderfully by J. Alphonse Nicholson, has recently returned home after serving time in prison. The boy views his father as something much larger than an ordinary man. In his imagination, Big Ant becomes this god-like mythological figure, connected to Poseidon and the other larger-than-life characters Lil Ant studies at school.
That idea becomes one of the most affecting things in the movie, because the father Lil Ant needs and the father who actually stands in front of him are two very different people.
Big Ant loves his son, but he is carrying years of pain, anger and damage that he doesn't know how to process.
He is trying to return to a family that has had to learn how to survive without him, and that creates an emotional tension that Thompson-Hernández handles with enormous sensitivity.
Danielle Brooks is terrific as Lozita, the mother holding everything together, financially and emotionally, while also trying to protect her kids from the neighborhood, from instability and, sometimes, from their own father.
What I love about the movie is that none of these people are reduced to symbols. They are not "the troubled father," "the strong mother" or "the sensitive kid." They're complicated human beings. Lozita can love Big Ant and still know that loving him doesn't mean she has to allow chaos back into her home.
Big Ant can desperately want to be a good father and still fail his son. Lil Ant can idolize his father while simultaneously becoming afraid of him.
There is an early scene in which Lil Ant is caught daydreaming in class while drawing a winged Pegasus, and the image begins to come alive on the page. It's a small moment, but it immediately establishes the language of the film. Thompson-Hernández doesn't stop the movie and announce that we have entered a fantasy sequence. The imagination simply slips into reality.
The Pegasus becomes an important recurring image. Lil Ant eventually constructs this beautiful purple papier-mâché Pegasus for a school project, and when Big Ant discovers it, something in him breaks open.
For a brief moment, all the hardness disappears and you see almost a childlike delight in the father as he recognizes just how creative and special his son is. Nicholson is fantastic in these moments because he doesn't push them. The emotion sneaks up on the character.
There is another remarkably subtle scene between father and son in which the two of them, while having a difficult conversation, unconsciously fiddle with matching necklaces bearing the letter "A." Their words are pulling them apart while this tiny physical gesture reminds us of the connection that remains between them.
That is the kind of filmmaking I admire enormously: don't explain everything, don't underline everything, just give the audience an image and trust us to understand it.
Eventually Big Ant's buried trauma erupts and he slaps his son. The moment is devastating partly because the movie has worked so carefully to make you understand him without ever excusing him. Later, when he tries to return home, he finds the apartment empty. Lozita has taken the children and moved on.
The movie refuses the easy version of redemption where somebody screws up terribly, apologizes and everybody hugs before the credits roll.
That restraint continues all the way to the quiet final sequence at the beach. Big Ant is allowed to see his children, but Lozita remains emotionally distant. There is love there, history there and possibly even hope there, but the damage hasn't magically disappeared. Thompson-Hernández understands that forgiveness and reconciliation are not the same thing.
And then there are the airplanes.
Commercial jets constantly pass low overhead, roaring above these children who spend much of their lives looking upward. For Lil Ant, they represent escape, fantasy and possibility, but there's something ominous about them too.
They are always above him, going somewhere else. The people inside those airplanes are literally passing over this neighborhood on their way to another destination while the kids below imagine what it would be like to leave.
Throughout the movie, Lil Ant and other children run through the neighborhood with their arms extended like wings, pretending to fly. It is a beautiful image because it expresses almost everything the film is about: childhood imagination, escape, poverty, confinement, hope and the desire to become something beyond the circumstances into which you were born.
Now, unfortunately, because of the way movies get released, I know exactly what is going to happen when some people see those images. They're going to say, "Hey, those kids running through the streets with their arms stretched out look like the kids in Weapons."
Please don't.
Yes, there is superficially similar imagery in Zach Cregger's Weapons, which had children running through nighttime streets with their arms extended. But Thompson-Hernández shot this material before Weapons was released, and the visual idea here comes from a completely different place.
It is deeply connected to the filmmaker's own childhood, to the airplanes overhead, to Lil Ant's Pegasus obsession and to the emotional and symbolic language of the entire movie.
Reducing that to some accusation that If I Go Will They Miss Me copied Weapons would be ridiculous. Quite frankly, it would also be insulting to Thompson-Hernández, because the imagery here is richer, more personal and infinitely more meaningful. Weapons uses a simple visual. Thompson-Hernández builds an entire emotional vocabulary around flight.
That distinction also gets at why this movie works so well when so many films influenced by other filmmakers don't. I've complained a lot recently about younger directors who don't seem inspired by great filmmakers so much as they're simply copying them. There is a difference between influence and imitation, and Thompson-Hernández understands it.
You can absolutely see Barry Jenkins in this movie. There are traces of Spike Lee. There's even a little Terrence Malick in the lyrical use of light, nature and movement. But the biggest influence, to me, is Charles Burnett, one of the most important African American filmmakers in the history of American cinema.
Burnett made Killer of Sheep, My Brother's Wedding and To Sleep with Anger, and he has always had this extraordinary ability to combine realism, poetry and something approaching magic without making any of those elements feel like they belong to different movies.
Killer of Sheep, in particular, found beauty, humor, melancholy and transcendence inside an impoverished Los Angeles neighborhood without sentimentalizing the people who lived there.
Thompson-Hernández clearly understands that tradition, and If I Go Will They Miss Me feels like a loving continuation of it rather than an imitation. The crucial difference is that he brings his own life into the material.
He knows these streets. He knows what those airplanes sounded like. He knows what it meant to be a kid looking upward and imagining someplace else.
That is why the magical realism feels earned. The movie doesn't use fantasy as an escape from reality; it uses fantasy to explain reality through the eyes of a child.
Visually, the film is breathtaking without ever becoming precious about its beauty. There are moments when the camera simply watches Lil Ant move through his neighborhood, and you can simultaneously feel the danger surrounding him and the wonder happening inside his head. The movie can be gritty, painful and emotionally brutal, and then suddenly an image takes flight and changes everything.
Bodhi Dell is remarkable at the center of it. There is nothing cute or overly polished about the performance. He feels like a real 12-year-old trying to understand adults who are far more damaged and complicated than he realizes.
J. Alphonse Nicholson matches him with a performance filled with anger, regret, pride and enormous vulnerability, and Danielle Brooks provides the movie with its emotional backbone.
If I Go Will They Miss Me is about fathers and sons, about the mythology children create around their parents, about the realities of growing up poor in Watts, and about imagination as a means of survival. It is also about what happens when the person you have turned into a god turns out to be painfully, disappointingly human.
Walter Thompson-Hernández takes all of that and creates something that feels simultaneously intimate and mythic, realistic and dreamlike, heartbreaking and strangely hopeful. The movie doesn't merely show these kids dreaming about flying away.
For a couple of hours, it actually lets them fly.
One of the most beautiful, hypnotic and emotionally powerful films of 2026. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
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