“Jeremy Allen White talks too slow to star in an Aaron Sorkin movie. Madison winds up lapping him during their attempts at banter. Curiously, Sorkin’s screenplay contains no cultural references post-1964. Topics of conversation in this film about the 21st century internet include Show Boat, Gilligan’s Island and Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon. OK boomer.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 10/07/2026
“Segan’s melancholy caper/character study assembles 1990s NYC indie icons Turturro, Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito for a tale of small time crooks realizing the times have passed them by. Any overlaps between these old-school criminals and the aging stars of an outmoded kind of independent movie are entirely intentional, and especially effective.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/06/2026
“This is the movie Gray has been trying to make. The nostalgic trappings of the early ‘80s setting underscore the haunted, wistful atmosphere. It hangs heavy with the realization of how suddenly we can discover that the good times are in the rearview. ‘I took risks,’ Teller confesses to his kids, who are only half-listening, ‘And we already had everything.’” – Spliced Personality Substack, 10/06/2026
“As you may have surmised from the title, this is the first Herzog movie one could conceivably call cutesy. It has little of the primal, forbidding strangeness of his early work. One imagines that the old Herzog would’ve made the sisters more feral and a little frightening. But I guess it’s silly of me to fault two billionaire heiresses for not being Bruno S.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 10/02/2026
“Digger periodically pauses to insist that real life is far more complex and less cathartic than phony, simplistic satires like this one, but we still have to sit through the rest of this phony, simplistic satire anyway. It’s a baffling creative choice. The movie rips the rug out from under us, then continues vacuuming for another 90 minutes or so.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/01/2026
“The reason to see the movie is Hathaway in monstrous mommy mode. So voracious she leaves bite-marks on the wooden headboard after having sex with hubby Hartnett, the actress makes a meal out of every evil utterance, crisply articulating with a mid-Atlantic accent out of a 1940s film. The character’s name is Verity Crawford, but Hathaway’s going full Joan.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 10/01/2026
“A blessedly inconsequential story of four girls with three days to put together an act for their school talent show. Yamashita’s languid pacing and stately wide shots conjure a dreamy, deadpan alchemy of lazy afterschool (in)activities and naps, the kind of wonderful, wasted time that only feels precious in retrospect, when there’s no more of it left to spare.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 09/29/2026
“Ayer slathers on a heartland family entertainment aesthetic so low-rent it’s kind of surprising to see an Oscar-winning movie star like Brad Pitt in the lead and not some country singer I’ve never heard of. The whole movie has an air of gaseous sanctimony, which is considerable nerve for such a ridiculous, made-up story about an imaginary wonder dog.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 09/28/2026
“Cinematographer Surtees shoots the picture in harsh, high-contrast black and white, a strategy that replicates the glare of the spotlight. You can feel Fosse’s kinship with the comic as a fellow creature of show business, reveling in the bottom-rung dressing rooms and the backstage camaraderie of musicians and show-people talking trash and shooting junk.” – Crooked Marquee, 09/25/2026
“Primetime skates along its sordid story’s surfaces with the glib incuriosity of the young. Too smug to truly unsettle, the movie would rather goof on Hansen and his crew as cartoonish, reality TV vampires. There’s no real reckoning with the darkness this show uncorked in the country’s id, no interest in examining our own complicity in this horror.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/23/2026
