In the wake of COVID-19, some changes…
Everyone is feeling the effects of COVID-19 and the entertainment industry, in particular movie studios and theaters, have been dramatically affected. I will be continuing to review new films when I can, albeit many will likely be smaller indies unless Hollywood embraces Video on Demand. I’m also going to make a real effort to continue seeking out Ohio-made indies and providing reviews for them. I will continue what I did for my huge 1999 in Rewind article and look back at my original teenage reviews and assess my current feelings on the movies and my old writing, for the year 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and now 2004. I’ll be on the lookout for amazingly new so-bad-it’s-gotta-be-seen movies (have you seen Love on a Leash?). In short, I’m going to keep writing. I hope you keep reading.
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You Can See Everything (2026)
After multiple investigative books and documentaries, an award-winning podcast series, which was adapted into an award-winning TV mini-series, you’d be forgiven for wondering what was left to uncover about the case of Elizabeth Holmes. She was the CEO of Theranos, a cutting-edge start-up company that wanted to revolutionize the world of healthcare and blood-drawn results. She was on magazine covers as the next Silicon Valley wunderkind, and she had big names like General Mattis and Henry Kissinger on her board of directors. Theranos was at one point worth billions of dollars and then it was pennies. Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and sentenced to serve eleven years in prison beginning in 2023. Seemed like a natural end to the tragic tale of Elizabeth Holmes, facing the just consequences of her criminal actions. Then mere months ago, comedian Nathan Fielder and documentary filmmaker Joshua Oppenheim (Primetime) revealed they had secretly filmed a documentary chronicling the last weeks of Holmes being a free woman with her husband and father of her two children, Billy Evans. This secret movie, with the purposely provocative title You Can See Everything, has been lavished with effusive praise, has become a runaway box-office hit for an indie documentary, and has grabbed hold of the cultural zeitgeist in a way that filmmakers and influencers would dream. It became the Movie You Had to See because everybody was talking about it. With all that acclaim, including many calling it one of the greatest documentaries in the history of the form, could it possibly live up to the hype? In short, yes.
The biggest question I have walking away is why would Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans want to bring cameras into their lives after everything they’ve been through? The first reason I would theorize was to try and tell “their story,” to counter the narrative against Holmes built from the many works of media retelling her descent into fraud, as well as the legal judgements. Why would someone want to have cameras document your last weeks with your children before going to prison for possibly ten years? Maybe you’re trying to get someone else to pay for a video scrapbook. It just seems like such a fraught and tense and emotional time. Adding a team of movie cameras inserts the pertinent question of exploitation, and the brilliance of You Can See Everything is that we are left wondering who exactly is exploiting whom. Are Fielder and Oppenheim exploiting the sad circumstances of this family on the precipice of being ripped apart, or are Elizabeth and Billy exploiting the platform of a Hollywood documentary crew to present an image rehabilitation and another in a series of projections of a version of Elizabeth Holmes they want the public to grapple with? Is that why Holmes breast feeds in front of the cameras, to soften her image? To humanize her to the haters? Why rent out this beachside villa in San Diego specifically just for the movie? Why would Billy want the camera crew to film him fully naked in the shower, the moment that earns the movie its R-rating? That question over manipulation guides Fielder as he interacts with his subjects and struggles to find a baseline of truth. Does Elizabeth really believe she did nothing wrong? This is best exemplified when Fielder and Holmes debate the word “could,” as she still tries defending the failure of her Edison machine by saying it “could work.” Well, yeah, it would be great if it could work, but it would also be great if eating donuts cured all illness and disease. Holmes is holding to the aspirational, the Silicon Valley “fake it ‘til you make it” ethos, but you don’t get credit for “could work,” you get credit for your verifiable results. Can you even agree what is recognizable truth?
I also greatly appreciated how Fielder and Oppenheim break free from many of the conventions of documentary filmmaking to the benefit of the overall experience. Many docs attempt to present an objective and ethical barrier between subject and storyteller, but that distance is already erased just by the invitation of Holmes. The question is less what will befall this family in the final weeks before leaving for a prison sentence and more about who these people truly are when given a microphone at length. Fielder was solicited personally by Holmes, so it makes sense for his on-screen presence to be just as common. He’s the audience surrogate trying to interrogate these people, generally wary that he’s being used or manipulated to some end. I laughed out loud when Billy told Fielder he knew what he was thinking and Fielder snapped back, “No you don’t!” That’s the kind of response the viewer would make, and it’s invigorating when the filmmaker is channeling our challenges and refusing to let his subjects get away with vagueries and obfuscation. There is also the nature of re-enactments, and the layers of removal of reality presented from them, which Fielder openly acknowledges, showing himself offering notes on how the performances should have been. It’s an actor reenactment based upon one man’s memory of the event. There are some bold directions the film takes halfway through, after Holmes goes to prison, because you’d be understandably wondering what was left to cover. There is a new driving force that becomes the voice of the viewer when it seems like Fielder’s objectivity has been compromised. I appreciated that Fielder and Oppenheim’s movie leaves in all the moments we might expect other docs to exclude. There are lingering moments, contemplative pauses, and the filmmakers questioning their own perspectives. It’s even more intriguing when even the filmmakers widen their introspection and scrutiny to themselves.
And then when you’re starting to have doubts and encroaching degrees of sympathy for Holmes, you remember, “Oh wait, she totally was a manipulative liar.” After watching this documentary, I went back and re-watched another documentary, Alex Gibney’s 2019 doc, The Inventor: Out For Blood in Silicon Valley and was bluntly reminded of how duplicitous Holmes can be with power. She has a way of swaying others with her dedication and aspirational big picture talk, but the details are where her goals run aground with reality. The Edison machine was never destined to work because, as one interviewer puts it, the “laws of thermodynamics,” which are presently undefeated. Having a small box to transfer blood samples, act as a centrifuge, and operate up to forty different tests is a lot to ask for, and it’s no wonder the machine would often malfunction. It was never going to work by design, no matter how long they toiled; it was the equivalent of a Silicon Valley CEO looking at a circular hole with a square peg and saying, “Those other disruptors just didn’t have vision like we do. It’s gonna work for us.” Theranos had to use other companies’ diagnostic machines to run its lab results, all the while saying they came from their magic don’t-really-work technology of tomorrow. The lab results from the actual Edison machine proffered false positives and negatives for patients, which can be a big deal when you’re having blood drawn for things like cancer screenings. Not only did the machine not work, they were actively misinforming patients, which directly contradicts Holmes mission of getting accurate medical results in time to make a preventative difference. Beyond that, Holmes used her position to squash internal questions, crushing employees under costly legal threats to keep them in line. The Gibney doc benefits tremendously from interview subjects reciting their own personal experiences of Holmes’ malfeasance.
Regardless of whether or not Holmes might be on the spectrum, which is audience projection at best, that doesn’t excuse her from committing fraud. Her own father throws out the alarming news that Elizabeth is a rape survivor, and he blames a trail of controlling men for her downfall. At one point, with Holmes struggling to explain the humor of one of the most famous comedy routines of the twentieth century, Billy leaps in to explain that Elizabeth just sees the world so differently and what might be clear in her brain is not easy for others. She’s just too special and smart for the rest of us, you see. It’s a strange moment of ethical rationalization, blame-shifting, and, oddly, a sympathetic defense of the woman he loves. While the movie offers many lingering questions about the pursuit of an objective form of truth, I found myself feeling that the affection Elizabeth and Billy share with one another is genuine. It’s strange but Billy’s intervention and sense of control can often be viewed through a protective lens, that he’s trying to protect Elizabeth from herself because others don’t understand her like he does. He’s the self-appointed Elizabeth Holmes translator. Then there are moments where he takes away a bowl of eggs from Elizabeth because he says she’s beating the eggs wrong and does it his way. Is he protecting her or dominating her? While there are still questions over whether Billy sought Elizabeth out as fame-chasing clout, he comes from money and, as Elizabeth notes, she is hemorrhaging money from her legal fees and lawsuits. These two people feel like born hustlers and attention-seekers, and yet could they really have something together that is simple and sincere and honest? It’s another fascinating question in a regularly fascinating movie.
Even at three hours, You Can See Everything doesn’t feel like a moment is in waste, and that by itself is a significant achievement. Fielder’s penchant for meta-textual elevations and invitations of empathy transform a documentary into so much more, raising questions that can lead to hours of discussion. Much of watching the movie can feel like trying to get to the Real Elizabeth Holmes, cornering her into finally admitting guilt and recompense, but that isn’t really the movie. It shifts and morphs before your eyes and makes you question your preconceptions but also the nature of journalism going through channels of interpretation. Elizabeth argues that the version of her played by Emmy-winner Amanda Seyfried in the TV miniseries is really a fictionalized portrait of a fictionalized persona. If that is the case, who is the real Elizabeth Holmes, and is it even possible to uncover this person through the art of documentation? Have we been deceived? Is she deceiving herself? Are we holding Holmes to a standard she could never meet? The movie invites an open dialogue and I think that’s what has heightened its must-see reputation. It’s an effortlessly fascinating movie that invites you to lean closer and think more critically, even about its own nature. To elicit that kind of response from a subject already so heavily documented is even more of a surprise. You Can See Everything might not live up to its title but what you can see is phenomenal.
Nate’s Grade: A
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Wildwood (2026)
Every time Laika releases a new feature film, I consider it an event. Over the course of five movies since 2009, there’s only been one dud in the bunch, 2019’s Missing Link, and the rest have been great to all-time great. Short of the Aardman crew, they’re also the only reliable production company still making stop-motion animated movies, a dying art form in an era of streamlining and streaming. These movies by their nature take a long time, but Wildwood has taken even longer than most. Starting from the 2011 release of the source material, a children’s book by Colin Meloy, the lead singer of the indie folk-rock band, The Decembrists, the movie has been in some form of development over the course of 15 years, recording the vocal artists during the early months of the COVID 19 outbreak. This has been a long time coming and waiting for the technology to catch up with the ambition of bringing this fantasy adventure to startling life. While I have some quibbles over world-building and plotting, Wildwood is undeniably special.
In the strange realm of… Portland, Oregon, Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) would prefer to hang out outside rather than babysit her two-year-old brother, Mac. Her parents are very protective and warn about the dangers that the outside world poses. She meets up with her classmate, Curtis (voiced by Jacob Tremblay), a nervous and talkative child, and the three of them head for a playground. While distracted, little Mac is abducted by a murder of crows and taken into the forest nick-named the Impossible Wilderness. It’s up to Prue and Curtis to find her baby brother and survive the unknown.
It should go without saying but the animators at Laika are nothing short of movie magicians. That old-fashioned stutter-step movement of stop-motion animation has been eliminated to the point that the medium is now as fluidly smooth as traditional hand-drawn animation. Given the time-sucking nature of the medium, many stop- motion features have very static cameras, because to involve camera movement means having to time it with all the other microscopic movements within the intended shot. It’s one more complexity in an artistic medium that is defined with back–breaking labor. I was stunned that Wildwood has so much camera movement and dynamic shot compositions, so much so that it felt like it was directed as a three-dimensional animated movie (note: I know it’s already three dimensions but you know what I’m referring to so don’t get too pedantic with me, dear reader). There are striking sequences where the camera will move like any other movie, or rack focus shots that changes our perspective within a scene; the kinds of immersion and activity we don’t expect from stop-motion animation, and that’s before the grandiose epic climactic battle as well as a hurricane of ivy that truly amazes the senses. It’s become staid to simply proclaim the genius of the animators, how much subtle life they can inform through movement, how much emotion they can perform with essentially action figures. The elasticity of the faces really struck me with this movie, how the flesh looked more human-like and translucent rather than hard plastic gel. I was amazed at the subtle animations involving mouths and teeth, how they would pull at the edges to reveal such little additional degrees of emoting to a line or a moment. I know all animation is time-consuming and often eye-popping, but there’s just something about the tactile nature of stop-motion animation that I find so much more astonishing to witness and become immersed within.
The story of Wildwood feels definitely influenced by the 1980s of children’s fantasy and novels that allowed things to go a little dark, like Return to Oz or Secret of NIMH and, of course, Labyrinth, also about a pre-teen girl looking to save her baby brother from an otherworldly dictator. This is Laika’s first PG-13 movie and the violence can feel harsh without feeling gratuitous. There was one sudden strike of violence that took my breath away, and the results stuck. Like other fantasy adventures, there’s a child learning more about herself, the world, but also learning that adults don’t always have the answers and are just as fallible as everyone else. The supporting character of Curtis has an equally compelling character arc, a nerdy kid who is socially awkward who’s thrown into a universe of struggle that he’s obviously ill-suited for, and yet he adapts, finds points of courage, but still doesn’t change who he is. Minor spoilers, but early on he calls himself a pacifist who doesn’t want to engage in violence, and in the climactic battle, he is forced to use violence to save a life. This harsh necessity of action versus inaction isn’t played in some heroic moment of triumph, with the character exhaling in satisfaction over his capability. He meets the moment with horror. He recognizes the necessity but is still aghast at the results. That’s because what he believes is firmly rooted in his conception of who he is, and even thrown into a fantasy realm, he doesn’t lose sight of his convictions even as he grows as a person. That’s refreshingly nuanced.
I appreciated how the villain is given degrees of complexity that provide explanation for her single-minded resolve. Alexandra (voiced by Carey Mulligan) too is a victim of the vice-grip of grief, unable to fully move on from the untimely death of her son until his bones can be found. It lays groundwork for a hostility against the forest, against the powers of nature, the environment she feels she needs to clear in order to locate the hidden remains of her only child. There’s something very raw about that, about being denied even the body of her lost child, and wanting that closure. In the evocative, nearly dialogue-free opening, we learn of her desperation and ache, using dark magic to bring her child’s spirit into a mechanical doppleganger. I’m surprised she didn’t continue tinkering with this process of robotic replacements, each of them eventually discovering the horrible truth and determining that death is a better alternative. She’s ultimately an example of what grief can do to a person, how it shuts out everything else, and she serves as a cautionary tale for our heroine, whether she might go down a similar path if she never recovers her abducted brother. She functions as a parallel for Prue without being overtly obvious. I really enjoyed Mulligan’s vocal performance as well, which has an edge to her voice throughout without giving way to larger histrionics. You can hear the pain in her every word, and the animators do a fantastic job of expressing this as well. I appreciate villains who see themselves as the real hero in their own story, who have genuine reasons for their motivations, and who can even teach our heroes some hard-won life lessons. Although it takes Alexandra too long to realize the availability of blood from “a child of magic.”
By the time the film settles into its final climactic act, if you had told me this was the most expensive movie ever made, I would believe you (the actual reported budget of $100 million is still a fraction of what Pixar spends). The level of ambition in the staging is staggering. It’s hard for me to even fathom the hours put into the minute details of this large-scale battle put to screen, with hundreds of figures in different points of articulation amidst the stages of battle. When Prue slides into the middle, I could feel my heart beating faster and my anticipation build. Oh, they really are going to go right into the thick of it with the animation. The scale of it is truly stunning, and the reality that you know each figure, each item, was moved incrementally by human hands and photographed for a fraction of a second, then reset, makes the breadth of the artistic achievement even more amazing. Dear reader, allow me to get into a sentimental digression here. Stop-motion animation is a hard medium to work in, demanding and challenging and, most of all, slow, and to witness this climax and the level of detail and scale dazzles me and genuinely inspires me. It’s a clear demonstration of the passion and talent of the dedicated artists all working together to bring to stunning life this work of art, and it just makes me think about the collective value of art for our culture and ourselves, how necessary it is. During the early months of COVID lockdowns, when people needed an escape and something to nourish them, they turned to movies and television and music and books and stories. We turned to art when we needed it. We will never stop needing art, the way that we make sense of ourselves, the world, and our palace within it, and if we can occasionally have a work of art as mesmerizing as Wildwood, then we’ve done well. By the end of its 130 minutes, it’s easy to feel the immeasurable love and passion many artists have imbued with this project.
However, there are some storytelling flaws that hold Wildwood back from being its best version. For a fantasy universe that we drop into, by the end it still feels rather messy and under-developed. The different factions of characters feel piled on rather than as organic extensions. There are indigenous peoples forcibly removed from their lands fighting to regain their homes. What’s the history or connection they have to the land? Is there a spiritualism or power they have that gives them an advantage? There are talking animals but there doesn’t seem to be a distinction between them beyond the coyotes that have taken up arms as Alexandra’s muscle. Why did this one group turn against their animal brethren? There are hoity-toity aristocrats but no larger sense of a kingdom than one building. How are the humans maintaining a government, or even independent productivity, when a displaced governess is deposed and regaining her power? There is a small farming community of animals and humans living in harmony, an aspect not really explored as being so different from the other locales. Then there’s the revelation that Alexandra can venture into the outside world to enact small miracles, and if that’s the case, why isn’t she pulling in outside technology or resources that would provide a new balance of power? If what she’s looking for is a “child born of magic,” why hasn’t she gone full Elon Musk and just traveled the land seeding future children through her powers of magic? Surely that would increase the odds of success. None of these questions destroys the reality of Wildwood, but enough of them make it feel like the world hasn’t been sufficiently developed to have its own set of internal logic and rules that prove satisfying. I also found the characters for the most part to be under-developed as well, kept as more archetypes than honing with the attention they deserved.
Even though not everything worked for me, I’m eager to re-watch Wildwood in the near future because I’ve found, with rare exception, that Laika’s movies grow on me with more viewings. I was initially admirable but reserved with 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings but after multiple viewings I now consider it to be a remarkable movie with stunning visuals and stirring emotional resonance. It’s quite possible that with some distance and contemplation that Wildwood would follow a similar path. I can also say my emotional investment in the movie was a bit personal as the three human children, Prue and Curtis and baby Mac, matched my family of little ones exactly, even down to similar physical appearances, so I found myself feeling more for these characters thanks to the wonders of psychological projection. Wildwood is a marvel of a movie that I presently wish had just spent a little more time on fleshing out its world and its intricacies and conflicts to make the fantasy realm feel more unified than ramshackle. It’s certainly worth seeing and cherishing even if it may not click fully with the individual viewer. The fact that something this ambitious and beautiful exists after 16 years of loving toil is its own miracle. We need more movies like Wildwood to remind us of the escapism and necessity of impassioned art.
Nate’s Grade: B+
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Clayface (2026)
Clayface reminded me a lot of Darkman, which is a terrific B-movie that showed off director Sam Raimi’s genre gifts and verve. Clayface is certainly no Darkman, but I appreciated that head honcho James Gunn (Superman) was willing to throw out a body horror entry that literally stretches the bounds of a DC movie. I’ve always been a fan of the character since I was introduced to him in the 1990s Batman animated series, and a shape-shifting comic book villain who loses control over his physical form sounds like a strong perspective for a tragic back-story origin. Under co-writer Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep, Haunting of Hill House), it can also lead to some gnarly and entertainingly gross body horror. We follow Oscar-nominated actor Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) as he loses his career after angry mobsters mutilate his pretty face and frame him for assault. A mad scientist experiment injects nanites into his face and it appears to heal, but the results are short-lived and prone to emotional disparities. Matt uses his newfound ability to seek vengeance on those he holds responsible for robbing him of his livelihood. Will the man become a monster? Under an anti-hero revenge formula, we should be rooting for this man, except he’s not truly that compelling as a character despite the best efforts from Harries. The problem is that Clayface needed to go further in every regard as a movie. It needed to be grosser and more imaginative in its body horror. It needed to be more insightful and psychologically challenging for a gripping descent into madness downfall. It also needed more fun set pieces to really enjoy its vengeance angle. Often the kills are smothering-based, with the worst implied off-screen, and it becomes disappointing in execution (pun intended). The villains are interchangeably dull without any distinctive quirk or purchase for poetic justice, something to make the movie feel less like a Darkman imitation and more like its own beast. There’s one memorable scene of Matt trying to cut his eyes open during a bumpy flight that made me squirm extra hard, but that’s about it. Most of the story just seems too familiar and lackluster, slapped together from the leavings of other famous genre movies. With such a strong hook, an underdog who can change form looking for revenge before he might lose his ability to control himself, I kept feeling this should simply be better. Let the murder monster be a murder monster and maximize the potential of its shape-shifting premise. If Matt’s downfall is going to matter we need to really engage with his anguish and loss, and I don’t feel like the movie achieves this. There’s so many forms Clayface could have taken, and to take one so derivative is a creative disappointment.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Mother Mary (2026)
Can a pop star be haunted by spirits? Smile 2 would dramatically say yes with a rictus, but writer/director David Lowery decided to make a movie that is one part chamber play and one part stage show pop art performance art. Anne Hathaway stars as pop diva Mother Mary who seeks out help from her former friend and collaborator Sam (Michaela Cole). After a forced hiatus from a concert accident rumored to be a possible suicide attempt, Mother Mary is looking to start over, and she’s willing to confront her old demons, literally and figuratively. The far majority of the movie is a two-hander in a big barn, Sam’s preferred work space for her fashion designs. The movie plays out like a theatrical psycho-drama, and the terse and understated dialogue has a genuinely engaging David Mamet-esque quality of dropping you in the middle of a relationship and providing the combustible pieces to form your picture of the whole. I was entertained just listening to these former friends circle one another, bare their regrets and resentments, and discuss the pressures of being able to top themselves in an artistic realm without losing a sense of their identity. Then there’s some ghost stuff too, weaved late into the movie with imagery of ominous red fabric that feels straight out of a 1970s Dario Argento movie. I don’t know if the ghost stuff worked for me or felt like a net-benefit to the story of two friends hashing out their grievances. The EDM-heavy pop songs sung by Hathaway were all a bit similar and underwhelming for me too. If you’re looking for a better version of this premise, stick with Smile 2.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Whalefall (2026)
If I could get swallowed by a whale and subsequently fight my way out in order to successfully process and move forward from my grief over the death of my father, I’d consider it. Thus are the prospects of Whalefall, a movie that is half about a man (Austin Abrams) literally trying to escape from the innards of a whale, and half about that same man’s rocky relationship with his demanding and now departed dad (Josh Brolin). As you can probably imagine, the fans of one of those kinds of movies are probably not going to be too interested in the other. I found the unique setting for a survival thriller to be fascinating, gross, imaginative, and slightly hard to visually decipher. When all you’re staring at are squishy parts of interior whale, it can be hard to determine exactly what you’re seeing. There are unique horrors, like the stomach acid of one of the four stomach chambers, and an extra threat with an irate squid also swallowed and fighting for its life. That stuff has a gnarly entertainment value, elevated by the physical endurance of Abrams, who has to act with an oxygen breather in his mouth for most of the film. When the movie slides into the touchy-feely stuff without the whale guts, it can’t help but feel less unique. The structure of the screenplay, adapted by the director Brian Duffield (Spontaneous), follows a track where our protagonist has a convenient memory with dear old dad for everything whale-survival related. The grieving and regret are given due reverence rather than feeling like some existential checklist for added dramatic weight to spiffy up the body horror. It’s meaningful but a bit blandly explored, relying upon a more generic framing for the audience to project their own personal familiar grief onto this guy. At one point, the whale becomes the spiritual embodiment of his dad, and he’s directly talking to it/him, and I wondered if maybe the best version of this movie would be a hypoxia triptych of spiritual need. By the end, I don’t know if the gooey journey was enough for the catharsis, but then again, I haven’t been swallowed by a whale. Yet.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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The Death of Robin Hood (2026)
You want to give me a somber, meditative, and grim movie set in a Medieval setting that challenges our notions of heroism, virtue, and sacrifice, and I am down for that dour experience. A deconstructionist view on the legend of Robin Hood sounds fantastic, but that’s not exactly what writer/director Michael Sarnoski (Pig, A Quiet Place: Day One) offers with his take on the legendary figure. It plays more like an old Western, the aged gunslinger attempting to make amends late in life for a career of regrets and bloodshed. The first 30-40 minutes is an intense and disconcerting beginning, stripping away the glamour of the legend. From there, much of the movie is Robin at rest trying to raise a little girl to do better than him. Jodie Comer (28 Years Later) plays a prioress whose family was massacred in the past by Robin, and that provides a notable sense of dread when the revelation will or ever come to surface. However, being such an aged outlaw, much of the Robin Hood lore and figures of fame are long out of the picture or dead, making this grounded Robin Hood feel less connected to the basis for the character. At this rate he could have just been any older outlaw wondering if he deserves some moment of redemption or peace. Jackman (Deadpool & Wolverine) is aggressively compelling even when the movie props up the character as more a symbol with his humanity long elapsed. Sarnoski has a fantastic sense of atmosphere with his movies and he allows his stories to have these grace notes and lingers on unexpected poignancy that I really appreciate. Pig is such a disarming movie hiding as an assumed revenge vehicle. I was hoping for another disarming and subversive surprise from The Death of Robin Hood, but just making Robin Hood darker, grittier, and lonely doesn’t serve the same purpose as an illuminating character study. The tone and perspective and presentation is right, but it’s missing too many of the details that would make such a character exploration engaging and intriguing for two hours.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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The Social Reckoning (2026)
I’m trying hard to articulate why exactly The Social Reckoning was nowhere near the experience that The Social Network was, albeit it’s extremely hard to replicate the exact alchemy that went into making one of the best movies of the twenty-first century. Seriously, The Social Network is a masterpiece and won screenwriter Aaron Sorkin his only Oscar. Now 16 years later, it’s all Sorkin, returning as writer and taking on the duties of director. The absence of director David Fincher is obviously massive, as the mercurial maestro brings excellent storytelling and presentation sensibilities to elevate any tale. Nobody can match that. I wonder if the biggest difference is less the change in artists and simply the times we live in to receive the story. Perhaps Reckoning not only missed its window of relatability but now feels quaint and unimportant, lacking the rise-and-fall tragic trajectory of the friendships at the formation of Facebook that captivated the original 2010 movie. Whereas the original felt engrossing and revelatory, this one feels hectoring, tin-eared, and already painfully dated for its alarmist messages about Internet veracity. Sorkin is no Fincher, but by all accounts who can be? However, more disappointingly, 2026 Sorkin is no 2010 Sorkin, and his headline-grabbing sequel to An Important Movie sure wants to be important. It’s too bad that the world has moved on and its lessons and moralizing have already been tuned out by the public.
Bouncing between 2019 and 2021, we follow Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a Facebook employee growing increasingly alarmed that their algorithm is radicalizing users through a steady stream of disinformation and media manipulation. She seeks help from Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jeff Horowitz (Jeremy Allan White) to expose the malpractice going on so that Facebook can reform. But with CEO/co-founder Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong, replacing Jesse Eisenberg) prioritizing profit over civic responsibility, is there anybody in the higher reaches of the company that even wants to care?
Newsflash: social media prioritizes keeping you hooked on its site as long as possible, and the best way to do so is through stories that will outrage you. Were you aware of this shocking revelation, something the movie seems to consider a hidden agenda that needs to be exposed? If stories about kittens and puppies cuddling together would keep your older aunts and uncles from clicking to another site, then that’s what Facebook or any other social media algorithm would be feeding them a steady drip of. It just so happens that fear and outrage is the median driver of user engagement, and so instead of kittens and puppies cuddling, it’s stories about Sharia law invading the heartland, or Obama’s fake birth certificate, or fluoride in the water making all the children trans that your kooky aunt and uncle are sharing with you. There’s a heavy correlation with misinformation because, unless somebody is fact-checking, there is no punishment for publishing and sharing conspiracy theories and gossip. It’s much harder to verify real facts and witness statements and times and the like then just making it all up, and if you can train a data center of Russian bots to sow the Internet with acrimonious misinformation, who is going to stop you?
Not Facebook, which Zuckerberg makes abundantly clear in his section of the movie that feels completely tacked on to the rest of the story. Zuckerberg is practicing his Congressional testimony with a team of advisors in preparation for an upcoming grilling over the legal liability of social media companies. Zuckerberg has adopted the convenient stance of the tech billionaires of being a “free speech absolutist,” which in his mind means presenting a platform but not censoring whatever is digested on said platform. Under these terms, Zuckerberg (dear reader: as a side note I want to share, while typing this sentence I accidentally wrote “Suckerberg” and that feels so fitting, doesn’t it?) would allow posts about racial superiority and bomb making and tips on how to kill your kids and get away with it. That’s because his “hand’s off” view has to exist in the all-or-nothing extremes of his cherished conception of liberty. Except Facebook isn’t the government, it’s a private company. It can set its own rules, especially if it learns how harmful its platform can be for misinformation and radicalization via polarized echo chambers. The Zuckerberg scenes feel like Sorkin performing a cross-examination with a mirror, arguing the edicts of culpability in a way to underline how derelict of its duties our Silicon Valley tech lords have become. It feels like it’s talking circles around the same points with some of the most clunky dialogue that twists metaphors into pithy trailer-ready soundbites. Ultimately, it culminates with the insurrection of January 6, 2021 and Zuckerberg having to consider the extreme harm of misinformation on his platform.
Except does he? I would argue, decisively, no. That’s where the “reckoning” part of the movie feels not only premature in celebration and admonition but also outdated and incorrect. Had this movie come out in 2022 or maybe even 2023, audiences might feel a little inflated sense of relief by its traditional conclusion, with Frances using whistleblower status to expose the ills of Facebook’s algorithm and testify before Congress, galvanizing the moment for change. We too might feel as she does, pumping her fist in declamatory yet awkward celebration. These guys sure will learn a valuable lesson. Except the only lesson they learned in the 2020s is that Republicans are the party that don’t want to regulate them as long as they 1) contribute to Republican candidates, 2) refuse to censor misinformation that is disproportionately aggregated to Republican voters. There’s a reason that Trump voters stormed the Capitol in 2021 and Kamala Harris voters didn’t similarly storm the Capitol in 2025. Studies and surveys have shown that the Republican voting base is more likely to ingest misinformation and is more prone to conspiracies, like Q-Anon, or Pizzagate, or Obama’s birth certificate, or Stop the Steal, etc. Fox News has profited for decades following the same faux outrage model to keep its loyal viewers angry and afraid. When Fox News attempted to move on from Trump post-insurrection, its viewers revolted, and so it was back to the reactionary misinformation farming that led to an $800 billion defamation settlement. If Fox News, after paying out close to a billion dollars for blatant lies, hasn’t learned a lesson, do we think the tech bros have? The concluding text for the movie is more revealing than anything else. It states that not only did Facebook remove fact-checkers from political ads and stories, it removed them from everything. Who needs to be an arbiter of truth in a frightening new digital age where people can create their own truths, following a president who attempts to bend reality to his will, unless it’s Iran and gas prices?
Much of The Social Reckoning is a story about journalism that feels flat and tripping over its own sense of self-importance and verbosity. The story just isn’t as interesting, and despite the jumps through linear time with the Zuckerberg sessions, not having the dual lawsuit depositions makes the script lose the fun of its storytelling puzzle coming together. This story is far more simple and with less morally grey proponents so as to signal Good Side and Bad Side. A great comparative lens is that both Social Network and Reckoning have the same cinematographer, Jeff Corenweth, but boy do these movies look different. That’s because Sorkin is at best a competent visual stylist, favoring choices that put the attention on his spoken words. That makes sense when the words are elevated and captivating, as Sorkin’s writing can be, but sub-Sorkin is not worthy of pushing all the other elements of cinematic storytelling to the fringes. I quite enjoyed the 2015 Steve Jobs movie but something vital would be lost if a dynamic visual artist like Danny Boyle was not at the helm as its director. That’s because someone is needed to make Sorkin’s digressive dissertations cinematic. There are moments or streaks of dialogue where Sorkin feels like he’s in a groove, the syncopation of the fast-paced dialogue beginning to coalesce like an orchestration calibrating together. The problem is there are only fleeting moments, recognition of the electric sense Sorkin can provide but isn’t consistently delivering with his staid and mechanical sequel. The cross cuts between Frances delivering her testimony before Congress and the January 6th rioters is trying too hard. The comedy banter are clunkers, with older Boomer media references (Frank Capra, Pentagon Papers, Gilligan’s Island, Greek tragedy) reminding the audience about Sorkin’s increasing distance from the cultural zeitgeist. His character dismissing the term “mansaplining” as what women say when they’re losing an argument is… well, it’s not exactly going to dispel the prolonged criticism that Sorkin has difficulty writing women.
The actors also feel ill-equipped to handle the needs of a Sorkin script, with Madison (Anora) and White (The Bear) feeling miscast and low on energy and overall engagement. Frances not understanding why a basketball player would pump his fist in celebration feels like a low moment in trying to convey her difficulty with relating to others. This goes into robot territory, just waiting for her to swing her arms wildly and mutter, “Does not compute” (another Boomer reference for you, you’re welcome). The running joke with Horowitz is he doesn’t know technology. He’s mostly just a plot device to ask people questions and restate topics for the audience. Strong (Succession, The Apprentice) delivers an uncanny Zuckerberg imitation, from the tenor of his voice to his posture, but this Zuck isn’t quite the character that Eisenberg got to play. It’s not even a “how far has he fallen?” sort of reappearance because this character isn’t just a stand-in for all Wall Street/Silicon Valley leaders but for an ideology Sorkin wants to rattle with prosecutorial scrutiny by Bill Burr, who actually delivers the best performance in the film. Burr’s acerbic tone and sharp wit are an asset as the primary voice against Zuck’s prevailing perspective.
Sixteen years later, The Social Network is still a towering achievement and one of the finest films of the last few decades. In sixteen years, will anyone have anything to say about The Social Reckoning, especially when it doesn’t have much to add to the milieu we’re already too deep into? It wants to be alarmist but it feels too quaint and late to the party. Imagine a hard-hitting story about the addictive nature of tobacco in 2026 and having the filmmakers ask, “Did we just blow your minds? It’s about time people might want to look more into that.” Thanks, but you’ve missed your window of alert activism. That certainly doesn’t mean society should just accept the status quo and forgo regulation of social media and further scrutiny of the ties between government and tech and misinformation, but this moment has been a long time coming since the dawn of the Internet allowed people to prioritize confirmation bias. Our current predicament is not solely Facebook’s fault, and younger users have already migrated away to the realm of TikTok, hopping onto the newer, cooler playground, so the influence of Facebook is waning by the hour. The Social Reckoning is ultimately a disappointment, not just in comparison to its predecessor but just as two hours of entertainment on even its own terms. By the end, it’s less a reckoning and more a ret-conning.
Nate’s Grade: C
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Animals (2026)
Strangely, Animals is the second streaming remake of Akira Kirsosawa’s High and Low in the last 13 months, but I think it gets more right in its adaptation of the source material than the more high-profile Spike Lee joint, Highest 2 Lowest. To reiterate: a wealthy family has their son kidnapped only to discover the kidnapper has taken the wrong boy, a child of one of the servants on the payroll. Will they continue to pay a hefty ransom for a child that isn’t even theirs? How much are they willing to risk their finances, security, and reputation now? It’s a juicy premise, and I’m glad that director/co-writer/star Ben Affleck knows how to wring some heightened drama from the predicament. He plays an independent candidate for L.A. mayor who has leveraged his family’s fortunes to the point they have little to pay a ransom. On top of that, the kidnapped child is from an undocumented Mexican employee, which would be a bad look for him politically, or so we’re told. Adding to the intrigue is a shady fixer character played with an enigmatic chill by Gillian Anderson. She has an exorbitant fee but the connections to do the rough stuff if it comes to it, which provides a temptation of how far is too far and whether this is a person you want to be in debt with. The presence of Anderson as a fixer above it all and the extra level of methodical menace she brings compensates for the lackluster villains. The storylines bumping up against the central kidnapping can feel like an obtrusive nosy neighbor, especially Kerry Washington as the wife who is having her own affair that goes nowhere. The mystery behind who the kidnappers are and their reasoning is a dead-end without having a meaningful point for its emptiness. There are also stretches that seem like Affleck really wanted to show off his Spanish speaking he learned during his second stint with Jennifer Lopez. The intensity of the drama can also feel a little too cranked up at points, with swinging 360-degree camera spins and volume levels stuck on shouting to the rafters. Visually, it’s also pretty uninspiring, and the few thriller set piece sequences are staged with minimal complications and too many drone shots. It’s a shock considering Affleck also gave us The Town and Argo and certainly knows how to craft an excellent suspense sequence. Of all the Affleck directorial efforts, Animals is certainly the weakest and the most plain in appearance and staging, and yet critics make it seem like an offense to good taste. I found it passed the time relatively easily, and while the acting can be overwrought, I still enjoyed the star-studded cast going for gusto, even for lines like, “I want you to f*** your wife.” Maybe we’re all animals after all (hey, wait a sec…).
Nate’s Grade: C+
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Verity (2026)
Verity is trashy fun without the fun. There’s a setup here that could naturally lead to soapy thrills and a guilty pleasure, but by the end you only feel guilt. Well, that and deep confusion thanks to the five-car pile-up of twists that doesn’t so much clarify as confounds. The premise: Anne Hathaway plays Verity, a name I’ve never heard before but TheBump.com tells me is #2771 for U.S. baby names, a popular thriller author known for getting deep into the minds of her villains. It’s been years since her last book and the world is in great anticipation, which is why her husband (Josh Hartnett) hires a promising novelist (Dakota Johnson) to serve as a ghost writer and help Verity finish the manuscript. The problem: Verity has been paralyzed and mute since a car accident that her husband has kept secret. But could she be faking? Could she be a monster? Could the sexy husband be a monster? Will Johnson be seduced by either member of this married couple? Too much of the movie is Johnson reading Verity’s manuscript with Hathaway’s narration telling us her biography, which isn’t that interesting until it seems like she might be scheming to murder her own kids. This is the kind of genre where it’s okay to cross over into cringe or camp, as long as it feels entertaining and the performers are in on the joke. Hathaway plays the best with the material, relishing every syllable of being a catty novelist known for tackling the psychology of bad people. The other actors feel adrift, and maybe that’s because the structure is so dominant toward Verity, even when she’s just supposed to be absolutely still. The question over whether Verity might be faking only leads to goofy options, and it only raises far more questions. Turning her into some jump scare phantom just leads to laughter. Also, one of the sillier twists involves a cascade of bad decisions, and unanswered follow-up questions, primped entirely by the reality that someone might just be a very convincing writer. Seriously, when this twist was revealed, I groaned so loud and slumped in my chair, and that feeling pervaded me, like when Johnson tries to fit her teeth into a headboard bite mark she believes belongs to Hathaway’s amorous jaw. What are we doing here? Just because Verity is the best Colleen Hoover movie yet is not the selling point one might believe.
Nate’s Grade: C
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The Love Hypothesis (2026)
This may have been my wife’s most anticipated movie of 2026. Ali Hazelwood is one of her can’t-miss favorite authors, and 2021’s The Love Hypothesis was her debut published work that cemented Hazelwood as a romance genre giant. The film adaptation is further evidence just how familiar formulas can be enlivened when the filmmakers recognize what is important to get right. The setup seems initially contrived, with PHD-student Olive Smith (Riverdale‘s Lili Reinhart) needing to find a fake boyfriend so her bestie will finally date the guy she once crushed over, and Dr. Adam Carlsen (Tom Bateman) needing to find a fake girlfriend so he receives his missing grant funds. Together, they will have to fool their friends and colleagues and maybe, just maybe, these opposites might find some real chemistry of their own. While being predictable, you simply won’t care because the fun of the whole combustible coupling is infectious. The bickering and eventual softening is a tried-and-true winning formula. Both of the actors have plenty of humor they get to showcase through awkward cover stories and improved physicality. It helps that the movie is directed by Claire Scanlon, who has a long history directing TV comedies like The Office and Kimmy Schmidt. The comedy bits feel natural to the story while giving the right berth for the actors to really hit their potential. The movie might be predictable as any genre formula can, but it’s the charming actors and their interaction that provides the right amount of swoon. I don’t know if it’s been confirmed in the Hazelwood fan-base but the male lead is definitely giving autism spectrum vibes, with his literal manner, rigid system of expectations, misunderstanding of social cues, and tonal affect. He’s more than a ball of tics, or dismissively a prickly Mr. Darcy stand-in, and Olive is more than an adorakable flibbertigibbet of a young woman. They are more than just facile genre archetypes, and the actors have genuine flinty-flirty chemistry that makes every interaction worth watching. The writing is clever without being self-consciously preoccupied with pithy banter or set pieces, instead drawing humor more from the characters, conflicts, and personalities in clash. There’s even a dash of satirical nods, like when Olive bemoans all the improbable scenarios that force people to share a bed. The Love Hypothesis is a sweet, funny, and ultimately satisfying example of the enduring appeal and comforts of rom-coms when they get the basics right.
Nate’s Grade: B
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