MOVIE REVIEWS: 11-13-26
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My Film Critic pants are quite fetching; they are on, pressed, and ironed. I'm ready to review five new movies in this week's movie reviews for Friday, November 13th, 2026.
I have to admit, I wasn't looking forward to Ebenezer. Not even a little bit. Here's yet another adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, a story that's been told approximately 900 million times in movies, television specials, sitcoms, cartoons, and just about every other form of entertainment imaginable.
And this time we've got Johnny Depp playing Ebenezer Scrooge in what Paramount has been promoting as his big return to major studio filmmaking after several years of tabloid headlines and personal controversies.
The trailers were terrible, making Depp look like he was delivering another exaggerated performance similar to the ones we've seen in some of his Tim Burton collaborations, including Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, and Alice in Wonderland.
Now, I happen to love Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but did we really need Depp doing another variation on one of his eccentric, heavily made-up characters?
The whole project looked like a calculated attempt to reintroduce him to mainstream audiences, right down to that gimmicky appearance at Comic-Con in full Scrooge costume.
The one thing that gave me hope was the director, Ti West, the terrific independent horror filmmaker responsible for The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, and the X, Pearl, and MaXXXine trilogy. I love West's work, but I wondered whether a big-budget Paramount adaptation of a Christmas classic was really the right project for him.
Well, I was wrong. Not only is Ebenezer a surprisingly good movie, but West has essentially made a full-blown Gothic horror film out of Dickens' beloved story, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.
The basic setup remains familiar. In Victorian London, Ebenezer Scrooge (Depp) is a wealthy, miserable businessman who despises Christmas, treats his employee Bob Cratchit (Rupert Grint) terribly, and wants nothing to do with his cheerful nephew Fred (Sam Claflin).
On Christmas Eve, he's visited by the ghost of his deceased business partner, Jacob Marley (Ian McKellen), who warns him that three spirits will arrive to show him the consequences of his selfish existence. We all know what happens next.
The Ghost of Christmas Past (Andrea Riseborough) takes him through his childhood and the mistakes that destroyed his relationship with Belle (Ellie Bamber), the Ghost of Christmas Present (Tramell Tillman) shows him the suffering of the Cratchit family, and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come reveals the consequences of a life devoted entirely to money.
But screenwriter Nathaniel Halpern makes some interesting changes, beginning with an opening sequence set seven years earlier, when Marley is still alive and working alongside Scrooge. We actually get to see their relationship, which makes Marley's eventual return more meaningful.
There's also an expanded exploration of Scrooge's childhood, including bullying and emotional trauma, and more attention paid to Belle. Interestingly, this Scrooge isn't simply a hateful monster waiting to be taught a lesson.
He's already carrying enormous regret and sadness, and the movie even shows him witnessing beggars pretending to be injured or disabled to collect money, suggesting that some of his cynical observations about human nature aren't entirely without justification.
These details make him a more complicated character, and Depp responds with one of his best performances in years.
And that's another pleasant surprise. Forget the trailers, which make Depp look like he's screaming and overacting his way through another collection of elaborate costumes and makeup. His performance is actually remarkably restrained, detailed, and emotionally affecting.
The physical transformation is excellent, but it's the sadness in his eyes, the subtle changes in his voice, and the way he communicates Scrooge's buried guilt that make the performance work. He's not simply a nasty old man who becomes a wonderful human being overnight. There's a genuine sense that this man has been carrying the weight of his decisions for years.
The supporting cast is excellent, particularly Rupert Grint as Cratchit and the great Ian McKellen as Marley. And then there's Andrea Riseborough, one of the finest actresses working today.
Every time I mention her, I feel compelled to remind people to seek out the extraordinary 2022 film To Leslie, featuring one of the greatest performances by an actress I've seen in years, for which she received a well-deserved Academy Award nomination. She's astonishing in that movie, and she's absolutely terrifying here.
But what really distinguishes Ebenezer from the countless other adaptations is what Ti West does with the ghosts.
This is a horror movie. A genuine, frightening, sometimes shockingly gruesome Gothic horror movie, and West embraces the supernatural elements of Dickens' story with tremendous enthusiasm.
Marley's arrival is frightening, with his rattling chains and an army of zombie-like damned souls floating outside Scrooge's windows, desperately trying to get inside.
Riseborough's Ghost of Christmas Past is even scarier, a pale, otherworldly creature with terrifying white eyes, a chilling voice, and an ability to appear and disappear in ways that are genuinely unnerving. At one point, she screams and light erupts from her face, creating a wonderfully disturbing image.
Then there's Tramell Tillman's Ghost of Christmas Present, whose body gradually decays as the present slips away. In one particularly memorable sequence, he opens his coat to reveal his rib cage filled with the tortured souls of children, hideous little creatures struggling to escape.
And finally, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is a silent, hooded nightmare who leads Scrooge toward his own death. There are sequences involving the theft of bloody sheets from Scrooge's corpse, his open grave, and zombie-like hands dragging him into the earth that are far more disturbing than anything you'd expect from a major studio Christmas movie.
West fills the film with atmospheric lighting, creepy imagery, effective jump scares, and terrific makeup effects, while cinematographer Checco Varese gives the entire production the look and feel of an elaborate Victorian nightmare.
There's also a particularly wonderful sequence in which Scrooge, refusing to believe that any of these supernatural visitors are real, declares that he's staying in bed and isn't going anywhere.
Suddenly, the bed begins spinning and he gets sucked down into it, in what is clearly a deliberate homage to Wes Craven's original A Nightmare on Elm Street.
And considering that Johnny Depp made his film debut in that 1984 horror classic, where his character is famously sucked into a bed before an enormous fountain of blood erupts from it, the reference is absolutely delightful. West is a filmmaker who knows and loves horror movies, and little touches like that are part of what makes this adaptation so much fun.
Now, I do have one complaint. As dark and disturbing as the movie gets, I couldn't help feeling that West was being somewhat restrained by the PG-13 rating and the demands of making a major studio Christmas release.
I would love to see what he could have done with a completely unrestricted, R-rated version of this material, because there are moments when you can almost sense him wanting to push the violence and psychological horror further.
Some of the more familiar elements of the Dickens story also feel a little obligatory, and purists may object to certain changes, including the altered Christmas morning sequences.
But considering that this is a Paramount release intended for a broad audience, the fact that West was allowed to make something this dark is pretty remarkable.
Ultimately, Ebenezer is one of the biggest surprises of the year. I went in expecting an unnecessary Johnny Depp comeback vehicle and instead got an intelligent, beautifully crafted Gothic horror film that finds fresh ways to explore one of the most familiar stories ever written.
West and Halpern understand that Dickens' original novella was, after all, a ghost story, and they've pushed its frightening elements into some wonderfully disturbing territory without losing the emotional power of Scrooge's redemption.
It's not perfect, and I still wish West had been allowed to go completely crazy with an R rating, but there's more imagination and filmmaking skill here than the dreadful advertising would ever lead you to believe. Do we really need another version of A Christmas Carol?
Apparently, if Ti West is directing it, the answer is yes.
I'm enthusiastically recommending Ebenezer, particularly to horror fans who appreciate a little genuine terror mixed in with their holiday traditions. Just don't expect a cozy Christmas movie to watch with the little kids.
This is Dickens by way of a haunted house, and that's exactly why it works. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Every once in a while, a horror movie comes along that reminds me why I love this genre so much. And considering that I've spent most of my life watching horror movies, talking about horror movies, and recently wrote an entire book about them, that's saying something.
Victorian Psycho is one of those wonderful surprises, a spectacularly bloody, outrageously funny, and genuinely disturbing black comedy that also manages to be unexpectedly heartbreaking.
Directed by Zachary Wigon and adapted by Virginia Feito from her own 2025 novel, it's a vicious satire about patriarchy, class, generational trauma, and the horrific treatment of women in the 19th century, with implications that are just as relevant today.
It's also one of the best horror films of the year, featuring an extraordinary performance by Maika Monroe, who continues to establish herself as one of the great contemporary actresses working in the genre.
The story takes place in 1858, when a young governess named Winifred Notty (Monroe) arrives at Ensor House, an isolated Gothic mansion on the Yorkshire Moors, to care for the two children of the wealthy and spectacularly self-absorbed Pounds family.
There's the pompous, creepy lord of the manor, Mr. Pounds (Jason Isaacs), his rigid, status-obsessed wife (Ruth Wilson), and their spoiled children, Andrew (Jacobi Jupe) and Drusilla (Evie Templeton). The family is far more concerned with appearances, social standing, and the future of their precious son than they are with their daughter, because, after all, she's merely a girl.
Winifred is introduced to the household staff, including the sweet and gentle Ms. Lamb (Thomasin McKenzie), and begins settling into her new surroundings. But there's something seriously wrong with this woman, and we know it almost immediately.
Through her wonderfully deadpan narration, Winifred casually informs us that her mother first tried to kill her when she was 18 months old, and that while most people fear the darkness, she absolutely loves it. She also has a little something inside her that she calls Fred, a particularly nasty presence that seems to encourage her more violent impulses.
And when she discovers a severed human ear in her room and proceeds to eat it with remarkable composure, well, you get the feeling that things at Ensor House are about to become rather unpleasant.
As Winifred becomes increasingly obsessed with the family, particularly Mr. Pounds, servants begin disappearing, bodies start piling up, and the mansion becomes a playground for her increasingly deranged behavior.
The movie is divided into cleverly titled chapters, complete with some wonderfully funny illustrations, and much of the story unfolds through Winifred's hilariously disturbing voice-over narration.
There are running jokes involving pineapples as symbols of wealth, the family's ridiculous boar crest, and the fact that Winifred's last name, Notty, sounds suspiciously like "naughty," which is a pretty appropriate description of a woman who enjoys collecting severed fingers and other assorted body parts.
There's a wonderful sequence involving a family portrait in which Winifred imagines inserting herself into the picture, and a genuinely terrifying scene involving something beneath a child's bed that delivers one of the best jump scares I've experienced in years.
Her increasingly strange relationship with Ms. Lamb also leads to a particularly bizarre and unsettling encounter involving some unwanted attention to the young woman's neck. But what makes all of this work is the intelligence behind the madness.
Feito's screenplay uses the conventions of Victorian Gothic fiction to expose the cruelty and hypocrisy of a society in which wealthy men control everything and women are expected to remain obedient, decorative, and disposable.
Wigon directs all of this with tremendous confidence and visual imagination. His previous film, Sanctuary, was an outstanding, darkly funny psychological thriller featuring two remarkable performances by Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley, essentially a twisted battle of wills between a wealthy man and his dominatrix.
I loved that movie, and it established Wigon as a filmmaker with a real talent for exploring power, manipulation, and deeply disturbed human behavior. Victorian Psycho takes those interests further, with a larger cast, a more elaborate visual style, and a whole lot more blood.
The camera glides through the mansion in beautifully choreographed movements, the compositions are often stunning, and the production design perfectly captures the oppressive elegance of Victorian wealth.
There are echoes of Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, Robert Eggers' The Witch, Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, The Favourite, and even a little Sweeney Todd and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thrown into the mix. The film also has that wonderful upstairs-downstairs social dynamic, with the servants quietly suffering while the wealthy family remains spectacularly oblivious to the horrors unfolding around them.
My one minor complaint is that the movie occasionally abandons Winifred's perspective to show us events she couldn't possibly witness, briefly disrupting the otherwise beautifully controlled storytelling. But that's a relatively small criticism of a movie that is so assured and inventive.
And the performances are sensational. Jason Isaacs gives one of the funniest performances of the year as the creepy, arrogant Mr. Pounds, a man whose sense of entitlement is matched only by his complete lack of self-awareness.
Ruth Wilson is equally terrific as his icy, insufferable wife, while Jacobi Jupe, who played Hamnet in last year's Hamnet, is very funny as the spoiled young Andrew. Evie Templeton is outstanding as Drusilla, the daughter whose treatment by her family becomes increasingly important to the film's emotional impact.
And then there's Thomasin McKenzie, an actress I've admired for years, particularly in Last Night in Soho, who brings genuine sweetness and vulnerability to Ms. Lamb.
But the movie belongs to Maika Monroe.
Originally, Margaret Qualley was supposed to play Winifred, and while I'm sure she would have been terrific, I honestly can't imagine anybody delivering the kind of performance Monroe gives here. Her facial expressions, impeccable comic timing, ability to shift from polite Victorian restraint to completely unhinged psychotic behavior, and the sadness lurking beneath all that madness are astonishing.
Monroe has become something of a modern horror icon, beginning with her brilliant performance in It Follows, continuing through films like Watcher and Longlegs, a movie I couldn't stand despite her fine work in it.
But this may be the best performance of her career. She somehow makes a woman who commits unspeakable acts of violence funny, fascinating, terrifying, and, against all reasonable expectations, sympathetic.
As the movie builds toward its spectacularly bloody, completely insane climax, it reveals some disturbing secrets about Winifred's past, her connection to the Pounds family, and the trauma that has shaped her entire existence.
Without giving anything away, the final stretch is simultaneously horrifying and unexpectedly moving, particularly in the relationship between Winifred and young Drusilla.
This is a movie about the sins of the father, the damage inflicted by generations of male privilege, and the rage of women who have been abused, ignored, and treated as disposable.
And somehow, amid all the madness, Wigon and Feito find genuine heartbreak. Feito, a Spanish novelist who writes in English, also wrote Mrs. March, which is being developed as a film with Elisabeth Moss, and after seeing this, I can't wait to read her work, particularly the novel on which this movie is based. I also can't wait to see what Wigon does next.
Victorian Psycho is one of the most refreshing cinematic surprises of 2026, and while its grotesque violence and pitch-black humor certainly won't be for everybody, adventurous horror fans should seek it out.
It's beautifully made, brilliantly acted, wickedly funny, and surprisingly moving. I absolutely loved it. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
David Leitch is a former stuntman and stunt coordinator who worked with Chad Stahelski on the first John Wick movie, although Stahelski is the only credited director of that film, and rightfully so, because John Wick is actually a good movie.
Leitch has gone on to direct some of the worst, loudest, most obnoxious action movies of the past decade. Atomic Blonde had a couple of terrific fight sequences and a great Charlize Theron performance, but Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw, Bullet Train, and the absolutely horrific The Fall Guy are prime examples of everything wrong with modern action filmmaking.
Leitch may be a talented stuntman, and he may know how to choreograph a fight, but he has absolutely no idea how to tell a story, direct actors, or make an action sequence feel like anything other than a bunch of noise edited together by somebody having a seizure.
His latest, How to Rob a Bank, is not only one of the worst movies he's ever made, it's one of the most painfully obnoxious films of 2026. This thing is biblically bad.
Written by Mark Bianculli, How to Rob a Bank stars the incredibly talented Nicholas Hoult as Ryan, the leader of a gang of bank robbers operating in Pittsburgh who have become social media sensations by recording their crimes and posting them online. Wearing animal masks, including Ryan's signature wolf mask, the gang calls itself the Wolf Pack and produces viral videos that attract millions of followers.
Their YouTube channel, Who's Hungry?, turns them into modern-day folk heroes, a social media version of Bonnie and Clyde, as they rob banks and deliver angry lectures about economic inequality, corporate greed, student loans, medical bills, and the impossibility of achieving the American Dream.
Ryan and his wife, played by Anna Sawai, are also dealing with the death of their child, a tragedy that fuels Ryan's personal vendetta against a powerful banking executive named Walton, played by Christian Slater.
Meanwhile, veteran FBI agent West (John C. Reilly) recruits a convicted hacker and software engineer named Reagan Gardner (Zoë Kravitz) to help track down the gang before they pull off their biggest robbery yet.
Now, there's certainly material here for a smart, angry, entertaining satire about the American economy, the ridiculous influence of social media, and the increasingly desperate circumstances facing ordinary working people.
The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the middle class is disappearing, and the idea that working 40 hours a week will somehow guarantee you a comfortable life has become a cruel joke for millions of Americans.
The movie even suggests that robbing a bank might be easier than paying your bills with an honest job. Fine. There's plenty to work with there. Unfortunately, Leitch and Bianculli don't have a single intelligent or original thing to say about any of it.
Instead, they deliver heavy-handed speeches, simplistic statistics, and painfully obvious observations presented as if somebody has just discovered that banks make money and people have trouble paying their rent. Wow. Stop the presses.
The movie desperately wants us to believe these criminals are righteous anti-establishment heroes, but it never figures out whether it's criticizing their behavior or celebrating it.
Even worse is the movie's approach to social media, which is so monumentally misguided that it practically destroys the very idea of cinema. We've seen plenty of recent movies attempt to satirize our addiction to phones, followers, likes, and viral videos, including Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, It's What's Inside, Influencers, Faces of Death, and John Early's dreadful Maddie's Secret.
But How to Rob a Bank commits the cardinal sin of adopting the very style it's supposedly criticizing. Huge portions of the movie are presented as recreations of the gang's social media posts, complete with distorted wide-angle digital photography, frantic cutting, memes, graphics, obnoxious sound effects, electronic pings, and endless shots of people staring directly into cameras.
The actual robberies barely exist as cinematic sequences because we're constantly watching them through the same idiotic visual language used by the people posting them. Leitch apparently thinks he's making a clever satire of this mindless culture, but he's actually celebrating it by turning his entire movie into one gigantic, brain-dead YouTube video.
If your goal is to criticize the stupidity of social media, making a movie that's every bit as stupid as the material you're criticizing is probably not the best approach.
And here's something particularly baffling. For a director whose reputation is built around elaborate stunt sequences, extended fights, ridiculous car crashes, and gigantic action set pieces, How to Rob a Bank has almost none of them.
There are no memorable one-on-one fights or extraordinary stunts. There's one car chase involving John C. Reilly driving his personal vehicle, an old woody station wagon, and it's completely indistinguishable from about 70 other generic car chases we've seen in terrible action movies over the years.
The robberies themselves are so badly staged and edited that they barely register. It's an action movie without exciting action, a comedy without funny jokes, and a satire without anything remotely insightful to say. That's quite an accomplishment.
The biggest crime, however, is the astonishing waste of talent. Nicholas Hoult is a terrific actor who has been doing wonderful work since he was a kid in About a Boy. He's demonstrated extraordinary range in films by directors like Robert Eggers and George Miller, but here he's reduced to a one-dimensional, self-righteous bore who spends an enormous amount of time wearing a wolf mask and delivering lectures directly into a camera.
John C. Reilly, one of our finest character actors, is similarly wasted as the perpetually irritated FBI agent who spends half the movie watching videos on his laptop and getting increasingly angry. Reilly, who is from Chicago, gets a couple of monologues about his hometown, his father's failed business, and why he chose law enforcement rather than crime.
There's even a coffee mug on his desk that reads, "I was a Chicago Cub fan before it was cool," a little nod to his Chicago roots that I appreciated, but which certainly doesn't make the movie any better.
The only scenes that are even remotely watchable involve Reilly and Zoë Kravitz, entirely because of their natural charisma. Kravitz plays the hacker recruited to help the FBI, and her character is apparently defined by three things: getting high, eating enormous amounts of food, and hanging around with a guinea pig. That's it. The running gag about her constantly eating becomes unbearable after approximately the 15th repetition.
They do manage a couple of decent moments discussing their personal histories, including a conversation about Kathryn Bigelow's Point Break, which actually made me laugh because the filmmakers apparently felt obligated to acknowledge one of the many infinitely superior movies they're ripping off.
Point Break is one of my favorite movies of all time, a magnificent combination of action, philosophy, male bonding, spectacular stunts, and genuinely thrilling bank robberies. The influence is obvious, but comparing these two movies is almost physically painful.
Leitch seems to have watched Point Break, missed absolutely everything that made it great, and decided that what it really needed was a bunch of YouTube graphics and Nicholas Hoult talking into a GoPro.
The rest of the cast fares even worse. Christian Slater, playing the evil banking executive, appears in only a handful of scenes, including one in which Hoult punches him repeatedly in the face. Anna Sawai, Rhenzy Feliz, and Tati Gabrielle are given little more than generic character traits and virtually nothing interesting to do.
And then there's Pete Davidson, whom I've always liked from Saturday Night Live and who has delivered some genuinely good movie performances, particularly in Craig Gillespie's wonderful Dumb Money. Here, Davidson plays Vince, one of the robbers, whose defining characteristic is that he sings his daughter to sleep every night.
This ridiculous subplot eventually leads to a scene in which he's surrounded by armed police officers, facing a potentially fatal confrontation, and calls home so his daughter can sing their bedtime song to him. It's supposed to be heartbreaking. It's actually one of the most embarrassingly manipulative scenes I've seen all year.
Watching this disaster made me want to revisit Dumb Money, a terrific 2023 film starring Paul Dano, America Ferrera, and Davidson that dealt with many of the same subjects: corporate greed, financial inequality, and ordinary people fighting back against powerful institutions. That movie was smart, funny, and genuinely angry about the system it was examining.
How to Rob a Bank even recycles several conspicuous musical cues that reminded me of Dumb Money, only here they're used with absolutely no imagination or purpose. You can also see bits of Fight Club in the gang's blindly devoted followers and Baby Driver in the attempts to combine stylish crime with musical energy. But Leitch and Bianculli borrow the surface elements of these films without understanding what made any of them work.
By the time the film reaches its final stretch, with the gang's followers getting involved and Reilly's character discovering that he's now being mocked by millions of people on the internet, the whole thing has become almost unbearable. We repeatedly watch characters watching videos that we've essentially already watched ourselves, and then we watch them react to those videos, usually by getting angry.
At one point, Hoult even abandons the established format and addresses us, the actual movie audience, directly, as if the filmmakers suddenly decided that another fourth-wall-breaking lecture was exactly what this disaster needed. It's the final nail in the coffin of a movie that has confused frantic editing with energy, volume with excitement, and simplistic political observations with meaningful satire.
How to Rob a Bank is a monumentally stupid, aggressively unpleasant, and almost unbelievably self-satisfied piece of filmmaking. It thinks it's hip, edgy, provocative, and socially relevant, when in reality it's derivative, heavy-handed, visually hideous, and completely devoid of wit.
David Leitch has made another terrible movie, but this one is particularly offensive because it doesn't even deliver the elaborate action spectacle that his fans might reasonably expect. Instead, we're left with a collection of great actors trapped in a loud, incoherent, painfully unfunny social media nightmare.
It's one of the worst films of 2026, and without question, one of the year's most appalling wastes of talent. The title is How to Rob a Bank, but the only people getting robbed here are the poor souls who pay money to see it. - ⭐️
One of the biggest and most delightful surprises of the year is Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky, an unapologetically old-fashioned, romanticized, occasionally corny, and thoroughly entertaining movie about the making of one of the greatest underdog movies ever made.
It's a film that doesn't have much on its mind beyond telling a good story, making you laugh, moving you emotionally, and celebrating the magic of movies. And you know what? Sometimes that's more than enough.
This is a movie specifically designed for people who love the original Rocky, the scrappy, low-budget 1976 classic that became a cultural phenomenon, won three Academy Awards (including Best Picture), launched a massive franchise, and turned Rocky Balboa into one of the most beloved characters in cinema history.
And the fascinating thing is that the story behind the making of Rocky is almost as much of an underdog story as the movie itself.
Farrelly, one half of the Farrelly Brothers responsible for such wonderfully outrageous comedies as Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There's Something About Mary, and who later won an Oscar for co-writing the Best Picture winner Green Book, has made a loving tribute to filmmaking that I enjoyed from beginning to end.
You could probably nitpick this thing to death, question its historical accuracy, and complain about its sentimentality. I have absolutely no desire to do any of that. I had a great time.
Anthony Ippolito is terrific as a young Sylvester Stallone, an aspiring actor struggling to survive in early 1970s New York City, where he goes by the name "Mike" Stallone because he hates his real first name. He's broke, practically homeless, and constantly humiliated at auditions where casting directors laugh at his appearance, his unusual speech, and his inability to fit their idea of a leading man. He can't even get decent roles as disposable thugs or anonymous cops.
Ippolito does a remarkable Stallone impersonation, capturing the voice, mannerisms, physicality, and distinctive facial expressions, but there's much more going on here than a clever imitation. It's a genuinely moving performance that makes you root for this guy immediately.
He meets Sasha Czack (the wonderful AnnaSophia Robb), a movie theater cashier who becomes his girlfriend, eventually his wife, and the person who encourages him to start writing his own material. She also witnesses the emotional damage inflicted by Stallone's miserable father, Frank, played with terrific, unrelenting cruelty by Matt Dillon.
There's a particularly uncomfortable dinner scene where Frank openly belittles his son in front of Sasha, establishing a painful relationship that will eventually influence one of the most important scenes in Rocky.
Meanwhile, Stallone is so desperate for money that he appears in a softcore porn movie, sleeps on the streets, and eventually has to sell his beloved dog, Butkus, just to survive. The scene where he discovers Butkus as a puppy near a garbage can while sleeping outside is almost ridiculously adorable, and I seriously doubt that's exactly how it happened. But the later scene where he reluctantly sells the dog is heartbreaking.
Manipulative? Maybe. Effective? Absolutely.
Eventually, Stallone and Sasha move to Los Angeles, where he manages to get his writing in front of producers Robert Chartoff (Toby Kebbell) and Irwin Winkler (P.J. Byrne), who recognize his talent and encourage him to keep writing. After watching the legendary 1975 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and the wildly overmatched Chuck Wepner, Stallone is inspired to write Rocky, completing the screenplay in an astonishing three-and-a-half days.
Chartoff and Winkler love it, but there's one enormous problem: Stallone insists on playing the title character. The studios want an established movie star, and they offer this desperately poor actor increasingly outrageous amounts of money to sell the script and walk away.
But Stallone refuses. He didn't write the screenplay because he wanted to become a screenwriter. He wrote it because nobody would give him a decent acting job, and he knew he could play this character better than anybody.
These negotiations provide some of the movie's funniest and most satisfying moments, particularly because Kebbell and Byrne are so good as the increasingly frustrated producers who genuinely believe in the material but can't quite believe what this stubborn unknown actor is demanding.
And then there's Tracy Letts. Good Lord, Tracy Letts! Playing Sandy Maddox, a fictional composite of several United Artists executives, Letts delivers one of my absolute favorite supporting performances of the year. He's spectacular.
Maddox is a wealthy, obnoxious, loudmouthed Hollywood executive who cares about nothing except money, power, and protecting his own enormous ego. Letts plays him huge, screaming at everybody, insulting everyone in sight, and seemingly spending every waking moment chewing enormous chunks of steak. I swear this guy is eating steak in practically every scene.
And he has a particular hatred for Paramount Pictures, Francis Ford Coppola, and The Godfather, which becomes an increasingly hilarious running gag. He can't stand the fact that Paramount made a fortune with that movie, and he brings it up constantly, usually while screaming about how much money he's going to lose on this ridiculous boxing picture starring some nobody.
Letts, a brilliant Chicago theater veteran, clearly understands this kind of pompous Hollywood jackass, and he goes absolutely nuts with the role. It's a hilarious, ferocious, wonderfully entertaining performance that deserves serious Best Supporting Actor consideration.
In fact, I have only one complaint about his character: Talia Shire, who played Connie Corleone in The Godfather, is also playing Adrian in Rocky, and somehow there's never a scene where Maddox discovers that an actress from the movie he despises is appearing in his production! I kept waiting for him to have a complete conniption over this revelation.
What a missed opportunity for one more great laugh.
Once the producers finally convince United Artists to finance the movie, with Stallone starring and a severely restricted budget of approximately one million dollars, I Play Rocky becomes an absolutely wonderful behind-the-scenes look at the chaotic 28-day production of the original film.
Jay Duplass is fantastic as director John G. Avildsen, a practical, no-nonsense filmmaker accustomed to working quickly and cheaply, who finds himself constantly dealing with budget restrictions, production disasters, and an inexperienced leading man who is also the screenwriter.
Duplass gets some terrific laughs, particularly in his interactions with the actors playing Burgess Meredith, Talia Shire, and Carl Weathers. There's a wonderful sequence involving the introduction of the then-revolutionary Steadicam, which allowed the filmmakers to capture those now-iconic shots of Rocky running through Philadelphia and charging up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Watching these famous sequences being recreated, including the spontaneous interactions with actual people on the streets, is an absolute joy. The movie also explores the improvisation behind the ice-skating scene with Rocky and Adrian, and the constant creative adjustments necessary when you're making a movie with almost no money and absolutely no time.
The recreations of these familiar moments are beautifully handled, and if you know Rocky as well as I do, watching them come together is incredibly satisfying.
There is one aspect of the production story that bothered me a little, and that's the movie's treatment of labor unions. Part of the reason the production moves from New York to Philadelphia is to avoid union restrictions and keep costs down, and there's a sequence involving a visiting union representative that has a slightly uncomfortable anti-union flavor.
I'm a union guy, and I wasn't particularly thrilled with the way that situation was presented.
But the movie is depicting the desperate circumstances surrounding this specific production, and I understand that the filmmakers were trying to get their movie made with practically no resources. It's a relatively minor irritation in a film that otherwise captures the collaborative madness of filmmaking beautifully.
And the script is filled with clever references to other movies of the era (mentions of Scorsese's disastrous New York, New York gets some laughs), wonderful little bits of Hollywood history, and the kind of colorful supporting characters who make stories about making movies so much fun.
But the moment that really got to me involves the filming of what happens to be my favorite scene in the original Rocky. It's the sequence where Mickey, played by Burgess Meredith, visits Rocky's miserable little apartment and asks to become his manager.
Rocky initially rejects him, and after Mickey leaves, Rocky explodes in a devastating outburst of anger, frustration, humiliation, and pain. He screams about his life, his failures, his apartment, and the way Mickey treated him when he was younger. Then, realizing what he's done, he runs outside, catches up with Mickey, and embraces him.
I have watched Rocky countless times, and that scene brings tears to my eyes every single time. It's the emotional heart of the movie, and one of Stallone's greatest acting moments.
In I Play Rocky, Avildsen realizes that something is missing from the scene they're shooting, that they haven't captured the emotional magic necessary to make it work.
Stallone, drawing on years of resentment toward his own father, finds that emotional truth and delivers the explosive performance that becomes the scene we all know. Watching Ippolito recreate that moment, and seeing the filmmakers recognize that they've finally captured something extraordinary, is genuinely beautiful.
For me, it's the best sequence in I Play Rocky, and the perfect example of why this movie works so well.
Of course, we know how everything turns out. Rocky becomes an enormous hit, wins Best Picture over an extraordinary lineup of films that includes Taxi Driver, Network, All the President's Men, and Bound for Glory, and transforms Stallone from a struggling unknown into a genuine movie star.
But knowing the ending doesn't diminish the pleasure of watching the journey. Farrelly stages the movie's eventual triumph with just the right combination of humor, sentiment, and old-fashioned Hollywood showmanship.
And while I'm sure some of the conversations have been invented, some events rearranged, and certain dramatic moments exaggerated, I really don't care. The performances are terrific across the board, Peter Gamble's screenplay is funny and clever, and Farrelly understands exactly what kind of movie he's making.
He isn't trying to deconstruct the mythology of Rocky or deliver some cynical examination of Hollywood. He's celebrating the determination, creativity, stubbornness, and occasional outright insanity required to get a movie made.
I Play Rocky is a wonderfully entertaining movie about movies, a love letter to one of the great American films, and a celebration of an artist who refused to compromise when everybody around him insisted that he should.
It's sentimental, funny, occasionally ridiculous, and completely irresistible. And just like Rocky itself, it's an underdog story about somebody who believes in himself when nobody else does.
If you love the original Rocky, and especially if that movie means something personal to you, I think you're going to adore every minute of this. I certainly did.
One of the year's most pleasant surprises, and an absolute delight. - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Club Kid premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, reportedly received a seven-minute standing ovation, and has been generating considerable buzz ever since. It played Telluride, Toronto, and was the opening-night selection at this year's Chicago International Film Festival.
I missed it at the festival but caught up with it at a press screening, and considering all the enthusiastic responses, I went in with pretty high expectations.
This is the feature directorial debut of Jordan Firstman, who also wrote the screenplay and stars in the movie, which is being released by A24. Unfortunately, I walked out enormously disappointed.
Here's a film that desperately wants to be edgy, provocative, unconventional, and emotionally powerful, but underneath all the drugs, sex, flashing lights, and underground New York nightlife is one of the most predictable and manipulative father-and-son stories imaginable.
It's a movie that thinks it's breaking new ground when, in reality, it's recycling just about every cliché in the book.
Firstman plays Peter, a 35-year-old gay nightclub promoter who spends his evenings organizing exclusive underground parties and his mornings recovering from whatever combination of cocaine, crack, pills, alcohol, and other substances he consumed the night before. He's obnoxious, irresponsible, self-absorbed, and completely incapable of functioning like an adult.
His business partner Sophie (Cara Delevingne), a hard-partying cokehead herself, finally gets fed up with him and fires him. Delevingne, by the way, is an actress I've always found uniquely irritating, and she does absolutely nothing here to change my opinion.
Peter lives in a surprisingly spacious rent-controlled New York apartment inherited from his mother, with an annoying roommate who doesn't pay rent and an eccentric older neighbor downstairs (Colleen Camp).
Then, out of nowhere, he discovers that he has a 10-year-old son named Arlo (Reggie Absolom), the result of a sexual encounter with a woman years earlier. Arlo's mother has recently died by suicide, and suddenly this spectacularly irresponsible man is expected to take care of a child he never knew existed.
Naturally, Peter has no idea what to do with the kid, so he attempts to incorporate him into his existing lifestyle, which is about as appropriate as bringing a fourth grader to a cocaine-fueled rave. Arlo develops an interest in music and DJing, and the two begin bonding, but Peter's reckless behavior eventually attracts the attention of social services.
There's also a psychologist named Oscar (Diego Calva, from Babylon), who becomes romantically involved with Peter, creating another series of complications. Before long, we're dealing with custody hearings, emotional confrontations, and the inevitable question of whether this irresponsible party animal can straighten out his life and become a decent father.
If you've seen Three Men and a Baby, About a Boy, Daddy Day Care, or even Dwayne Johnson's The Game Plan, you've seen variations of this story before. The only significant difference is that this one takes place in the underground queer nightclub scene, with a lot more explicit sex, drugs, and strobe lights.
Now, to be fair, Firstman does a convincing job of recreating that particular world. The nightclub sequences feel authentic, with their pounding music, flashing lights, sweaty bodies, drug consumption, and endless partying. But the filmmaking itself is another story.
The opening sequence, involving a group of obnoxious people crammed into an Uber, is photographed in one long, elaborate, swinging camera movement that immediately announces just how clever the filmmakers think they're being.
Cinematographer Adam Newport-Berra also worked on the Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg series The Studio, another project that relies heavily on elaborate extended takes, and Firstman seems determined to use every self-conscious visual trick available to a first-time director.
The handheld camera, the extended shots, the frantic movement, the relentless noise, it all feels calculated to impress rather than illuminate. Instead of being immersed in the story, I kept noticing the director showing off.
There's a difference between having a distinctive visual style and constantly calling attention to yourself, and Club Kid crosses that line repeatedly. It's the kind of first-feature overindulgence that practically screams, "Look at me! Aren't I an edgy filmmaker?"
The bigger problem, however, is the screenplay, which treats serious emotional and psychological issues as convenient plot devices rather than genuine complications.
Peter isn't simply an irresponsible guy who occasionally drinks too much. He's a full-blown drug addict, regularly consuming dangerous substances, blacking out, and engaging in behavior that puts himself and everyone around him at risk.
Yet the movie seems to suggest that once he decides he wants to become a father, he can begin cleaning up his act in a matter of weeks. I'm sorry, but that's not how addiction works.
You don't overcome years of serious substance abuse simply because a cute 10-year-old suddenly appears in your apartment and the screenplay needs you to become a better person before the third act.
Arlo also exhibits troubling anger issues that suggest he needs genuine psychological help, but those concerns are introduced and then largely abandoned. The relationship between Peter and Oscar raises obvious professional and ethical questions that the movie never adequately addresses, either.
These aren't minor details. They're significant issues that should shape the characters and their decisions, but Firstman keeps brushing them aside whenever they threaten to interfere with the movie's predetermined emotional destination. For a film that works so hard to appear realistic and uncompromising, its treatment of addiction, trauma, and parenting is remarkably superficial.
There are, admittedly, some things that work. Young Reggie Absolom is quite good as Arlo, and he and Firstman occasionally share moments of genuine warmth and humor. Their conversations about music are appealing, and there's a funny scene in which the two are walking down the street, casually swearing at each other, when a woman objects to the child's language and receives a wonderfully inappropriate response.
It's a good gag, and there are a handful of similarly amusing moments involving Peter's complete inability to understand what constitutes appropriate behavior around a child.
I also enjoyed seeing the wonderful Colleen Camp as Peter's eccentric downstairs neighbor. I've loved Camp for decades, from Apocalypse Now and Valley Girl to her hilarious work in Clue, and it's always a pleasure when she turns up in something. Unfortunately, even she's stuck playing the familiar kooky older neighbor we've encountered in countless other movies.
The supporting characters are generally one-dimensional, and while the film captures the atmosphere of its nightclub setting convincingly, the people inhabiting that world are rarely interesting enough to justify spending this much time with them.
What ultimately irritated me about Club Kid is the enormous gap between what the movie thinks it's doing and what it actually accomplishes.
Firstman clearly wants to tell a story about an unconventional family, the importance of chosen communities, and a man learning to take responsibility for someone other than himself.
Those are perfectly legitimate subjects, but a different setting doesn't automatically make a familiar story original, and explicit sexual content, drug use, and profanity don't magically transform a conventional domestic comedy into something daring or profound.
Peter remains intensely unlikable, and his eventual transformation never feels earned. I actually found myself thinking that Arlo might be considerably better off living with a responsible adult somewhere else.
And you know what movie I kept thinking about while watching this? Big Daddy, the goofy 1999 Adam Sandler comedy about an irresponsible man who suddenly finds himself caring for a young boy and teaching him all sorts of wildly inappropriate things. Yes, Big Daddy.
That ridiculous Adam Sandler movie deals with essentially the same premise, and it does it with considerably more charm, humor, and genuine affection for its characters. Club Kid is basically a pretentious, self-consciously edgy version of Big Daddy, only with more cocaine, more sex, and a lot more artistic posturing.
And here's the thing: Big Daddy is a much better movie. Despite all the acclaim, the festival attention, and that seven-minute standing ovation at Cannes, I found Club Kid irritating, manipulative, and deeply disappointing.
If I'm up at two in the morning flipping through channels and I have a choice between watching Club Kid again or revisiting Adam Sandler's Big Daddy, I'll take Sandler every single time.
And I won't even have to think about it. - ⭐️⭐️
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