Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
In Giselle Bonilla’s The Musical (C-), Will Brill plays a frustrated playwright and middle school teacher who hatches the perfect plan to exact revenge on Rob Lowe’s character, the principal who has wronged him. The game plan seems foolproof: ruin the school’s chances of winning the prestigious Blue Ribbon of Academic Excellence by staging an inappropriate and chaotic school play. At the film’s center, Brill doesn’t register with the comic timing nor the screenplay words to properly propel the dark comedy. There’s some fun with occasional outrageous jokes at the expense of woke culture, and the kid ensemble is roundly enjoyable. Bonilla maintains consistent gallows humor, but the enterprise just doesn’t get much lift. Anyone who has viewed the 2016 TV series Vice Principals or the 1999 movie Election has already seen a much better interpretation on similar themes. By the time the showdown goes on in the final act, there’s not much more to say or sing.
Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
Based on her spirited original screenplay, comedienne Iliza Shlesinger stars as a global humanitarian licking her own wounds after losing both her job and her love interest in Josephine Decker’s joyful dramedy Chasing Summer (B). When her character retreats to her Texas hometown, she experiences a kind of Millennial coming-of-age that starts screwball and evolves to sentimental. There are good ensemble performances by Cassidy Freeman and Megan Mullally as family members, Lola Tung as a new friend and Tom Welling as a high school sweetheart, but it’s Garrett Wareing who rises to the top as a handsome and confident new younger boyfriend, providing our protagonist with a memorable age gap relationship which could either be a summer fling or much more. Shlesinger is largely a hoot as her fish out of water maneuvers a summer job at the skating rink including extracurricular keggers. The actress demonstrates considerable sass and spunk; and as screenwriter she gives herself some pretty fun situations and scenery to chew. It’s not the most original film (it’s telling it’s not even the only Sundance movie this year about the insights one learns on a return to one’s hometown: see – or rather don’t – Carousel). The romantic plot is electric, and our leading lady is funny opposite the more traditional Lone Star State women as she flexes her character arc. It’s well filmed and entertaining thanks to Decker, and a screen star is born in Shlesinger.
Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
The grand tradition of a couple finding love against the backdrop of history continues in the nearly decade and a half chronicled in a new Sundance Film Festival premiere documentary. Birds of War (B+), co-directed by its subjects Abd Alkater and Janay Boulos, follows their love and war story. He’s a Syrian activist and cameraman, and she’s a London-based Lebanese BBC journalist. The story traces a pivotal 13 years of their personal archives spanning revolutions, war and exile. With international journalists banned from front-line coverage during the Syrian civil war, international news stations were reliant on activists on the ground to provide footage of the conflict. Exchanging text and voice messages between their respective cities of London and Aleppo, Boulos tasks Habak to clandestinely capture editorially approved stories and segments for her viewers. Gradually, theirs shifts beyond a working relationship, and the film deftly balances the gravity of the grim stories they cover with the flourish and delight of young people in love. The documentary traces the duo’s parallel lives and burgeoning love affair as Boulos loses her faith in journalism and Habak faces the inevitable fall of Aleppo. As both Syria and Boulos’ homeland of Lebanon undergo dramatic developments, the couple reflects on the sacrifices made because of politics and war, but also on the insights they’ve gained along the way. The film is powerful and emotional and a standout of the 2026 Sundance slate.
Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
Mohammed Ali Naqvi’s documentary Hanging by a Wire (B) showcases valiant rescue efforts to save eight schoolchildren trapped mid-wire nearly 1,000 feet over a ravine in a daily use cable car in a remote part of the Himalayan foothills. With ten hours until the transport’s snapped wire is expected to drop the cabin of kids to the ground, viewers witness an array of techniques being employed to try to avert disaster. The film’s director orchestrates reenactments and captures fascinating interviews with locals and lieutenants juxtaposed with crystal-clear drone footage of the race against time. It’s a lean and exciting, if not particularly surprising, entry into real-life sagas of heroism. Some sophisticated techniques to save the stranded are no match for the ingenuity of some unexpected problem solvers. It’s clear why international attention turned to this North Pakistan tale, and this doc fills in many of the details with skill and finesse that will suspend disbelief.
Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
Despite clearly positive intentions, Rachel Lambert’s domestic drama Carousel (C) is a whole lot of the same. It’s nice to see Chris Pine in a dramatic role: here he portrays a sad dad coping with changes in the physician clinic where he works, with an anxious daughter (Abby Ryder Fortson) and a childhood love interest (Jenny Slate) re-emerging in his life. The plot just doesn’t spark and the dialogue doesn’t crackle as the film quietly observes the machinations of domestic life. Most confounding, the chemistry between Pine and Slate doesn’t manifest with much natural energy, and it’s unconvincing these lifelong connections had a palatable past relationship. Still, despite the inertia of this particular movie, Chris Pine’s presence in it should remind casting directors we want to see more of him challenging himself in future juicy roles.
Viewed as part of Virtual Sundance Film Festival 2026
There’s never an optimal time to make tough decisions affecting one’s personal destiny, and for the female protagonist in the Lithuanian film How to Divorce During the War (B+) directed by Andrius Blaževičius, separating from her partner on the eve before the Russian invasion of Ukraine is just the beginning. Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė stars as steely corporate breadwinner Marija opposite Marius Repšys as faux-hipster homemaker husband Vytas, and the crumbling couple shares a precocious pre-teen daughter Dovilė, convincingly played by Amelija Adomaitytė. Set in Vilnius in 2022 in the Baltic state adjacent to a simmering war territory, the characters occupy a clinical and sometimes lightly satirical world as they maneuver through complacency about shifts to the status quo and soul search to be properly performative about life in flux on both domestic and geopolitical fronts. Jakštaitė is particularly effective, from an iconic early sequence told almost entirely through a windshield to her fluid interactions with corporate colleagues, refugees and even her own rebellious offspring. The elegant, classical composition of sequences by cinematographer Narvydas Naujalis against unsettling and insistent music by Jakub Rataj places the players in this ensemble as fascinating pawns in a zone of interest. Examining both the propaganda and realities of politics and war in their extended families tightens the psychological lens. From home life and corporate settings to the art scene and schoolyards where protests large and small start conjuring, a meditation on messiness plays out in interesting ways, even though the film feels like a pilot episode of an even more interesting plot to come. While those next milestones don’t fully manifest within the boundaries of this movie, its makers provoke a deep sense of introspection and conversation about identity in an interconnected world.
Jodie Foster plays an idiosyncratic American psychiatrist in Paris and flexes her remarkable language skills in Rebecca Zlotowski’s largely unremarkable dramatic thriller A Private Life (C). While the protagonist’s tightly knit world begins to unravel after the sudden death of a patient, the viewer can’t help but contemplate the lead actress in full French-speaking mode attempting to also emote within the confines of a fairly flimsy and meandering mystery. Her character is seen alternately puffing cigs, gulping wine or muttering “merde” while en route to each subsequent scene. Zlotowski doesn’t give Foster much to work with in terms of story, ensemble or even relics of modernity. For every reference to long Covid grounding the tale in modern times, there are countless conversations about missing cassettes and a tense trip to the card catalogue. The drab cinematography and dreary atmosphere fail to give the film the pick-me-up that might have helped hasten the pace. I kept waiting for my seventh grade French class teacher to invite us all to a “surprise-partie.” There’s one sequence of hypnosis that almost takes viewers to an alternate otherworld, but the film largely remains steeped in potboiler tropes without that veritable pot ever boiling. One sexy subplot goes absolutely nowhere; another goes further than one would wish. Thankfully there are a few anticipated moments of joie de vivre in the final act.
Strap onto your seats, not out of a promise of actual cinematic intensity, but because only literal harnesses or handcuffs will keep anticipatory viewers sufficiently locked in for this misbegotten A.I. justice thriller. Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy (F) tethers career-worst performances by both Chris Pratt and Rebecca Ferguson to a belabored plot, accompanied by a constant countdown which incessantly reminds viewers it’s almost over. The story places Pratt in a literal chair from which he must defend himself against a crime of passion before Ferguson’s monotone cyber judge with the assistance of computer files, municipal cloud recordings, location records and phone-a-friend technologies. This data dump boasts all the thrills of overnight mainframe maintenance. None of the film’s preposterous characters bears resemblance to any found naturally in reality, and the stakes are rotten from the get-go. The film’s format robs a generally charismatic actor of his charm and the actress of her nuance. Even a final act showdown is thwarted by mind-numbing dialogue and baffling answers to an already shaky thesis. This hour and a half of cheesy effects and weasely affectations is akin to an escape room where every participant simply wants out. It redefines “edge of your seat” in that you’ll find yourself rearing to slither away to any other place.
What happens when a battle-tested boy, an isolated physician, a naked and sedated alpha zombie and a gang of miscreants encounter one another for the second part of an inventive film trilogy in a long-running series? It’s bloody interesting, when that film installment is Nia DaCosta’s 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (B). Ralph Fiennes’ kindly physician character takes center stage, and his “bone temple” memorial to lost lives in an uncertain future becomes a veritable amphitheater for this movie’s showdown with some unlikely villains. This film amps up the gore, brutality and existential dread about true evil in the world, and Fiennes anchors the film with grace notes of humanity mixed with a hint of the unhinged. As the teen who came of age in the previous installment, Alfie Williams is again wonderfully emotive but a little sidelined in a majority of the story. Jack O’Connell is dynamite as a menacing leader of a band of renegades including an effective Erin Kellyman. Even Chi Lewis-Parry brings humanity to his hulking infected character. This latest trilogy upends many of the tropes of the undead genre, with conversation and contemplation featured more often than straightforward action. It’s still very engrossing, even if the myth-making in Danny Boyle’s previous movie was more revelatory than the religious angles of DaCosta’s. This is a delightful and delicate mash-up of genres and one of the most offbeat Hollywood tentpole films to be released in some time. Again, it’s exciting and insightful.
We are on the precipice of a very early Golden Globes weekend this Sunday (before Oscars, months away on 3/15/26 – and oh, do we have a viewing party in the works down at Trilith come the ides of March!) Expect parental anxiety and monsters (both literal and human!) to reign supreme for the wins! Timothee Chalamet as a ping pong champion (“Marty Supreme” now a hit in theatres), Michael B. Jordan as twin gangsters fighting the supernatural (“Sinners”), Rose Byrne and Jesse Buckley as parents facing unbearable crucibles (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” and “Hamnet”), Jacob Elordi as a patchwork creature (“Frankenstein” on Netflix) and Amy Madigan wielding witchery and micro-bangs (one of my faves, “Weapons” now on HBO Max) are my predictions to triumph. Brazil’s “Secret Agent” could also be an acting spoiler, with big fans in the international voting wing. Expect “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners,” both now on HBO Max for those catching up, to clinch top prizes. Nikki Glaser hosts Sunday night on CBS and Paramount+. Expect it all to be as “Golden” as The Outsiders in their heyday or the ubiquitous “K Pop Demon Hunters” song.
There goes Disney again with the preposterous notion that all should be equal; that’s right, follow-up features generally aren’t. Jared Bush and Byron Howard’s Zootopia 2 (B-) poses the premise that second-class citizen reptiles should be regarded equally in the pantheon of all-animal new urbanism. The spry duo of Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman returns as undercover cops in bunny and fox form, respectively, joined in the fun and puns by the amusing voice talents of Quinta Brunson, Fortune Feimster and Ke Huy Quan. The fast-paced action is fairly nonstop with few amazing animations or detours to distinguish the sequel from the original. Still, as global blockbusters go, this proves pretty entertaining for both kids and adults (including the overall Chinatown vibe and The Shining references) and gets a marginal recommendation as a family outing.
Those wondering if the third film in the saga about clashes between humans and blue alien creatures would live up to the epic stature of its predecessors can hold their collective Pandora breath. Despite a lush rendered environment, James Cameron’s latest opus Avatar: Fire and Ash (C) is just as head-scratching in its mediocrity as the two films before it. In some ways this one’s a little worse as it flagrantly rehashes many of the themes in the last bloated entry. Rarely has so much meticulous craft been invented at the service of such benign characters and pedantic a storyline. Riffs on loss, conflicts with warring tribes and meddling humans, meditations on the nobility of sea creatures and even Biblical parables about fathers and surrogate sons don’t make this entry any better. The soggy story and screenplay extinguish most of the intrigue here, with flickers of action sequences filling the ample running time between the senseless sermonizing. None of the CGI-coated actors get much of a showcase as this glorified screen saver parades before us.
