“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
“Calling something the best video game movie ever made isn’t exactly high praise, but it seems like an adequate level of appreciation for Zach Cregger’s wittily-assembled fright machine. As in the filmmaker’s previous pictures, the story doesn’t move forward so much as it reboots itself over and over at each level. It advances without progressing.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 09/19/2026
“I’ve never seen a scene like this in a documentary before, with the subject calling the filmmaker out for cowardice and them not only keeping it in the edit, but leading with it. I’ve also never seen a photograph like the one Perlmutter presents to the camera, and I hope never to again. Yet such horrors are seen every day by healthcare workers in Gaza.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 09/18/2026
“This sinewy thriller gave me the kind of buzz I last caught at mall theater matinee screening of Hell Or High Water, surrounded by men in their 60s who nodded and muttered ‘Good picture’ to each other on the way out. I joked to a friend the other day that The Weight was the best Clint Eastwood movie I’ve seen in ages. That’s not a small compliment.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/16/2026
“A celebration of the communal concert-going experience, focused just as much on the audience as on the band. It tries to capture what it feels like to sway arm-in-arm with thousands of like-minded folks rhapsodically screaming about how Sally can wait. This is an unusually emotional concert movie. You can really get carried away on those soaring choruses.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 09/15/2026
