In his fourth feature, David Robert Mitchell makes what is easily his most conventional film to date. And yet I still detect in it a coy, almost cerebral relationship with its audience’s touchstones and expectations. Each of his movies, from The Myth of the American Sleepover to It Follows to Under the Silver Lake, has been a hall of mirrors, paying homage to well-worn and well-known cinematic idioms at the same time as it subverts them. This time, he cheekily imagines the dinosaur movie Spielberg might have made ten years earlier. Indeed, the film pays tribute to the Amblin era (Spielberg’s ’80s and early ’90s flicks and the likes of The Goonies) to such a degree that you might accuse it of cashing in on Stranger Things’ whole operation. Call it “Amblin-core.” (It’s produced by J.J. Abrams, who has built a whole cottage industry out of Spielberg pastiche. See: Super 8.)

That’s the joke, of course: a Jurassic Park movie for a world where Jurassic Park never happened, which gives Mitchell license to raid it freely. He pulls countless beats and moments from the dino mega-series, sometimes recreating them almost exactly, sometimes making a left turn at the last second, and sometimes just inventing something completely new. He cuts away most expository chaff; it’s sufficient to know hungry dinos are on the prowl. The result is a tremendously fun and direct piece of popcorn entertainment that perfectly threads the needle between vintage throwback and postmodern exercise.

The year is 1982, and the titular Oak Street sits in one of those perfect ’80s suburbs, the kind E.T. wandered into that very same year. The Platts, however, are less than perfect. Denise (Anne Hathaway) and Greg (Ewan McGregor) are a married couple whose relationship is fraying, and their kids, teenage Audrey (Maisy Stella) and her younger brother Brian (Christian Convery), are desperately clinging to normalcy. Then, following a couple of strange flashes of light and the sudden appearance of long-extinct flora, the whole neighborhood gets ripped out of suburbia and dropped somewhere (or rather, somewhen) prehistoric. Before long, dinosaurs are picking off the neighbors one by one, and the Platts are boarding up their windows and doors.

The most Spielbergian touch of all is that if the dinosaurs are symbolic of anything, it’s divorce: a violent monster that tears asunder a nuclear family. Spielberg has spent half a century working through his own parents’ split on screen (E.T. is practically a divorce movie with an alien in it, and The Fabelmans simply is a divorce movie), and Mitchell tunes into that theme as well. The Platts’ marriage is already on the rocks before the first dinosaur shows up: Greg and Denise lock each other out as they privately grapple with financial and emotional woes. Greg lies to Denise about getting laid off. He drives around delivering pizzas to keep his family’s checkbook (and his own pride as breadwinner) afloat. Denise, meanwhile, has been writing a novel about a suburban mom who fantasizes about leaving her husband and kids, a manuscript she’s shared with a neighbor down the block. It’s fiction, she insists, but we know better. The monsters give the threat of a family being torn apart literal teeth.

The dinos look pretty darn great, though Mitchell has put himself at the disadvantage of being compared to one of cinema’s great blockbuster effects achievements in JP (which maybe reveals why not as many non-Jurassic brand dinosaur movies have bothered; it’s tough to come at the king). None of Oak Street’s dinos are quite so daunting or tactile as that T-rex in the rain, but the fact that it’s even worth having that conversation is a huge win for Mitchell. These are savage, bloodthirsty beasts. Their most distinctive visual trait is that they sport feathers and fuzz, which is how paleontologists have come to picture many dinosaurs in the years since the scaly-dino ’90s.

It’s hard to narrow down a best chase or survival sequence, as the movie is simply jam-packed with them, and they’re all good. Shoutout to the allosaurs: they force the Platts into some tight squeezes and give the family a few good cardio workouts. If pressed, though, my favorite of the monsters is a gigantic albino serpent from the film’s second half. I have absolutely no idea if this is a real dinosaur (I suspect not), but I do not especially care, as it makes for great cinema either way. Much of its menace is that it slithers so quietly the characters don’t detect it at first. When the serpent opened its fang-filled mouth for the first time, I physically recoiled, so frightening it looks. Kudos to Mitchell for not beating around the bush or softening the danger. These dinos just want to eat humans, and that’s it. And that’s why we buy tickets to dinosaur movies.

Mitchell has always had an impish, almost prankster sensibility, though it certainly peaked in Under the Silver Lake. Some of that comes through in The End of Oak Street as well: Both dinosaur poop and dinosaur sex get dedicated scenes. And an abrupt, gory death late in the runtime lands with the rhythm of a cruel punchline.

I enjoy that the movie defies some of the expected beats, mostly in small ways. Brian totes around a bow and arrow, yet rather than getting a heroic payoff, he spends the movie unable to land a single shot. Meanwhile, his attempts to flirt with Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), the new girl in the neighborhood and a fellow survivor, flounder almost cruelly. She never becomes his love interest. He’s too much of a dweeb, with bad aim and no game. I actually think Jeannette is here mostly as a misdirection, and not only romantically: Her presence makes you think, “Ah, she’s how we’ll witness the real agony of loss,” as if she’s there to absorb the movie’s grief so the Platts don’t have to, when the specter of loss is very much afoot for the family.

Audrey, meanwhile, is painted as a geek obsessed with time travel and Carl Sagan, so surely she’ll be the one to resolve the wormhole dilemma. (She has a spark with Jeannette that another, slower movie would potentially have investigated with a queer lens.) In fact, the resolution to the dilemma boils down to chance and instinct, with roughly the scientific rigor of squinting at something and saying, “Hey, that looks like a portal.”

One thing that didn’t really bother me, though maybe it should have: The residents of Oak Street barely ever leave their houses, let alone band together. I bought it in the moment, because the movie sold me on the idea that anyone who stepped outside would get eaten on the spot, at least until the Platts… go outside and don’t get eaten on the spot. Call it the Jurassic Park lesson: The writing can be a little dumb, so long as the one thing that really matters, the palpable danger of bloodthirsty dinos, works like gangbusters.

My favorite moment in the film, though, is a sad, quiet one with a pitch-perfect needle drop. Amid the carnage, Audrey sneaks into the garage, turns the key in the family car, and tearily sings along to Steve Winwood’s “Valerie” on the cassette deck. For just a minute, the movie pauses amidst the apocalyptic wreckage around its characters, and it gives everything a little more human impact.

Speaking of music, Michael Giacchino’s score is outstanding. It is as much a throwback-meets-update as the film around it, blending the kind of soaring, deeply Romantic themes John Williams brought to Spielberg films with textures more modern and expansive. It’s another masterful outing for a composer who I just keep finding more reasons to respect. (His employment might be a dinosaur movie reference in and of itself: Giacchino also scored the entire Jurassic World trilogy.)

Visually, Mitchell and his regular cinematographer Michael Gioulakis update their distinct, panning camera technique for capturing the chaos of blockbuster action. The tracking shots make the action feel tremendously kinetic. Gioulakis and Mitchell also lean quite a bit on a glorious old-school trick: the split diopter, a half-lens attachment that holds two planes of the frame, one near and one far, in sharp focus at the same time. They go to that well frequently (roughly 20 times, according to one viewer’s count), and it feels novel every time, capturing focus on two different ideas within the same frame without racking back and forth between them. This is a fun touch from a movie that wears its ’80s influences this proudly. But it also suits a movie about a family at risk of getting split at a seam.

The cast is contained to four or five members for most of the runtime, and they’re all solid, with most of the movie’s dramatic heft falling on the shoulders of McGregor and Hathaway. McGregor is fine as a slightly dopey, prideful dad with just a nip of alcoholism. But Hathaway (who is having quite the year: this, Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and The Odyssey already, with Verity coming shortly) is really excellent as a mother with barbed cynicism who’s barely holding it together. As for the kids, I warmed to Stella as a shy, geeky teen here more than I did when she was an annoyingly normal one in My Old Ass. Convery (the kid from Cocaine Bear) makes a perfectly pitched dweeb.

The ending is a bit kooky with its sci-fi shenanigans, and it would be vulnerable to accusations of undercutting the stakes with time-travel tomfoolery if it didn’t stick the landing. But I think it does. The finale ultimately transforms the film into a life-affirming, family-affirming bit of fantasy that just happens to feature some really grisly gore and dismemberment. The stuff all great family films are made of.

It is not a one-to-one comparison, though I do think The Odyssey is his most Dark Knight-ish film since The Dark Knight. (Yes, even more than Rises.) Above all other thoughts and reactions, The Odyssey made me nostalgic and appreciative of a director who has been remarkably sturdy in his brand of epic, quasi-cerebral blockbuster filmmaking, grounded in practical production and an unceasing fascination with the grit that makes us human, dirty and flawed, set against operatic themes of light and dark locked in eternal, cyclical struggle with each other. Christopher Nolan, the biggest name in Hollywood, has evolved, and I’d even say matured, but what a blessing for movie lovers that he is still doing his thing and doing it well. Though I’ll never love his films as much as I did when I was 20, I am grateful for him.

What’s interesting is that you could come up with strong parallels between The Odyssey and all of Nolan’s films; I could have written the opening paragraph of this review in a similar style about literally any of Nolan’s pictures that I’ve seen dating back to Memento. (I promise I’ll see Following one of these days.) Heck, this is at least the fifth Nolan movie I’ve seen at Airbus IMAX, the biggest screen in Virginia. Put another way, The Odyssey feels like a summation of Nolan’s career even as it is very obviously doing some things no Christopher Nolan movie has ever done before.

For example, The Odyssey is the first time any of Nolan’s movies have been set in ancient times, which gives the director some tremendous new playgrounds for crafting his world-class spectacle: ancient burning cities, boats adrift at sea, giant mythical monsters, slaughter by sword blades and arrows. He also constructs a certain horse near the city of Troy that you may have heard of. All of this grandeur is as great and overpowering as you would hope, especially in the much-ballyhooed all-IMAX format. And this, I suppose, is the reason we still show up in droves: whatever Christopher Nolan makes is going to be huge and exhaustingly, triumphantly rewarding as cinema of scope.

But between the new stuff Nolan is trying and the way his telling of the story threads through all of his thematic preoccupations, I couldn’t help but feel that The Odyssey is a bit of an indecisive film. Look no further than the opening title card, which reads “an age of apparent magic.” That is as close to a point-blank confession as we’re going to get that he couldn’t quite wrap his filmmaking arms around the entire mythical scope of the Odyssey while still tying it into his own schema. We all wondered what a fantasy Christopher Nolan film would look like; it turns out that he was wondering that, too, and none of us really got clear answers.

And that leads me to the wobbliest part of the movie: the episodic opening hour. It’s almost as if Nolan had little patience for the most iconic bits of the Odyssey, because they feel the most askew with what the second half of the movie chooses to focus upon. Christopher Nolan has to pay the Homer tax of showing us a cyclops if he wants to investigate the complicated morality of Trojan War hero Odysseus (Matt Damon). And so we end up with some really impressively staged, but not quite right, sequences on various islands. They inevitably end with lots of death and the surviving soldiers sprinting to the coastline while they shout “run away!” like they’re in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

On their own, each of these early encounters is an achievement of production and vision. The cyclops is not quite so verbal as you might remember him, and indeed the well-known part of the story where Odysseus becomes a trickster and tells the cyclops that his name is Nobody is nowhere to be found. But that largely animatronic and puppet-based design of the cyclops is a triumph, uncanny and alien, and always shot to look impossibly large. And it says something about Nolan’s priorities that the man he cast as Polyphemus is Bill Irwin, a stage clown physical performers alive: this is a monster conceived for the body rather than the mouth. Meanwhile, the encounter with the witch Circe (Samantha Morton) treads into horror territory. Nolan can’t quite nail the Robert Eggers effect of transporting you into the mind and soul of a lost culture, but he’s at least trying to make it feel like these misadventures are out of a legend.

The problem with these early episodes is that they don’t track with the overall arc Nolan is ultimately sending Odysseus on. The attempts to connect each episode to the way Odysseus is processing his spiritual burden about his treachery and violent destruction of Troy end up very thin. Of course, as Homer wrote them, those episodes truly are standalone stories that are only loosely tied together in the larger epic poem framework. But Nolan has clearly latched onto telling the Odyssey in modern terms and narrative structures and values as the key thrust of his story, an approach that only intermittently works. So these episodes, these encounters with monsters and ghosts on one-off islands, end up neither fish nor fowl: they are individually memorable scenes in a movie where what is most memorable is, in fact, nothing individual, but the overall sweep of the story that these episodes don’t quite fit into, and thus they actually reduce the arc Odysseus goes through rather than deepening it.

This brings me to the overall structure of The Odyssey. For a while, I thought Nolan was going to use Citizen Kane as a model, where we get an external overview of the story followed by in-depth tellings and reframings of key moments through the eyes of other characters, mainly ones that Telemachus (Tom Holland) talks to or hears from. But that only really lasts through Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) telling him the story of the Trojan horse. After that, Nolan just goes kind of freeform with the structure, mixing various flashbacks with the present-day ordeals on Ithaca.

The film ratchets up quite a bit in the second half, and it’s better to go out strong like The Odyssey than to go out slow and drawn out like Oppenheimer, though I ultimately put the two of them in a similar tier, and the pair are astonishingly thematically linked despite “sword-and-sandals epic” and “biopic” being two genres on opposite ends of the cinematic spectrum. Both are about complicated men reckoning with the violence they hath wrought, the destroyer of worlds they have become.

The entire final hour of The Odyssey has hardly a wrong note, though it does have at least one: the double-whammy fakeout of Odysseus’s possible death is a stinker of a beat. Nolan couldn’t quite steer the ship into port without a collision, but it’s a mere scuff on the hull in the grand scheme of a great ending, a slow-pedaled emotional payoff eventually full of righteous vengeance.

“In the grand scheme” is the operative term because The Odyssey is the kind of movie that asks you to submit to its sweep, details be damned. It is a movie infinitely susceptible to “deconstruction”  as Mitch, the host of The Movie Call Podcast, likes to say (i.e. seeking out flaws and contradictions). Any movie that takes as broad of a swing as The Odyssey does, with so many goals and ideas, is vulnerable to pointing out, e.g. “Why the hell did Odysseus shoot the cyclops one last time after he’d made it out alive?” “Why did he not plug his own ears with wax?” “Why do these monsters look like Power Ranger villains?” “Is it just me or is that whirlpool not actually that big?”

But Nolan’s “grand scheme” approach to the material also highlights the ways in which he is one of cinema’s great writers. His dialogue occasionally clanks, his vision might be blurry on the intricate curvature of gods and guilt in “an age of bronze,” but he is writing a script to match the ambition of his own camera, and it’s a perfect fit. He captures the massive, unsinkable, operatic struggles he’s long been fascinated with, and does so with muscle and confidence, if not grace. Nolan sees his concepts and his cinema interlocking, sometimes in unison and sometimes in tension, like a boat in the sea, swept along but battered.

And the modernity that Nolan injects into the story does goose the tale in a way that a textbook adaptation wouldn’t. It results in a mirror of current headlines and struggles. The movie opens in Penelope’s court with a rapper as a bard (Travis Scott) performing the legend, suggesting a lineage between oral history and modern hip hop. Generally, though, the echoes are grimmer. I don’t think it’s too much of a projection to see Nolan grappling, in a world-weary way, with greedy political firebrands picking at an institution already scarred by violence and grief. The first victim of the Ithaca massacre takes a puncture wound to the neck, an unmistakable echo of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The rest of the violence in Ithaca reads an inverse January 6, where the angry political upstarts invading the governing hall get mowed down by the legitimate power. The film’s populace, meanwhile, cries out about “sea people” arriving to ruin their people and their culture: when Odysseus and his men are, of course, the “sea people.” This is America’s relationship with immigration discourse in a nutshell.

One simply cannot discuss this Odyssey without the requisite salutes to its cinematic achievements: We can start with acting. This is the starriest movie cast since The Departed, almost all doing a good version of what the story asks of them. Holland is the most replacement-level performance, but mostly because Telemachus is a replacement-level protagonist as the prince of Ithaca. Damon is great, very obviously up to the task of carrying all the weird responsibilities the story lays upon him in a way that had me thinking of Christian Bale’s performance as Batman. Anne Hathaway is tremendous as Penelope, as are many of the supporting turns, with my favorites off the top of my head being Bernthal and John Leguizamo, though I don’t really have any stinkers. And I haven’t even gotten to Robert Pattinson as Antinous, chief among the suitors and the closest thing this movie has to a proper villain. The closest I have to a complaint is, sadly, Zendaya as Athena; she has the statuesque poise and beauty but doesn’t convey any Olympian grace and authority (and given that we ultimately see her as the imagined reflection of an ordinary casualty of war, that could be an intentional tension by Nolan).

Another of the “requisite salutes” is the IMAX cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema, shooting his fifth straight film for Nolan, though I will hedge a little here. I have a strong hunch that the limitations of the IMAX camera caused some challenges in shooting even for a cinematographer of van Hoytema’s caliber: the visual focus of a shot sometimes stumbles around like a seasick sailor, with characters and props going blurry at odd moments. The vertical IMAX framing does work well, vacuuming you into the screen and marveling at the hugeness of buildings and boats and machines of war, though I wonder if an enveloping widescreen depiction of the wine-dark sea might have been lost in the IMAX full frame.

I have far fewer reservations about the score and the sound design, though. (Except, maybe, that it’s very loud and aggressive; but this is a loud and aggressive movie.) Ludwig Göransson, my boy from Community, once again delivers a candidate for the score of the year, a blend of ancient instrumentation and modern epic cinematic flair. It’s a rousing, aching achievement. The theme that soars when Odysseus plucks his bow elicits chills every single damn time.

The editing is likewise outstanding by Jennifer Lame, at least within the framework of IMAX film’s three-hour projection limit. The pace is propulsive and rhythmic, giving you that maelstrom of portent and the surging toward climaxes that Oppenheimer also had (which, indeed, Lame also edited and won an Oscar for; she is surely one of several odds-on Academy Award favorites from this movie). And yet I think the three-hour constraint is a bit of a problem: part of the trouble with the opening hour of this film is that the seafaring and its various episodes have been cut to the bone, so the sensation of time passage and grueling distance is lost. It’s a rare movie that I think might be better if it were 10 to 15 minutes longer, not shorter, if only to expand the “epic” feeling of the story.

So The Odyssey is great, and it is also messy and funky in the way a lot of great movies are. Nolan makes his own Ten Commandments here: an unrestrained, blank-check piece of spectacle following his Best Picture win, the same move Cecil B. DeMille made when he cashed his Greatest Show on Earth Oscar. And if Nolan’s attempt to lasso this ancient epic into a character study in his own voice doesn’t always work, I’d still rather watch him use all his magisterial blockbuster powers on it than any other living filmmaker. I walked out of that Chantilly Airbus IMAX the same way I did in 2008: rattled, a little deafened, and already thinking about when I could go back.

While watching The Whisper Man, I discovered a new breathing mantra. Inhale: You have GOT… Exhale: …to be kidding me.

Every breath of every scene, more or less.

What is especially frustrating is that this made-for-Netflix serial killer thriller is surprisingly functional in a few fundamentals. The atmosphere is tense and grim, the drip of plot twists is steady and compelling, the film is well-cast, and the actors are elevating the material. And yet practically everything that actually happens in the movie left me baffled. None of it makes sense. So much of the proceedings rely upon some mix of incredible dum-dum behavior and ridiculous contrivance. The beats are pulled mostly from David Fincher and The Silence of the Lambs, with bits of Prisoners and other suburban-kidnapping fare stewed in, and yet every character decision feels like it was written by Laura Dern after huffing spray paint in Citizen Ruth.

For example: after grumpy widowed novelist Tom Kennedy (Adam Scott) discovers a man has broken into his house, he chides his son Jake (Acston Luca Porto) that same evening for claiming he heard someone moving about the house, chalking it up to the kid’s overactive imagination and not considering for one moment that a dangerous intruder might be afoot. Even though their house was recently broken into and kids in the neighborhood have recently been kidnapped. Then, WOW, Jake promptly gets kidnapped. You have GOT to be kidding me.

Later, a witness with no previous suicidal inclination, the one person besides the killer who knows where Jake is being held, kills himself with a previously unseen knife rather than reveal the location to the protagonists, mainly, it seems, to drag the story out another twenty minutes. You have GOT to be kidding me.

In another scene, a key revelation arrives when the remains of a secret victim of long-incarcerated serial killer Frank Carter (Michael Keaton) (think Hannibal Lecter) turn up inside the very house Tom is renting, in a spot he magically never looked at despite it being where the previous break-in had occurred. You have GOT to be kidding me.

Maybe these don’t sound quite so ludicrous out of context. But the nonstop drip of illogic builds into a movie-ruining fog, a nonstop state of incredulity, all in service of a by-the-numbers procedural. By the third act, when the half-ludicrous-half-boring revelations start piling up and the final confrontation arrives, the movie has fully deflated. I actually laughed out loud when the shrimpy killer (Owen Teague) manages to take out all of Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, and Michelle Monaghan in a single wrestling match. (You have GOT to be kidding me.)

This is a shame, because the craft is not slumming it. Director James Ashcroft builds atmosphere and lands some punches; he just cannot keep the story on the rails. The great cinematographer Peter Deming shoots in damp browns and teals, authentically unsettling and evocative of better crime films; you can feel his previous work with David Lynch in how patiently he sits in some moments to build unease. Colin Stetson’s unconventional score, more rhythmic than melodic, sustains dread the way his Hereditary work did. And the movie has some genuine sound design to it, especially in the recurring motif of cassette recordings the killer leaves behind, capped by the cleverly shot sequence following the delivery from its mailbox to the police office (a moment that feels especially Fincher-esque). The Whisper Man looks and sounds like a real theatrical release rather than the flat streaming slush Netflix usually ships.

The cast holds up its end well enough. Peter Willis (De Niro), Tom’s estranged father and the detective who put Carter away, is quiet, lived-in, unfussy; in other words, it’s still octogenarian De Niro on autopilot, but the unhurried demeanor fits a man who closed this case fifteen years ago and would rather not revisit it. Keaton gets maybe fifteen minutes and makes good use of those scenes, supplying a quiet and unsettling menace that at least demonstrates understanding of why Anthony Hopkins was so memorable as Hannibal Lecter without, of course, achieving those heights (though a decent Hopkins-Lecter impersonation is nothing to sniff at). (Incidentally, this is Keaton’s first time onscreen with De Niro since Jackie Brown.) And I will always go to bat for Scott, who has proven he can slot into any mode and bring it a sarcastic ache. The weak link is Porto as the kidnapped kid, but it’s no worse than your average kid performance, I suppose.

A better version of this film would find a lot of potent echoes and hooks in the story. You can squint and see the shape of a thematic spine in here: fathers and sons, guilt handed down like a family heirloom, skeletons in the closet (in one scene, literally). But The Whisper Man limply points towards at these ideas without ever taking hold of any of them.

What’s left is the kind of mid-budget crime picture made for grownups that used to turn up in theaters monthly: functional, disposable, blessedly unwilling to pander to short attention spans. I miss those movies and I want more of them. I just want them to hold together for longer than half a breath.

The Breadwinner, Bargatze’s debut feature, was an obvious first step. He co-writes with Dan Lagana and transfers a great many of his bits directly to the script. He pulls in a respectable collection of talent both in front of and behind the camera. Eric Appel, who earned a bump in profile with Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, helms the film, and lots of solid funny-men and -women populate the cast sheet, including Will Forte, Colin Jost, Kumail Nanjiani, Zach Cherry from Severance, and Martin Herlihy from the great online sketch group turned SNL squad Please Don’t Destroy. That is an impressive amount of support for a debut starring vehicle, much like the support of Toyota Safety Sense 3.0, which is available on every trim of every vehicle in the 2026 Toyota lineup, offers drivers peace of mind.

But movies don’t fund themselves. And so The Breadwinner leaned on product placement for production, as have many content creators and film critics. In fact, I’ve never seen a movie so inundated with logos. At the top of the list is Toyota: Protagonist Nate Wilcox (Bargatze) is the top salesman at a Nashville Toyota dealership, and you can barely go a single scene without seeing a logo or hearing the company’s name uttered, just like you can hardly go a mile down the road without seeing a Toyota GR86, one of Car and Driver Magazine’s Top 10 Cars of 2026.

The product placement is world-historically relentless, though. When Nate’s wife Katie (Mandy Moore) lands a Shark Tank deal for a household organizer she invented and ships off to South Korea to arrange a manufacturing run, Nate takes over the house, the three daughters, and a schedule he has never once looked at. Along the way there is a Walmart sequence staged as suburban rapture and scored to “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” a bucket of KFC framed like the Ark of the Covenant, and enough Tennessee Titans merch to stock a pro shop. (The Titans changed their logo shortly before release, so the film is now inadvertently a period piece.) By the twentieth corporate logo I had shifted from annoyed to impressed. It had started to become performance art. Speaking of performance, the 2026 Toyota RAV4 offers 324 horsepower in addition to its updated style package and 37.8 cubic feet of storage space.

The template is stolen shamelessly from Mr. Mom from 1983 sprinkled with The Money Pit from 1986. Four decades later, the joke that a grown man does not know how to operate a toaster or which bus his kid rides is beyond stale. I’m not convinced “dads can’t parent” was a live-wire premise when Michael Keaton was doing it before I was born. It certainly isn’t now. Bargatze and Lagana just treat it like an extended CBS sitcom script: ruined laundry, burnt breakfast, forgotten school event, teenage daughter talking to boys, house falling apart after a bad repair and some manic shenanigans. These are old hat punchlines, not painful but only intermittently funny, and about as trite as can be. Which is, in fairness, the Corolla philosophy: never redesign what already works, but refine it to perfection, including improved efficiency of up to 50 miles per gallon in the hybrid model and a 12.3 inch digital gauge cluster that makes driving easier than ever.

Appel shoots all of it in a CinemaScope frame, the single most perplexing decision here. That frame belongs to comedies with a visual thesis like The Graduate or Rushmore. (Oh God, I’ve started to complain about aspect ratios. I swore to never cross this threshold of film dorkiness.) It makes The Breadwinner, in essence, a sitcom in a tuxedo T-shirt. The compositions are flat, centered, and functional. The lighting is that even, shadowless multi-cam sitcom wash. All that width and nothing put in it, which is the precise opposite of the 2026 Grand Highlander, where the available third row offers industry-best comfort and luxury with every inch, and a best-in-class panoramic moonroof makes every ride a spacious one.

Bargatze himself is the film’s most persistent problem. His standup persona runs on a very specific mode: bemused, unhurried, faintly astonished that any of this is happening to him. As standup, it comes across as polished but unassuming storytelling. As the lead of a comedy film, it comes across as an absence of energy. He is playing the number-one guy on the sales floor, a character whose entire premise is that he’s a workaholic who can charm anybody, and his performance has 0% salesman in it. He seems like a nice man waiting politely for the scene to end. Quiet, composed, virtually no emissions to speak of; that is exactly what you get from the Camry Hybrid, America’s best-selling passenger car whose Nightshade trim offers sporty 19-inch black alloy wheels in addition to Camry’s industry-defining engine efficiency peaking at 46 mpg in all-wheel drivetrain setups.

Around him, the movie wastes a strong bench. Moore is off on her own narrative-focused side plot, and she’s fine (and, I’ll admit, aging beautifully). Nanjiani gets one note, preening rival, and plays it well. Jost is asked to be a flop-sweaty presence of cringe-inducing try-hard fathering as a counterpoint to Bargatze, his personality changing but never his comic desperation. Forte brings some wry weirdness as an inept roofer, but my favorite performance comes from Herlihy as a deadpan pizza delivery driver who gets called on so often he slowly becomes part of the family, much the way a beloved family car does, such as the Sienna, the only minivan in America running exclusively on hybrid power and whose innovative FridgeBox makes every family trip a cool one.

I’ll give the film this: It is not mean-spirited. The Breadwinner is sincere and non-patronizing about how tough it is to be a parent in the chaotic 2020s. It never turns the household into a mom-versus-dad scoreboard, and Katie’s competence is framed in genuine, sympathetic terms. That’s more grace than this genre historically musters. It’s also why Moore’s role actually hits harder than I was prepared for: She is playing the impossibly capable wife-and-mother archetype we’ve seen in a thousand sitcoms and playing it with warmth and humanity. It’s the kind of warmth you’ll feel driving a Sequoia, a 2026 Top Safety Pick+ rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.

The film bombed at the box office and with critics, but word-of-mouth has been gentle towards it. And I get it; I, too, want more movies like this in the 2020s: theatrically released, professionally made, comfortable, PG, wholly unthreatening ninety-five minutes about a family that loves each other. I get, conceptually, there is real hunger for exactly that, even if the box office receipts don’t back that up. I only wish the movie wanted any of it half as badly as it wanted to sell me a Highlander, which comfortably seats up to eight passengers and can be financed at a reasonable APR from your local Toyota dealership (terms and conditions apply).

That’s lofty praise, and I don’t want to get carried away. This is not quite the magical family movie of a generation, though looking around, I can’t see too many non-animated competitors (and, to be fair, I haven’t seen the beloved Paddingtons). It is, however, pretty authentically great, and it pulls off an impressive feat of tonal acrobatics, juggling a half dozen threads and concepts — e.g. talking animals are funny, a murder has shaken this small town, is there a God — and somehow making all of them feel like they intuitively belong not just in the same film but in the same scene.

George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) is a shepherd in the picture-book English village of Denbrook who reads detective novels aloud to his flock every night, secure in the assumption that they can’t possibly understand him. They can. When George turns up dead in his field, the sheep, who have absorbed years of mystery-novel mechanics and precisely zero real-world context, decide to solve it themselves, in parallel with a local police force consisting entirely of Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), who has never investigated anything more serious than a parking complaint. Aiding Derry is scrappy journalist Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine). The result is both a compelling mystery and a hilarious series of misadventures by a flock of clueless sheep, which is a narrow needle to thread.

What surprised me is how many layers sit underneath the whodunit. The Sheep Detectives has a heavy undercurrent of spiritual interrogation running through it. The sheep have their own mythology about the afterlife, and they spend the duration of the film sorting through it. Any story involving shepherds and flocks is going to accumulate religious undertones whether it wants them or not, and this one definitely wants them. The sheep in this universe possess a specific biological/spiritual gift: with a small bit of mental exertion, they can force themselves to forget a painful memory. It’s less a superpower than a fitness activity, like massaging out a cramp in the brain, and the effect is that they get hit with the Men in Black neuralyzer on demand. This means that all but a small handful of them are entirely ignorant of death, having wiped away every scrap of grief they’ve ever encountered.

When George dies, they are staring grief in the face for what they believe to be the first time, completely incapable of making sense of it. The film’s best idea is that we are stronger for taking loss head on, that grappling with hard feelings is part of the deal of being alive, and that the departed don’t simply become clouds we wave goodbye to then never think of again. They are everywhere and they are inside us in real and inescapable ways.

Stacked on top of all that is the meta layer, which I have to assume is the fingerprint of executive producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, whose postmodern instincts are relentless. The sheep only know what a mystery is because George read them one every night, so they process each new event and revelation strictly according to the mystery story formula. Every clue gets filed against the genre template. It’s both a running gag and a surprisingly durable structure, always pointing the sheep to the next story event in clever ways. Craig Mazin’s script is disciplined enough to make it work in both directions: he honors fair-play mystery construction, laying out every clue for an attentive viewer, while the sheep loudly misinterpret the ones right in front of them. Coming from the man who wrote both Chernobyl and Scary Movie 3, this may be the most complete synthesis of his career.

The movie’s biggest downside is that the movie is so busy, it doesn’t have a chance to really develop the flock itself. Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a terrific lead, balancing wit and real feeling, and Sebastian (Bryan Cranston) as the reclusive black sheep and Mopple (Chris O’Dowd) as the one who can’t forget both have clear functions and clear voices. But the rest are well-voiced and memorably introduced and then largely left to mill around, which leaves a persistent sense of missed potential: this could have been a genuinely wonderful ensemble of talking animals, and is instead a bit shallow. The film’s lineup of human suspects and red herrings is also a bit perfunctory rather than sparky, though that’s par for the course in any Agatha Christie-like story.

Thankfully, the sparky stuff is very sparky. Braun is outstanding in this: He carries every scene he’s in, nails the tone the film needs from its bumbling but sympathetic authority figure, and does it in a charming fake English accent. Director Kyle Balda gets plenty of comic mileage out of Braun’s 6’7″ frame folding itself into small country interiors. Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson) turns up for a will-reading at her crisp, imperious, governessy best, and ends up being exactly the correct amount of Emma Thompson so she doesn’t overwhelm the movie. And Jackman, in a brief and deliberately front-loaded performance, grounds the affair with real warmth and soft sadness.

Balda is making his live-action debut here after the Minions pictures and Despicable Me 3, and his experience maneuvering CGI animation is part of the film’s success. The sheep, animated by British effects studio Framestore, are convincing not just in fur but in weight and mass, to the point I occasionally wondered if the animation was supplemented with real models or even real animals. George Steel shoots the Buckinghamshire countryside in a lush, cozy register, and Christophe Beck’s score is playful without narrating the jokes. Even the studio logo is in on the fun: the MGM lion opens the film with a baa instead of a roar.

It doesn’t quite reach the heights of its very obvious inspiration, Babe. But, frankly, few films reach that level of storybook magic, and the fact that Sheep Detectives lands in the same zip code is notable. This navigates to a tricky balance of being genuinely all-ages, honest but not morbid about death, and is direct about where meat comes (which I appreciate as a vegetarian; let kids know what nuggets and lamb chops really are). But this is a real throwback to a warmer and more ambitious era of family filmmaking made by people who trusted kids to sit with tough ideas the same way old fairy tales did. I take some comfort in the image of two grown women and their kids screening and discussing this film thirty years from now, watching a flock of sheep slowly bumble their way toward truth, not unlike the human race. That’ll do.

The setup is a fun high concept. Owen (Spike Fearn) runs sound at the student union bar of the fictional Manchester City University and has a great night out with a girl who gives him her first name, Emily (Sadie Soverall), and a phone number with a typo in it. So begins a Cinderella quest: scour every Emily on campus until one fits the slipper. The first false Emily he bumps into is Emily Raine (Angourie Rice), the psychology student writing that thesis, and she offers to help him find his true Emily, never mentioning he’s now her research subject. You can probably guess 90% of the story from that alone.

The film quickly finds a groove doing what a romcom ought to do: exploring the chemistry between its characters, the ways they’re similar, and, more importantly, the ways they’re different and can grow from each other: Owen tempering his romanticism with reality, and Emily vice versa. All of it flows naturally from the premise and from what Fearn and Rice offer, two delightful performers in easy sync.

Then the second half arrives, and the film ramps its high concept higher and higher until it’s juggling satire of social media, cancel culture, and toxic masculinity, pushing its story beats to farce levels of misunderstanding and contrivance. It’s not a total trainwreck, but it’s a mismatch of expectation set in the first half. None of the extra story material surrounding his Emily hunt works as well as the core romantic comedy material. The film thankfully never abandons the fundamentals: the romance and the comedy between Owen and Emily. But I can’t help but wonder if we were robbed of an upper-tier romcom if first-time feature director Alicia MacDonald and writer Rachel Hirons had trimmed the plotting escalations and given their couple some space to breathe and grow.

My favorite aspect of the film is the flavor and texture of its Englishness. Fearn’s Manchester accent is so thick that it’s sometimes hard to make out what he’s saying, like he’s a lost Gallagher brother, and yet it registers as endearing and scruffy rather than alienating. I was grateful, too, that Rice plays unabashedly American without the whole affair devolving into a fish-out-of-water story. (Sometimes when movies are too British it can feel like I’m visiting an alternate dimension where they speak my language but don’t really speak my language; see: Rye Lane.) It’s a really nice flavor.

Many of the film’s instincts are excellent. It uses music very well: “Blue Monday,” “Bad Guy,” “Call Me Maybe,” and more all enhance key scenes and turning points without abusing needle drops as a shortcut for emotional engagement the way some films do (see: Voicemails for Isabelle). There’s something comforting about a Manchester movie leaning on New Order. The pace never lulls too badly even with a runtime creeping toward two hours, and the tone is seductively congenial, which is why I find the second-half plotting and satire swings so baffling.

The casting is strong all around. Rice is gradually becoming a destination-programming actress for me whenever she’s a lead; when I saw Honor Society I hoped it portended her rising stardom, and here we are. (I guess I really do need to finally watch the Mean Girls musical.) She has a natural, disarming warmth and keeps choosing flawed, prickly characters that push against her natural demeanor; the net effect reads as witty and complex rather than bland.

The real breakout, though, is Fearn, who previously had a small role in Aftersun. He does a little bit of everything here, and all of it well: mope romantically, deliver a punchline, execute some physical comedy, deliver a sincere monologue, bat goo goo eyes. He sings once or twice and has rapport with everyone else in the cast. He’s one to watch; it’s basically impossible not to smile when he’s on screen.

If the story is overstuffed, so is the cast. Both Owen and Emily drag around an orbit of uninteresting friends and companions, several of whom get their own subplots, and it’s a little too much commotion for too little payoff. My favorite of the bunch is Professor Westlake (Prasanna Puwanarajah), Emily’s dead-eyed and depressed thesis supervisor, doing an impression of John Oliver’s professor from Community. Minnie Driver has a small turn as a college dean, and I’m not objecting to that, either.

As the film escalated through the satirical beats of its too-long back half, I felt my goodwill start to wane, but it never fully drained. Finding Emily is a real charmer, a pleasing and rewarding romantic comedy built on two wonderful leads, and that’s no small achievement: It’s enough to place it among the year’s more purely enjoyable films. Her thesis was right all along: romance is a delusion we talk ourselves into. I talked myself into this one, and gladly.

The film goes down exceptionally smoothly thanks to two B+ lead performances with great chemistry: Jill (Zoey Deutch) is an aspiring San Francisco pastry chef who copes with her sister Isabelle’s death by leaving confessional voicemails on her sister’s old number. Wes (Nick Robinson) is the Austin real estate agent who inherits that number. Wes listens to Jill’s voicemails for Isabelle and starts falling for the stranger, eventually crossing paths with her. The plot is a decent stock execution of about 25 romance tropes smashed together, those tropes occasionally lampshaded in case it wasn’t clear to you that this is a partially regurgitated You’ve Got Mail riff, with dashes of Sleepless in Seattle, Jerry Maguire, and even some Steel Magnolias-brand sister weepie stirred in for flavor.

The film’s distinctive point is its tragic undercurrent: Jill is not just a clumsy workaholic who has bad luck with boys like you’d normally see in one of these, but grieving a serious loss. (And, to be fair, she is those other things, too.) The film takes a couple of big emotional swings, and I would be lying if I said none of them land. “Dancing On My Own” by Robyn is practically a cheat code to my heart, and it’s used potently here.

The leads deserve the lion’s share of the credit for the film’s charms. Deutch anchors the film, bringing warmth to the thinner stretches of plot; she can pivot from chaotic comic banter to raw grief on a dime and without grinding the gears. Robinson, meanwhile, is a romcom lead natural: engaging and low-key charismatic enough to make the ethically dicey premise feel gentle. And writer-director Leah McKendrick is not without achievement; she grounds the affair in character-driven humor rather than pure shenanigans.

And yet Voicemails for Isabelle never threatens to become an actual movie. It’s just too marinated in the Netflix content conveyor belt house style. Montage and needle drops reign in place of storytelling or voice; the endless Benson Boone-ass jukebox has its moments, but it has all the emotional precision of a leaky firehose, overbearing and manipulative, constantly suggesting you feel something before the scene has earned the feeling. Every shot is a medium shot. Every theme is explicated; every edge of the story sanded off.

The back half is padded with redundant beats, a patchwork of dozens of other romcoms whose central romance leans on well-worn scaffolding. And the emotional manipulation surrounding the Perfect Dead Sister (less popular cousin of the Perfect Dead Wife) occasionally borders on the pornographic while even still pulling some punches. Through it all, the tone is too harmless given the emotional stakes. The net effect of Voicemails for Isabelle is similar to that of a leisurely walk through a shopping mall.

The movie makes some cowardly choices down the line to dodge the toughest dilemmas it sets up. It pivots away from the creep factor and the moral dilemma of the scenario with a half-assed “let’s start over” type of shtick in the finale. It almost stumbles into powerful subtext about grief and the way a new love both helps make the loss sting more in some ways and more bearable and others, but it feels accidental: Mostly the scenario gets cashed in as the fuel for the third-act breakup rather than anything resembling a genuine reckoning.

I genuinely expect most people who watch this will like it, because most people are tuning in hoping to experience “emotional but breezy Netflix romcom with charismatic leads,” and that is what it delivers. I’m not so pretentious as to reject that proposition entirely. If that’s what you have your sights on, by all means. I like spending time with these specific actors quite a bit (I’ve been Team Robinson since The Kings of Summer and Team Deutch since Everybody Wants Some!!). The final scene is sweeping and sad enough that I nearly decided to give this a begrudging passing grade. Certainly Voicemails for Isabelle is more watchable than some films I’ve handed halfhearted passing grades to. But I ultimately just feel pandered and talked down to.

I wish I could hand you a definitive rave or takedown, but my reaction to Obsession is extremely mixed. The highest praise I can give the film: I wish there were more horror stories like it, with a great hook you can explain in a sentence, a darkly comic tone that sacrifices none of the danger, and confidence in its cast to carry the material. As all movies should, it has a human core inside its genre wrapper that reels you in. The logline is great: Bear (Michael Johnston), a lonely music store clerk, makes a wish upon an enchanted curio that his coworker Nikki will love him more than anything else in the world, and it immediately comes true. Her “obsession” with him gets pushed to frightening extremes. He can’t undo the wish, and he’s not entirely sure he wants to. This concept executed at a baseline level with some charisma, mainly Navarrette’s, is enough for the movie’s claws to sink in and pull you along.

And yet I have plenty of heartburn about the film. Some comes from strange missteps in the writing and craft, but also, I don’t trust the film’s voice. Obsession depicts a beautiful woman enslaved to the lustful whims of a lonely man pining from afar, throwing her body and soul at him until it breaks her down into terrible, humiliating acts. Her agency lies buried deep inside her, surfacing only in brief and haunted glimmers. The problem is that the story is told entirely from Bear’s perspective: Even before the wish, the movie is about his experience of longing for her rather than who she is or even what their relationship is. The result is a film that has its cake and eats it too. Textually, it villainizes Bear and breaks down his gaze. Experientially, it revels in the fantasy of the beautiful Nikki being slavishly worshipful, obedient, and horny towards you, even to the point of self-degradation. From what I’ve heard anecdotally, young women find this movie scarier than any other demographic, and that makes sense: The film is so thorough in depicting a woman surrendering all her agency to a man who doesn’t have her best interests at heart. But you can see why men might find perverse appeal in the same fantasy. I suspect that’s a big part of the movie’s crossover appeal, and that rubs me the wrong way.

As a story, Obsession suffers from some baffling mistakes that reveal the inexperience of the 26-year-old Barker. The film’s sense of escalation is out of whack. Once the premise is properly introduced, Nikki’s degrading faculties and social behavior get parceled out in incoherent chunks, like the movie is a series of sketches. Sure enough, like many rising names in horror, Barker has a background in sketch comedy (his YouTube partner Cooper Tomlinson even plays Bear’s buddy Ian). This profile for a horror director has reached a market saturation intense enough (Jordan Peele, Zach Cregger, Josh Ruben, etc.) that I’m starting to wonder if it will have ramifications for good old-fashioned horror mood-making and long-form storytelling. Given Barker’s background, it’s no surprise the movie often lacks a cohesive sense of flow and is quite episodic and uneven.

Barker and his crew make a deliberate choice to shoot most of the movie in low, desaturated light. I simply do not like this, aesthetically. It cuts against the grain of the film’s ambition to structure itself as a curdled romantic comedy, where a more colorful and poisoned look might have drawn out more sides of the story Barker is telling. Still, it’s undoubtedly effective and story-driven whenever Nikki is framed as a shadowy silhouette, her body in commune with sinister forces.

On the plus side, the cast is good, and most of that weight falls on Navarrette’s shoulders. I wish the movie had given her more to do before her possession, because, like the rest of the film, her performance is a bit too unmodulated once the premise kicks in. Obsession offers perfect fodder for the TikToks and YouTube clips that highlight her most commanding moments, and she is indeed a lightning bolt on screen for the entire runtime. But I wouldn’t put this in the hall of fame of horror movie performances, and anyone who suggests she’s better than Mia Goth was in Pearl is probably just attracted to Navarrette. Which, fair.

Barker also threads the needle on horror-comedy more than many of his peers: This has some genuinely funny moments tightly spliced with its freaky moments. Barker has some real instincts in jerking the audience’s mood around from laughs to cringes to screams and back again.

The buzz around Obsession has been cacophonous, and its ROI at the box office is truly bananas (shot for under a million dollars, it’s now Focus Features’ highest-grossing release ever at $400m+ in receipts). But I still see Obsession as something of a muted success, rickety enough in its storytelling and dubious enough in its point of view that my reservations pile up. Beware the buzzy horror breakthrough, even the ones that work.

That same conundrum applies on an even more expanded level to Steven Spielberg in the 2020s, who has been making movies nonstop since the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. It’s why I’ve come to believe that nearly every so-called “late-era” work by a great and prolific director — those ambitious, messy, heartfelt films we get from masters supposedly past their peak — is, at its core, about movies and about the act of making them. That’s all these people have done for most of their lives, sometimes for half a century or more. Of course it’s what surfaces. This is true, to varying degrees, of Robert Zemeckis’s Here, true of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, and already true of Wes Anderson‘s recent run, though he’s still in his fifties.

Spielberg, of course, didn’t need to make a sweeping late-period statement about what cinema means to him, because he already did, point-blank, with 2022’s The Fabelmans. Unlike Here or Megalopolis, that one required no reading between the lines: It’s a barely fictionalized telling of how he started making movies and what it exposes about his world. But Spielberg has so often operated in the material of larger-than-life storytelling forces that his coming-of-age story, normally my favorite genre, never overwhelmed me or swept me away the way that I know Spielberg can do. Thus, The Fabelmans is a film I intellectually admire more than I deeply love.

This brings us to Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s spiritual alien-conspiracy thriller, harking back to at least a half dozen of his films, as far back as Firelight, his cobbled-together amateur feature from 1964. It is a movie I deeply love more than I intellectually admire. I find that Disclosure Day is, somehow, as much a statement of the man’s creative philosophy, his theory of communication and creation and wonder, as The Fabelmans. Tonally, it’s a slurry of basically all of his film, the work of someone who has grown both more suspicious of power and desperate for the salvation of a uniting, higher truth. I’ll grant that I might be over-projecting thematic heft onto a film that is, on the most basic level, a 145-minute chase sequence punctuated with ponderous exposition and philosophizing. Disclosure Day doesn’t have a single clean thesis the way some of his other works do. But hold that thought. I’ll take a stab at it before we’re through.

The story is credited to Spielberg, but the script itself is credited to David Koepp, who is responsible for a great number of movies you have seen, including several helmed by Spielberg (most memorably, Jurassic Park and another divisive alien flick). I don’t always love Koepp’s scripts, and I will admit that Disclosure Day hands him room to indulge a couple of his worst instincts. And yet he was probably the right man to turn Spielberg’s reported fifty-page story treatment across forty-plus drafts into something that provides adequate shape for Spielberg to crack his knuckles and build out a cinematic world — untidy and ungainly as the result frequently is.

The film follows two figures with complicated pasts as they criss-cross an alien coverup conspiracy: Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is a Kansas City meteorologist who, mid-broadcast, begins to channel a mathematical cipher on air. Meanwhile, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is a reformed hacker turned goon for a shadowy outfit called Wardex. Daniel decides the world has a right to know what said outfit has been hiding, and plans to smuggle out data and tech. Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) runs Wardex and would very much prefer that Daniel didn’t. Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) is the head of Daniel’s cell of rebels, the film’s moral compass and its most patient explainer. The rest of the story is glorious, semi-coherent forward motion wrapped in a palpably sincere ache for a higher, humanity-forging truth.

It would be easy, and not entirely unfair, to turn any review of Disclosure Day into a litany of what’s broken and dumb about it. I’ve read every negative and mixed notice I could get my hands on, and I agree with a lot of the specifics. Not all of them, but a lot.

So let’s get the litany over with. The script is relentlessly expository, forever telling instead of showing (though it goes down easier when Domingo is the one doing the telling). The villains rarely make sense, and their field agents are Stormtrooper-grade in their inability to hit, catch, or stop anyone. The plot holes are frequent and enormous — though this is a film where you can wave most of them away with the phrase “aliens did it.” (You can do the same, I suppose, for the crappy animal CGI. Perhaps their unshakable fakeness is because they’re a space-tech projection.)

I also wish I loved the performances more than I do. Blunt is by an order of magnitude the most commanding presence here, helped enormously by having the most interesting character in the picture, and her take is really good, verging on great. Through the years, I’ve occasionally found Blunt’s line readings to stiffen and go slightly synthetic when she’s working in an American accent, and that’s true again — except, here, that’s exactly what the role asks for. The film parks itself in close-up on her face for what feels like an eternity, over and over, and she earns that real estate with amazing face acting. (I will be mean-spirited for a single sentence: the long looks at her face also highlight that she has clearly had some face-stiffening cosmetic work done.) O’Connor has been steadily growing on me (I gave him my Best Supporting Actor B.A.D.S. award for Wake Up Dead Man this past year) but he never quite finds the through-line on Daniel, and I won’t be handing him any trophies this time, even if it would be unfair to call his work bad. He burrows into Spielberg’s angst with appropriate gravity. Eve Hewson, playing Daniel’s religiously-inclined girlfriend Jane, drifts toward outright dull, though most of that falls on a character who exists chiefly to exude uncertainty and to ferry the plot from one place to the next. (She does make the most of her one big set piece scene, dynamic and scary for a few minutes.)

What I admire with very little reservation is the filmmaking itself. Janusz Kaminski’s camera directed by Spielberg is almost never at rest: It circles the actors, crosses axis lines it isn’t supposed to cross, and ties together visual concepts gracefully. There’s a single take gliding up on a farmhouse that’s pure silk, and a collision of car and train that I’d rank among the best action beats Spielberg has staged in many years. (It is one of few pieces of proper action spectacle, which is not a complaint in my eyes; Spielberg is making other good use of this runtime.) And John Williams, in his thirtieth (thirtieth!) collaboration with the director, is always welcome: rousing, unmistakably his, thick with French horn, and laced with eerie strings and dissonances that reach back across his career, particularly Close Encounters, as if he’s playing up the rhyme between them. Decades in, the Spielberg-Williams partnership is one of the great sustained acts of artistic communion in American movies. And yet I confess the score is a bit reserved and low energy compared to Williams’ best; perhaps that is thematic and intentional, but I will not begrudge the 94-year-old master hanging up the baton, sad though the thought makes me. (The main theme, “listen…” is magnficent, though.)

But, the cast and the rest of the crew be damned: Disclosure Day is above all a chance for Steven Spielberg to lock in and take us on a journey, physical and spiritual. He does not hold back in drowning the story with overtones, undertones, and whatever other tones you might have in mind. Disclosure Day is immersed in scripture even though it is not purely religious. Its depiction of techno-demigod aliens reads as gnostic, but the film is fascinated with many aspects and contradictions of religious experiences. The film plays like a dozen Bible stories running at once, the Tower of Babel and the serpent at the Tree of Knowledge and Noah’s ark and the stable at Bethlehem, all of it strained through Koepp’s archly sincere script and Spielberg’s flawless control of the image. Spielberg is especially focused on eyes and hands. Consider one of the movie’s best scenes, which centers on Hewson’s Jane: First, her hand, gripping a crucifix to the point of stigmata, suggesting humans suffering in the resistance of oppression and the search for truth. Second, her eyes, morphing between blue and brown as her soul struggles between possession and release.

It goes beyond the body, though: Like in Fabelmans, Spielberg is fascinated with shadow and light and, especially, reflection as vessels of life. Never before has Kaminski’s predilection for blowing out diegetic and background lights felt so thematic, especially when they ramp up in the film’s climax: It captures a divine force from above or a light at the end of the tunnel. Some of the film’s most interesting shots are characters mirrored onto each other through glass, shadows on semi-transparent objects.

But the film’s biggest ideas and images are about communication, and subsequently control, in many forms: Margaret’s uncanny gift for reading a stranger’s entire life in a glance; a small “device” invading and overwriting a person from the inside (like our phones and tablets do to us daily); grainy footage of traumatic, unspeakable truths. The film’s third act has two halves: First an elaborate meta-movie, where the truth arrives to Margaret not from the sky but through a reconstruction of her youth on, essentially, a film set. The second half of the climax gathers all the movie’s characters, and then the entire population of earth, to share and embrace a higher truth via a newscast.

And with “the news” as such a central point, Disclosure Day also reads as a film haunted by current headlines. The textual topic is UFO conspiracies, and those are definitely on the top of Spielberg’s mind (he’s said, point blank, he believes we’ve been visited by intelligent alien life in recent interviews). But the film carries the weight of a messy, terrified mix of modern news coding, evoking mass shootings, constant violence in the Middle East, the Epstein files, the toxic dysfunction of the Federal government, the systemic erosion of traditional media, 9/11, January 6, and so much more. Spielberg makes the peculiar choice of having the aliens as complete stereotypes: “greys” like they are on the cover of a sci-fi novel, from Roswell, piloting saucers and shuttles. I think this is Spielberg (unsuccessfully) twisting a little irony in front of us, that all the tin foil crackpot stories we’ve been dismissing for decades are no stranger or less plausible than the real headlines. I still wish the aliens were a little more original or vivid.

Okay, but what does it all mean? I promised I’d try to give my answer. The frustration and beauty of Disclosure Day is that it is not about one thing, but a summation of Spielberg’s thematic fascinations, so you can read it any number of ways. It’s a memorial for the end of the monoculture and its trusted institutions, like The Post, and a fairy tale of us reuniting around a single image. It is also, in many deep-seated ways, about Steven Spielberg’s parents getting divorced, and his impossible, divine fantasy of bringing them back together (or returning to the time before they split) as a way to heal his world. It’s about empathy (“listen”ing to each other) and about appreciating the beauty of a world we don’t understand nearly as much as we think we do (“listen”ing to everything else). It’s about reckoning simultaneously with blind faith and observable fact, and a vision of what the world would be like if the act of trusting both wasn’t a contradiction.

Above all, Disclosure Day is a messy film about belief and love, and that is no small or narrow thing to be about. It asks every question in the mind of Spielberg the dreamer. And, because Spielberg has known little else for 50 years, Disclosure Day, in the end, is a movie about movies, about sharing and shaping stories as the means to process all those questions he dreams: After all, you can find the answer to everything when the lights go down in a cineplex.

Filmmakers have been circling this particular strain of dread for a few years now. Jane Schoenbrun keeps teasing out how we dissolve our personalities into our screens (We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow). Pascal Plante’s extraordinary thriller Red Rooms, still the high-water mark of the style, followed a woman down a dark-web rabbit hole and found no easy answers about the ways our souls are transforming in front of devices. Faces of Death splashes in similar waters as these films. It takes the broad thematic ideas of Red Rooms, states them louder and more plainly, and bolts them onto a more conventional thriller chassis. It sounds mean to call it Stupid Red Rooms, but it is also honest.

The film follows Margot (Barbie Ferreira), who works as a content moderator for a TikTok stand-in called Kino, spending her days scrubbing the worst the internet produces. One day, she starts flagging clips that look less like gore gags or reposts and more like the genuine article: murders staged as scene-for-scene recreations of the controversial 1978 shocker Faces of Death. (The movie’s funniest joke is in the background: Kino’s rules wave graphic death right through moderation while deleting clips about safe sex or clean needles.) Rather than draw out a whodunit, the film hands you the killer early: Arthur Spevak (Dacre Montgomery), a mellow cell phone store clerk who data mines his potential victims. Before long, Faces of Death’s Clarice and Buffalo Bill are on a collision course.

Faces of Death is a success as a nuts-and-bolts horror-thriller. Director Daniel Goldhaber, best known before this for the engaging but sanded-down How to Blow Up a Pipeline, constructs a brutal story. Visually, he finds a provocative contrast between the sickly fluorescence of Margot’s open-plan office and the lurid dark of Arthur’s murder chamber. Gavin Brivik’s synth score thumps along with a retro-genre menace that’s both atmospherically perfect and flat-out well-composed. The craft is accomplished across the board: Goldhaber integrates screens (e.g. Reddit threads on laptops) into the story very smoothly (and plausibly), and he executes a one-take in the back half that’s a genuine showstopper. And, I must emphasize, it is scary and grisly without crossing into degrading nihilism. The suffering is rendered as nauseating as the themes demand, with none of the defanged, PG-13 flinch we might have expected if this had a wide release ten years ago.

Ferreira is the heart of the film, a slightly unusual presence. She carries the thriller material, especially an excruciating struggle in the climax, quite well. She also sells the bruised human underneath, somebody clawing through her own damaged, social media-ruined past trauma: Her sister’s death on a train track was caught during a live social media stream as a botched stunt. Montgomery is good as the villain, too, all skin-crawling restraint with little glimmers of campy over-extension.

A few things keep me from going all the way in on Faces of Death. The first is that the third act works so hard to upend normal horror movie plotting that it ends up circling back to a different kind of aggravating. Margot is written as one of the few people onscreen who genuinely grasps the danger afoot, yet she keeps making the exact dum-dum decisions Sidney Prescott once lodged her famous complaint about. That third act is also when the film decides to step on its soapbox and announce its themes a few times just in case it wasn’t clear that desensitization to violence and cruelty is a bad thing, and maybe we shouldn’t be cheering for the spectacle of murder like we’re watching Roman gladiators.

The connection to 1978 Faces of Death is oddly thin and underwhelming, too, and the quips about a “remake” are straight out of the worse Scream sequels. The thread about Arthur recreating the old movie feels more like a leftover from an earlier draft than a crucial thematic or narrative structure. Cut it and you’d lose almost nothing.

None of this sinks the film. It’s dark, biting, and brutal, and if it doesn’t bowl me over, it’s still an achievement: Horror-heads will devour it, and the merely curious will still find a fresh, gnarly thrill. Squint and you’ll catch a little Scream in its DNA, some found footage, a little Texas Chain Saw from further back, along with the blunter kinship with Red Rooms and other social media-centered horror flicks. So I’m sorry it landed with such a soft thud: its $7 million box office looks especially flimsy next to the year’s big horror success stories of Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung. A movie this provocative about the human compulsion to watch depraved thrills deserved a few more people who couldn’t stop watching it.