CAPSULE REVIEWS: 1-9-26
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- 23 min read
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review six new movies in this week's capsule (short) movie reviews for Friday, January 9th, 2026.
It’s always interesting when a new Gus Van Sant movie comes along, because for decades now he has been one of the most wildly unpredictable filmmakers working. He is capable of absolute greatness and absolute misfires, sometimes back to back, sometimes within the same decade, sometimes within the same movie.
Early on, he was one of the most exciting American independent filmmakers around. Mala Noche announced a bold new voice. Drugstore Cowboy remains a genuine classic. My Own Private Idaho is one of the most important films of the 1990s, a truly great American movie. To Die For is razor-sharp, vicious, funny, and brilliant.
Then he crossed over into the Hollywood mainstream with Good Will Hunting, which became a cultural phenomenon and won Oscars, and almost immediately followed that with one of the most baffling career moves of all time: a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho that remains one of the worst ideas ever committed to film.
Since then, his career has zigzagged between inspired and inert, personal and painfully distant. You never quite know what you’re going to get, and unfortunately Dead Man’s Wire falls more on the disappointing side of that equation.
On paper, this should have been a perfect project for him. A gritty true story set in the late 1970s, centered on a bizarre hostage standoff that became a media circus, loaded with moral ambiguity, paranoia, and public spectacle.
It’s exactly the kind of material that echoes the great American cinema of that era, the kind of story that invites comparisons to Dog Day Afternoon, The Conversation, and Network, the best of Sidney Lumet and Coppola.
The movie is inspired by the real-life case of Tony Kiritsis, a deeply troubled real estate developer who believed he had been financially ruined by a mortgage company and decided to take extreme, theatrical revenge.
He kidnaps the wrong man, rigs a shotgun to his hostage’s neck with a dead man’s wire, and turns the whole ordeal into a prolonged, televised standoff that captures the attention of an angry, disillusioned public.
The film looks terrific. From a purely technical standpoint, Van Sant and his team absolutely nail the 1970s atmosphere. The costumes, the production design, the grainy texture, and the muted color palette feel authentic and lived in.
You can tell he wants this to feel like a lost film from that era, something that might have played in grindhouses or second-run theaters alongside the great urban thrillers of the decade.
The problem is that despite how good it looks, the movie never feels alive. There’s a strange hollowness to it, a sense that Van Sant is going through the motions rather than fully engaging with the material on a personal level. It feels oddly impersonal, like a director with immense talent simply coasting.
The screenplay by Austin Kolodney has some strong ideas and genuinely fascinating moments. The true story itself is compelling, and the themes about media exploitation, public grievance, and the way violence becomes spectacle are still very relevant.
But the film never quite pulls those ideas together into something cohesive. Instead, it feels like a blender full of mismatched tones and performances, all competing with one another rather than working in harmony.
Bill Skarsgård is the undeniable centerpiece and easily the best thing in the movie. His performance as Tony Kiritsis is intense, focused, and deeply committed. He gives the character real emotional weight and complexity, and for long stretches, he’s the only thing holding the film together.
You care about him, even when he’s doing something monstrous, and that’s not an easy trick to pull off. Skarsgård continues to prove that he’s one of the most interesting actors of his generation, and his work here is powerful enough that it almost makes you wish the entire movie were built around his perspective alone.
Unfortunately, the supporting performances are wildly uneven. Dacre Montgomery, who spends the most time on screen with Skarsgård as the kidnapped Richard Hall, is simply not up to the task. He’s stiff, flat, and frequently overwhelmed by his co-star. The imbalance between them undercuts much of the tension that should be driving the story.
Myha’la, on the other hand, is excellent as a young reporter drawn into the chaos, bringing intelligence and urgency to her scenes. She understands the movie she’s in, and her performance works.
Colman Domingo is where the movie really starts to wobble. I know he’s enormously popular right now and a favorite of awards voters, but I have never understood the appeal. He is an actor with a capital A, and he wants you to know it.
Every line reading is oversized, every gesture is amplified, and here he feels completely out of step with the rest of the film. His performance as the radio DJ becomes grating almost immediately, pulling focus and draining credibility from scenes that should feel grounded.
Then there’s Al Pacino, who was obviously cast to remind the audience of Dog Day Afternoon. Watching him in this movie is both fascinating and frustrating. He’s doing a completely indecipherable accent, punctuating scenes with strange hand movements and exaggerated tics, and delivering lines as if he’s in a broad satire rather than a gritty crime drama.
Kelly Lynch, playing his wife, seems to be in the same strange movie he is, complete with an odd accent and a performance that feels wildly out of place. Pacino and Lynch might be entertaining in isolation, but together they feel like they wandered in from a different genre altogether.
Cary Elwes is perhaps the strangest element of all. He is almost unrecognizable, buried under a bizarre accent and an even stranger performance choice. On its own, what he’s doing is wildly entertaining, goofy, and memorable.
Within the context of this movie, it makes absolutely no sense. It’s fun to watch, but it pulls you completely out of the story, which is the exact opposite of what this kind of thriller needs.
As a result, Dead Man’s Wire never settles into a consistent tone. It wants to be a serious true-crime thriller, a media satire, a character study, and a nostalgic throwback all at once, and it never finds a way to balance those impulses.
The movie is too long, too scattered, and too emotionally distant to fully work. Despite its strong visual style and one genuinely great central performance, it never becomes the gripping, unsettling experience it should have been.
This is yet another example of Gus Van Sant making a movie that feels technically proficient but spiritually empty. It’s not terrible, and it’s certainly not the worst thing he’s ever done, but it’s nowhere near the level of his best work.
There are flashes of something great here, mostly whenever Bill Skarsgård is on screen, but they’re buried under inconsistent performances and a lack of directorial urgency.
In the end, it’s a mixed bag and ultimately a disappointment. Despite the fascinating true story and the impressive cast, I can’t really recommend it. - ⭐️⭐️1/2
Jim Jarmusch is one of my all-time favorite filmmakers, so whenever a new movie of his shows up, it’s automatically an event for me. He’s a director with a completely unmistakable voice, a filmmaker who has never bent his style to trends, expectations, or commercial pressure, and Father Mother Sister Brother feels like a reaffirmation of exactly why his work has mattered for decades.
This is his return to the anthology format, something he’s always been particularly great at. Mystery Train told three stories, Night on Earth gave us five, Coffee and Cigarettes bounced through more than ten short encounters, and now here we get a triptych: three distinct stories that echo, reflect, and quietly talk to each other across continents.
The movie is broken into three chapters, each set in a different country and each dealing with adult children confronting, or failing to confront, their relationships with parents and siblings.
On the surface, nothing much happens, which is exactly the point. This is a Jim Jarmusch movie, after all. Meaningful pauses, long silences, sideways glances, awkward conversations, and emotional truths buried under politeness and deadpan humor are where the action lives.
The first chapter, "Father," takes place in a snowy, rural corner of the United States and stars Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik as siblings visiting their estranged, reclusive father, played by Tom Waits.
Adam Driver has worked with Jarmusch before in Paterson, which remains one of my favorite films from both of them and contains what might be my favorite Driver performance ever.
He’s once again excellent here, subtle and restrained, playing a man who has quietly taken on responsibility without making a big deal out of it. Mayim Bialik is terrific as well, sharper and more openly suspicious, clearly less willing to accept her father’s strange behavior at face value.
And then there’s Tom Waits. Tom Waits is one of the great screen presences of all time, and no one understands how to use him better than Jim Jarmusch. He’s been a recurring presence in Jarmusch’s work for years, and every time he shows up, it’s magic. His performance here is funny, prickly, sad, and ultimately revealing in a way that feels completely earned.
The slow uncovering of who this man really is, what he’s hiding, and why he’s hiding it lands beautifully, and the final moments of this chapter are both amusing and quietly devastating. It’s a perfect piece of deadpan storytelling, and all three performances are outstanding.
The second chapter, "Mother," shifts gears entirely and takes us to Dublin. Charlotte Rampling plays a famous, emotionally distant novelist meeting her two daughters, played by Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps, for their once-a-year ritual tea.
This section feels the most European in tone, filled with manners, posture, and polite conversation that barely conceals years of resentment, insecurity, and unspoken competition. It’s funny in a brittle, precise way, but there’s also a tremendous amount of sadness lurking beneath the surface.
Watching Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, and Vicky Krieps share the screen is an absolute pleasure. These are three extraordinary actresses, each with a very different energy, and Jarmusch gives them space to work.
Rampling is elegant, cool, and quietly intimidating. Blanchett plays exhaustion and anxiety with remarkable control, while Krieps brings a nervous, performative cheerfulness that feels increasingly desperate as the scene unfolds.
This chapter is all about what people choose to say and, more importantly, what they refuse to say. It’s stiff, uncomfortable, revealing, and unexpectedly touching, and it looks completely different from the first chapter in terms of color, pacing, and atmosphere.
The final chapter, "Sister Brother," takes place in Paris and is the most emotionally open of the three. Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play siblings cleaning out their parents’ apartment after their sudden death. Unlike the other stories, this one feels softer, warmer, and more openly reflective.
There’s less comedy here and more melancholy, as the siblings sift through memories, objects, and revelations about who their parents really were. Françoise Lebrun appears as the landlord, adding another quiet layer of compassion and mystery.
This section is the most moving, the most elegiac, and the one that lingers the longest. It’s about grief, yes, but also about discovery and acceptance. The idea that we never fully know our parents, that they contain entire secret lives and histories we’ll never completely understand, becomes the emotional core of the film here.
What ties all three stories together are recurring visual and thematic motifs. Watches appear in each chapter. Skateboarders glide through scenes in different countries, moving in slow motion as if time itself has been momentarily suspended. Lines of dialogue echo across stories. These connections are subtle, never underlined, never explained, but they give the film a quiet cohesion that feels organic and deeply human.
This is one of those movies where every performance works. Every single actor understands the tone, the rhythm, and the restraint required. Jarmusch has always had an uncanny ability to get remarkable work out of people, including musicians and performers who aren’t traditionally thought of as actors, and that gift is on full display here.
There is no mistaking this for anyone else’s movie. The style is unmistakable: proudly independent, weird, funny, melancholy, and deeply personal without ever becoming sentimental.
Is it Jarmusch’s greatest film? No. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Dead Man, Down by Law, or Paterson. But as an anthology piece, it stands comfortably alongside Mystery Train, Night on Earth, and Coffee and Cigarettes.
It’s thoughtful, funny, strange, and quietly profound. If you’re a fan of Jim Jarmusch, this is exactly what you want from him, and if you’re not, this might be one of the best entry points into understanding why his work has mattered for so long.
Three stories, three countries, one filmmaker with a singular voice. Father Mother Sister Brother is a beautiful reminder that cinema can be small, quiet, and deeply human, and still leave a lasting mark. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
There are sequels nobody asks for, and then there are sequels that make you question whether anyone involved actually watched the first movie all the way through. Greenland 2: Migration falls squarely into that second category.
Did we really need a follow-up to Greenland, that loud, ridiculous, derivative 2020 comet-disaster thriller that already felt tired the moment it was released?
Apparently, someone thought so, and here we are, five years later, staring down one of the most dull, overwrought, and inexplicably self-serious post-apocalyptic movies I’ve seen in a long time.
The premise picks up five years after the Clarke comet wiped out most of the planet. The Garrity family, led by Gerard Butler’s perpetually grim John Garrity, has been surviving in a bunker in Greenland. Supplies are dwindling, morale is low, and the air outside is still toxic enough that everyone needs a mask.
Butler opens the movie with a very somber voiceover explaining what’s happened since the end of the first film, and he delivers it like he’s narrating the audiobook version of his own obituary.
Right away, we’re reminded of two things: this movie thinks it’s much more important than it actually is, and Gerard Butler coughs. A lot. He coughs in nearly every scene, so you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out where that’s headed.
When the bunker starts to fail, the family decides to migrate, hence the title. Although the movie is called Greenland 2, 90 percent of it takes place either in England or on the road through a frozen, broken Europe.
They’re headed toward a rumored safe haven known as the Crater, a new green place that’s supposed to offer clean water, crops, and hope. If that sounds vaguely like Mad Max: Fury Road, congratulations, you’re thinking of a much better movie.
What’s immediately striking is how little of the disaster spectacle remains. Director Ric Roman Waugh, who built his career on loud, bombastic action films like the Has Fallen series, suddenly delivers a movie that is incredibly talky, ponderous, and slow.
The big action sequences that defined the first film are largely absent. The budget is clearly smaller, and it shows everywhere. The sound design is weak. The visual effects are shoddy. The matte paintings and digital landscapes look unfinished.
When the movie does attempt a big set piece, like a sequence where the family has to drive across what used to be the English Channel and then traverse ladders and rope bridges over massive chasms, it plays like a discount version of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, minus the tension, excitement, or sense of fun.
The characters don’t help. They’re all painfully one-dimensional, and the writing is loaded with clichés and lazy shortcuts. The world we’re told is dangerous, lawless, and filled with violent factions, turns out to be populated almost entirely by incredibly helpful strangers.
Time and again, the family encounters armed, suspicious survivors who pull guns on them, only to become friendly, cooperative, and dinner-inviting within minutes.
This is the luckiest family ever to wander through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Apparently, the end of the world has made everyone extremely reasonable.
There’s an attempt to inject emotional weight through long conversations, including a particularly clunky philosophical discussion between John and his son about why people pray over dead bodies.
You can practically hear the screenwriters underlining the dialogue, and yes, it comes back later for a big emotional payoff that lands with a thud. Everything here is telegraphed. Nothing feels organic.
The movie also tries, and fails, at humor. Early on, there’s a scene in the bunker where characters are dancing and bonding, trying to maintain some sense of humanity. One character talks about loving “classical rock,” which Gerard Butler corrects to “classic rock,” because apparently this is what passes for banter at the end of civilization.
He mentions loving Michael McDonald, yet the soundtrack plays a painfully generic Michael McDonald knockoff because the production couldn’t secure the rights to an actual song.
Then, inexplicably, a real Jackson Browne song, "Running on Empty," shows up later, despite the same character claiming he doesn’t know who Jackson Browne is and hates his music. It’s a small thing, but it perfectly illustrates how sloppy and careless the writing is.
Morena Baccarin is completely wasted, as are several other decent actors who show up only to be swallowed by bad dialogue and inert scenes. Gerard Butler remains one of the most consistently irritating presences in modern action cinema.
He looks like he’s trying to be Russell Crowe while accidentally morphing into Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and he has never once convinced me as a compelling screen presence. He’s marginally better here than he was in The Phantom of the Opera, which is not exactly a ringing endorsement.
As the film drags on, it becomes increasingly clear that Greenland 2: Migration doesn’t know what kind of movie it wants to be. It was marketed like a big, loud, comet-smashing disaster epic, but what it actually is is a long, dull, overly serious meditation on survival that has nothing interesting to say.
The narration, which continues throughout the film, becomes unintentionally hilarious once you realize where Butler’s character arc is headed. I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say the choice to frame the story this way only highlights how misguided the entire enterprise is.
I was bored out of my mind. The audience I saw it with looked equally disengaged, and more than a few people seemed to nod off.
Whatever energy or spectacle the first film had is completely absent here. I barely remember Greenland from 2020, except that it was loud and stupid. This one is quieter, but it’s just as stupid, and somehow even more tedious.
It’s early in 2026, but Greenland 2: Migration is already a strong contender for one of the worst movies of the year. Overwritten, underwhelming, and painfully self-important, it’s a sequel nobody needed and a journey I couldn’t wait to end. Avoid it. - ⭐️
I Was a Stranger is one of those movies that feels like it’s been sitting on a shelf for a long time, because it has. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival back in early 2024, bounced around festivals, flirted with release dates, and finally landed in theaters at the end of 2025 after being picked up by Angel Studios.
And if you’ve followed my writing or listened to me talk about movies for any length of time, you already know what that association tends to mean. Angel Studios is a faith-based distributor that, more often than not, traffics in movies with extremely heavy-handed messaging.
Subtlety is not their strong suit, and unfortunately I Was a Stranger fits that pattern almost perfectly, even though it isn’t overtly religious in content.
The film, written, directed, and produced by Brandt Andersen in his feature debut, tells an interconnected, multi-character story about displacement, war, and survival. It follows several characters whose lives intersect over the course of a single, catastrophic night.
At the center is a Syrian doctor fleeing Aleppo with her young daughter after an unspeakable tragedy. Her escape intersects with a smuggler trying to save his own son, a conflicted soldier wrestling with what he’s been ordered to do, a poet searching for a place to belong, and a Greek coast guard captain torn between duty and mercy.
All of these threads converge in a dangerous crossing in the Mediterranean, where survival is very much in doubt.
That all sounds compelling on paper, and there’s no question that the subject matter is serious, important, and worth addressing. The film is clearly inspired by very real events and very real suffering, and its intention is to confront the audience with the human cost of war, displacement, and xenophobic policies. The problem is not the intention. The problem is the execution.
From the very beginning, the movie announces itself as Important with a capital I. It opens in Chicago with a blatantly obvious skyline shot that leans toward Trump Tower like a visual exclamation point, a not-so-subtle reminder of the political inspiration behind the story.
The film was written in response to policies enacted in 2017, and the anti-Trump sentiment is clear. I don’t have an issue with that sentiment at all (trust me...I don't), but the way it’s presented here is blunt to the point of distraction. There’s no room for interpretation, no space for the audience to engage on their own terms.
Structurally, the movie is broken into chapters, each focusing on a different character in a different location. Every chapter is steeped in tragedy, urgency, and despair, and almost every one ends on a cliffhanger designed to maximize anxiety. Rockets hit homes. Families are torn apart. Moral compromises are forced upon people who have no good options.
It’s relentless, and not in a productive way. There is no variation in tone, no emotional modulation, no moments of quiet humanity that might give the suffering texture or depth. It’s just wave after wave of misery.
One of the biggest issues is that the characters never feel like people so much as symbols. They are defined almost entirely by their roles: the doctor, the smuggler, the soldier, the poet, the coast guard captain. The script never really digs beneath those labels.
We don’t get contradictions, idiosyncrasies, or moments that make these characters feel fully dimensional. They exist to illustrate the message, not to live and breathe on screen. As a result, despite the seriousness of what’s happening to them, it’s hard to feel deeply connected.
The performances are fine, but that’s about the best I can say. No one is bad, but no one is given the space to be great. The actors are pushed to maximum intensity at all times, which flattens everything out.
When everyone is at an emotional eleven for two straight hours, the impact eventually disappears. What should feel devastating starts to feel exhausting.
There is a large, climactic sequence at sea meant to pull all the threads together, and by the time it arrives, I was simply worn down. Not moved. Not shaken. Just drained.
The film wants desperately to matter, and it wants you to feel the weight of its message, but it confuses heaviness with depth. Important subject matter does not automatically translate into important cinema.
Brandt Andersen’s passion for the material is undeniable, and I don’t question his right or his need to tell this story. The issues the film addresses are real and urgent. But passion without restraint leads to a movie that feels didactic, oppressive, and emotionally one-note.
This is an unsure directorial debut, lacking subtlety, nuance, or tonal control. So yes, the message of I Was a Stranger is important. What it’s saying about war, displacement, and policy deserves to be heard.
But as a film, it simply doesn’t work. It’s heavy-handed, one-dimensional, and relentlessly bleak. Despite all of its good intentions, the movie itself isn’t nearly as meaningful as it wants to be. - ⭐️⭐️
There are movies you admire, movies you respect, movies you think about for days afterward, and then there are movies like Primate, which exist for one very specific reason: to show a rabid chimpanzee ripping a bunch of stupid people to bloody shreds for 86 gloriously idiotic minutes. And you know what? On that level, Primate absolutely delivers.
Let’s get this out of the way right up front. This movie is about as stupid as movies get. The plot is dumb. The characters are one-dimensional, interchangeable, walking slabs of horror-movie meat.
You could dismantle this thing in seconds if you’re looking for logic, intelligence, nuance, or anything resembling thoughtful screenwriting. If you want three-dimensional people you care about, turn around now. That is not what this movie is here to do.
This movie is here to let a drooling, blood-soaked chimpanzee tear heads, jaws, limbs, and bodies apart in spectacularly messy fashion. And it does that really, really well.
Primate, directed by Johannes Roberts, is a natural horror/survival film set largely in a remote Hawaiian mansion where a college student named Lucy comes home for summer break to reunite with her family.
The family includes her deaf father, played by Oscar-winner Troy Kotsur, her younger sister, and Ben, a chimpanzee raised like a son by their late mother, who happened to be an animal cognition scientist. Because of course she was.
Ben gets bitten by a rabid mongoose, because horror movies require catalysts, and once the rabies kicks in, the party’s over. Literally. A pool party full of college hotties turns into a siege scenario as Ben goes absolutely feral and starts slaughtering everyone in sight.
That’s the movie. That’s it. You don’t need a diagram. You don’t need subtext. You don’t need themes. You need blood. You need gore. You need screaming. You need limbs flying through the air. And Primate gives you all of that in spades.
What makes this thing work, and why I actually had a blast watching it, is that it is extraordinarily well made. This is a dumb movie executed with real craft. The practical makeup effects are fantastic, excessive, over-the-top, and a beautiful throwback to 1980s horror.
This is the kind of gore that splatters, squelches, and lingers. Faces get ripped off. Bodies get torn apart. The opening scene, where the chimp absolutely annihilates a doctor, sets the tone immediately and lets you know exactly what kind of ride you’re in for. No coy buildup. No false prestige. Just carnage.
Johannes Roberts is not a great screenwriter, but he is a damn solid horror director. He’s done good work before, including one of the better segments in the V/H/S franchise, 47 Meters Down, and one of the Strangers movies.
Here, his direction is sharp, confident, and energetic. He understands pacing. He understands geography. He knows how to stage chaos without losing clarity. The movie moves. It doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s 86 minutes long, and thank God for that. You’re in, you’re out, you’re drenched in blood, and you’re done.
The craftsmanship is what elevates this from total trash to highly entertaining trash. The chimp is brought to life through performance and practical effects, not CGI, and it makes all the difference.
There’s weight, physicality, and genuine menace in the movement. The violence feels tactile and brutal. This thing would not work if it were computer-generated nonsense, and thankfully, it isn’t.
The music score by Adrian Johnston is another huge plus. It’s a fantastic synth-heavy score that blatantly evokes John Carpenter, and that’s not a complaint. If you’re going to rip someone off, rip off the best.
The score sounds like it wandered in from Escape from New York, Prince of Darkness, or any number of great Carpenter-era horror films, and it fits this movie perfectly. It’s pulpy, propulsive, and wonderfully retro.
Now let’s talk about the cast. They’re fine. That’s the nicest thing I can say. These are attractive, loud, oblivious college-age characters who exist solely to be slaughtered. They make bad decisions. They split up. They scream. They panic. They die. That’s the job. And they do it.
Troy Kotsur is in this movie, which remains endlessly amusing to me. An Oscar winner, rolling around on the floor fighting a rabid chimpanzee, bleeding, screaming, and trying not to get his face torn off.
I took a certain perverse pleasure in that, and honestly, I had more fun watching him here than I did watching him in CODA. But that’s just me.
Primate fits squarely into the proud, ridiculous subgenre of killer monkey movies. This is a real thing, and it has a history.
You’ve got Monkey Shines, George A. Romero’s terrific, clever, and genuinely scary 1988 film. You’ve got Link. You’ve got Congo. You’ve got Phenomena, with Dario Argento unleashing a straight-razor-wielding chimp.
You’ve even got that one effective flashback scene in Nope, which is otherwise a terrible movie. And yes, this movie also brings to mind Cujo, another rabies-driven siege horror film that worked because it was well directed and committed to its premise.
Is Primate as good as those movies? No. Not even close. But it knows what it is, and it commits fully. This is a salute to 1980s gore movies, slasher films, and killer creature features.
It is mean-spirited, excessive, unapologetically stupid, and technically impressive. The material is dumb, but the execution is first-rate.
There is no justification for my positive reaction to this movie other than the fact that I had a really good time watching it. It’s brainless. It’s ridiculous. It’s loaded with clichés and idiocy.
But it’s also sharply directed, beautifully crafted in its gore, driven by a killer score, and smart enough to get in, wreck shop, and get out.
Leave your brain at the door. Grab a rowdy crowd. Watch a rabid chimpanzee rip apart a bunch of morons in spectacular fashion. Sometimes, that’s enough. And in the case of Primate, it absolutely was for me. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
There is something almost defiantly old-fashioned about The Choral, and I mean that in both a good way and a slightly problematic way. This is a refreshingly modest, handsomely mounted, well-acted British historical drama that knows exactly what kind of movie it is and never pretends to be anything else.
It does not break new ground. It does not reinvent the wheel. It is not formally daring or narratively surprising. But it is sincere, professionally made, emotionally accessible, and anchored by one of the best actors working today doing exactly what he does best.
Set in 1916, during the darkest stretch of World War I, The Choral takes place in the fictional Yorkshire town of Ramsden, where a local choral society is struggling to survive as its male singers are steadily swallowed up by the war.
Their choirmaster has joined the army, morale is low, suspicion is high, and the community is fractured by grief, fear, and prejudice. In a move that feels both desperate and quietly radical, the group appoints Dr. Henry Guthrie as their new conductor, a man who is immediately viewed with distrust because of his Germanophilia, his atheism, and his quietly unspoken homosexuality.
Guthrie, played by Ralph Fiennes with extraordinary restraint and aching intelligence, proposes that the choir perform Edward Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, a choice driven less by artistic purity than by wartime politics.
Elgar is British, after all, and not German, even if his Catholicism and the work’s theological implications make the townsfolk uneasy. As Guthrie expands the choir to include teenagers, factory workers, wounded soldiers from a nearby military hospital, and other voices that would normally be excluded, the film begins weaving together its many threads.
Young romances form. Loyalties are tested. Conscription looms. Faith, sexuality, patriotism, and art collide in ways that are sometimes subtle and sometimes very much not.
This is not the most original story in the world. We have seen variations on this theme many times before: the idea that music, art, or communal expression can provide solace and meaning during unimaginable horror.
The film is loaded with themes, sometimes too many for its own good, and it occasionally bites off more than it can chew. There are moments when the symbolism is a little too neat, the emotional beats a little too familiar, and the manipulation a little too obvious.
At its weakest, The Choral can feel like a slightly overcooked British soap opera, tugging at well-worn heartstrings with a bit too much confidence that they will vibrate on cue.
The pacing is slow, sometimes almost stubbornly so, and there are stretches that feel a bit dull before the film regains its footing. But when it works, it really works, and much of that is because Nicholas Hytner knows exactly how to direct actors. It is wonderful to see Hytner back behind the camera after more than a decade away from feature films.
This is one of the great theater directors in English history, a man whose work ranges from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to modern drama, and that deep understanding of performance is evident in every scene. He stages conversations with care, allows silence to speak volumes, and gives his actors room to breathe.
Hytner has always been a filmmaker who understands material and performance, going all the way back to The Madness of King George, The Crucible, and The History Boys. Here, he brings that same theatrical intelligence to a story that could easily have collapsed under the weight of its own earnestness. The result is a film that may be imperfect, but is never careless.
The cast is uniformly strong. Roger Allam, Mark Addy, Alun Armstrong, Simon Russell Beale, Robert Emms, and a terrific group of young performers all do excellent work, creating a lived-in community that feels authentic and emotionally grounded.
Simon Russell Beale’s brief appearance as Elgar is especially memorable, capturing both the composer’s pride and his prickly defensiveness in a single scene. The young actors are impressive, particularly in conveying the strange mixture of innocence, fear, hope, and resignation that defines youth on the brink of war.
But make no mistake: this is Ralph Fiennes’ movie. He carries it. He anchors it. He elevates it. Fiennes is consistently one of the best actors on the planet, and he is having an extraordinary run.
From The Return to Conclave to the 28 Years Later films to what feels like a constant stream of challenging, nuanced performances, he remains fearless, precise, and deeply human.
As Guthrie, he conveys grief, longing, discipline, and moral conviction with minimal dialogue and maximum impact. His face tells entire stories. His stillness is as powerful as any monologue.
Visually, the film is beautifully photographed by Mike Eley, capturing both the pastoral calm of the countryside and the oppressive weight of wartime England. The music, unsurprisingly, is magnificent, and it genuinely transcends the material.
Even when the narrative feels a little thin or familiar, the power of Elgar’s work and the act of communal performance lift the film to a higher emotional plane.
The Choral is not a great movie, but it is a solid one. It is flawed, occasionally manipulative, and sometimes too comfortable with familiar emotional shortcuts. But it is also sincere, handsomely crafted, and deeply committed to its message about togetherness, resilience, and the transformative power of music.
It is an old-fashioned British crowd-pleaser, the kind of film you can nitpick to death if you’re inclined, but one that ultimately earns its emotional payoff through strong performances and thoughtful direction.
In the end, despite its imperfections, this is a film I am recommending. It is anchored by a great central performance, guided by a skilled director who understands actors and material, enriched by beautiful music, and driven by a message that still matters.
In times of unimaginable darkness, art can be a lifeline. The Choral may not sing perfectly, but it sings honestly, and sometimes that’s more than enough. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️
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