Crime 101 (2026) | REVIEW

Directed by Bart Layton — Screenplay by Bart Layton.

Based on a Don Winslow novella of the same name, Bart Layton’s Crime 101 follows a disciplined and lonely thief named Mike (played by Chris Hemsworth), who has done a good job of avoiding capture and planning out his robberies over the years. Now, after having completed a mission in which he stole diamonds (but which almost cost him his life), he’s on the fence about what to do next and is unsure about going straight into the next heist, even though his underworld middleman, Money (played by Nick Nolte), is frustrated by his unwillingness to go straight into the next job. So, while Mike strikes up a romance with a woman he encounters named Maya (played by Monica Barbaro), Money enlists a wild and unpredictable thief called Ormon (played by Barry Keoghan) to do what Mike won’t and possibly cut off the loose end that Mike personifies. Meanwhile, LAPD detective Lou Lubesnick (played by Mark Ruffalo) has managed to connect the crimes Mike committed and has determined that one person committed all of them. While both the criminal underworld and law enforcement are trying to track down Mike, he attempts to juggle a blossoming romantic relationship with getting ‘one last job’ done so that he can put his criminal days behind him for good. That ‘last job’ will involve Sharon Combs (played by Halle Berry), an increasingly disgruntled insurance broker, who may or may not be interested in breaking bad.

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Widow’s Bay – Season One (2026) | TV REVIEW

The following is a review of the complete first season of Apple TV’s WIDOW’S BAY — Show created by Katie Dippold.

Katie Dippold’s Widow’s Bay is a comedy-horror series that follows Tom Loftis (played by Matthew Rhys), the ambitious but nervous mayor of the titular island location, as he tries to get more tourists to visit the place that he and his troublesome son, Evan (played by Kingston Rumi Southwick), call home. Despite evidence to the contrary, Tom is skeptical of the locals who insist that the island is cursed. Chief among the local believers is Wyck Crawford (played by Stephen Root), who is a constant thorn in Loftis’ side. When Tom starts experiencing supernatural events firsthand, he, however, must team up with Wyck and his own assistant, Patricia (played by Kate O’Flynn), a spirited social outcast whose own prior history with the island’s legends becomes the focal point of some of the season’s best episodes.

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2026 TV Review Catch-Up, June Update, Part One | Bite-Sized Reviews

We’re right around halfway through 2026, and there have been so many shows to watch that I almost feel a little bit overwhelmed at times. Therefore, I like to do these TV Review Catch-Ups, so as to get my thoughts out there on a wide variety of shows that I watched and perhaps enjoyed, but which didn’t really inspire me to dedicate entire solo reviews for. So, instead, here I’ve collected my thoughts in bite-sized form in a review compilation. This time around, I’m giving you my thoughts on 1) a returning Danish Netflix series, 2) a very odd HBO dramedy, 3) a video-game adaptation whose second season may not have fully blown me away, 4) an underseen period piece spy-dramedy, 5) another Bill Lawrence comedy, and 6) an unsettling Netflix original series from earlier this year.

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Disclosure Day (2026) | REVIEW

Directed by Steven Spielberg (Raiders of the Lost Ark; Schindler’s List) — Screenplay by David Koepp (Black Bag).

No one does major motion picture pop blockbusters quite like Steven Spielberg. The septuagenarian (soon-to-be octogenarian) star filmmaker is one of cinema history’s greatest science-fiction storytellers, having made science-fiction greats such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Minority Report, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and War of the Worlds. So, when it was announced that he would be returning to a cinematic genre, our understanding of which he has helped to sculpt, the ears of cinephiles around the world pricked up, their appetites were whetted, and their excitement built up. That new feature is Disclosure Day, a film that aims to grapple with the question of how we would all react to finding out that we are not alone in the universe. For the legendary director, it is thus a return to concepts that are definitely not alien to his oeuvre. While the new film is not without blemishes, it is nonetheless a strong genre effort that speaks to our current moment with a humanist spirit and plea. It also shows, for all to see, that Steven Spielberg still has what it takes to tap into the incredible sense of wonder with which he has become synonymous.

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Ladies First (2026) | REVIEW

Directed by Thea Sharrock — Screenplay by Natalie Krinsky, Cinco Paul, and Katie Silberman.

Thea Sharrock’s Ladies First is an English-language remake of Netflix’s 2018 French romantic-comedy Je ne suis pas un homme facile (international title: I Am Not An Easy Man) from director Éléonore Pourriat. The film follows Damien Sachs (played by Sacha Baron Cohen), a chauvinist high-ranking executive at an advertising agency, who gets recently promoted creative director Alex Fox (played by Rosamund Pike) to quit her job. She decides to leave when it becomes clear to her that he doesn’t care at all what she thinks and only promoted her for show. As Damien follows her out of their place of employment, he knocks himself out. He then wakes up in a world where positions of power have shifted into some kind of matriarchal society. To get back to his own world, Damien is told that he must rise through the ranks at the advertising agency, all the while overcoming the workplace and societal discrimination that women endure in the patriarchal society from which he originates.

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We Need to Talk about Film Directors and Their Relationship with AI | Special Features

Hollywood has long waged a war with generative artificial intelligence, i.e., the “group of AI algorithms and models that are capable of producing new content, including texts, images, videos and problem-solving strategies, with human-like creativity and adaptability,” as defined in a journal article from the National Science Review in 2025. Generative artificial intelligence has often been criticized for using publicly available images, audio, and writing as training data to create its output, which many naturally consider to be stealing human work. There have naturally been notable strikes in Tinseltown over protecting human-created design, performance, or writing, as well as protecting the human jobs and roles that AI threatens to change or completely erase. But, back when the Screen Actors’ Guild and the Writers Guild of America were striking, they were noticeably without their brothers and sisters in the director’s chair from the DGA (Directors Guild of America), so to speak. That’s because DGA reached an agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) without ensuring the other parties had seats at the table. So, while the DGA ensured that its members would not be replaced by technological advances, other Hollywood creatives had to pound the pavement and strike. It was a huge story at the time in 2023, and the DGA came under heavy fire for the way they went about it. Now, three years later, individual directors are again making decisions on their own that may have an impact on the entire industry. Though this time around, notable directors are opening the door for generative AI in ways that feel anathema to the collaborative creative processes involved with filmmaking. As if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re not just talking about a few notable directors. Rather, we’re now starting to talk about some of the biggest names in Hollywood. It’s shocking, and we need to talk about why this is happening and what it means both for their legacy and for Hollywood as a whole.

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Marty Supreme (2025) | REVIEW

Directed by Josh Safdie — Screenplay by Ronald Bronstein and Josh Safdie.

The intensity and anxiety that the Safdie brothers tapped into when creating their breakthrough features Good Time and Uncut Gems is not easily replicated. The Safdies burst onto the scene with a clear sense of style, storytelling, and ability to foster great leading performances. They not only furthered the reputations of Robert Pattinson and Adam Sandler with those two equally electric films, but they also managed to have the anxieties of their films’ protagonists leap off the screen and affect their viewers. So, when the brothers — Benny and Josh — split up to pursue filmmaking careers as solo-directors, one of the big questions that their ‘break-up’ left you with was whether or not they, on their own, could recapture the same lightning-in-a-bottle concoction that they had successfully conjured into existence together. Josh Safdie’s first solo effort since their recent split is Marty Supreme, a critically acclaimed genre-blended sports film that earned the cast and crew recognition from awards bodies far and wide. But is the film actually as good as its reputation and the intense marketing that its leading man helped promote? Well, before I get into it later in my review, I’ll say this: it certainly packs a spark of energy, which I found to be quite effective. It’s certainly a unique sports film.

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Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (2026) | REVIEW

Directed by Jon Favreau — Screenplay by Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor.

Now, don’t get me wrong. For someone who, after the release of George Lucas’ prequel trilogy, once (and for a while there) was worried he would never get to see another movie set in that faraway galaxy, getting to see a new Star Wars movie in theaters is probably always going to feel like a treat. But I have to say that I don’t think I’ve ever been looking forward to a live-action Star Wars theatrical release less than here with The Mandalorian and Grogu. This is coming from someone who has seen every single episode of the Disney+ show it spun off from, who loved the first two seasons of the series, and who enjoys the titular duo a great deal. But despite that and the seven-year wait between this and the last theatrically released Star Wars film (J. J. Abrams’ critically panned The Rise of Skywalker), and even though last year’s second season of Andor was a miracle of intelligent and political storytelling that rivals the best films in the franchise, something about this next big release just feels off. Maybe it’s just because of the disappointing third season of the show, but it could also be the ill-judged marketing campaign (what with the faux-beer commercial as their Super Bowl ad). I have long sensed that the main problem is that the studio and the storytellers have, through three seasons, trained audiences to expect these stories on a streaming service, and even though this is an expensive Star Wars story that you’re putting the next ‘chapter’ of on the big screen, it doesn’t change the fact that people are going to view this as a TV-movie because of its origin on the streaming service. Nevertheless, I was hopeful that this would still be an enjoyable moviegoing experience. Having now seen it, I can say that, as a fan of this universe and these characters, I enjoyed seeing them on another adventure fine enough, but I was largely underwhelmed by what I was presented with, and I am really concerned about what this film may mean for the future of the franchise.

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It Was Just An Accident (2025) | REVIEW

Directed by Jafar Panahi — Screenplay by Jafar Panahi.

For some, making art with something to say is a vocation that means risking your life if you decide to pursue it. Such is the case for renowned Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Panahi, a veteran of the art form, has had a career that has seen him come into direct conflict with the Iranian government, which has, over the years, censored, detained, imprisoned, and punished him for making films that criticize the people in charge of the country, the politics of said government, and the effects of the system in place on Iranians. A former political prisoner who has been banned from making films in his home country, Panahi has frequently been supported by organizations, politicians, and filmmakers from all over the world, and he consistently tries to find loopholes to get around the extreme difficulty of being a filmmaker in a country that has no interest in seeing him make films. To make his Palme d’Or-winning and Oscar-nominated film It Was Just An Accident, he had to film in secret without a permit and be inventive with where and when to film so as not to be approached, arrested, or worse by authorities. As the accolades won by him attest, Panahi succeeded in making something worthwhile. I finally saw it earlier today, and I thought it was a fantastic film (and important text) made even more impressive by the difficulties he and his crew had to overcome to make it.

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Obsession (2026) | REVIEW

Directed by Curry Barker (Milk & Serial) — Screenplay by Curry Barker.

One of the more interesting recent developments in the film industry is that certain online personalities — YouTubers and TikTokers — are being afforded the opportunity to become filmmakers. The primary example of this is arguably Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian twins who went from YouTubers to significant horror filmmakers, and their films Talk To Me and Bring Her Back. But it doesn’t stop there. Last year, YouTube film critic-turned-filmmaker Chris Stuckmann had his feature debut, Shelby Oaks, released by Neon. Earlier this year, Mark ‘Markiplier’ Fischbach self-released an adaptation of an indie video game (Iron Lung), while it was announced that Seán ‘jacksepticeye’ McLoughlin would be a producer on an animated feature film adaptation of the video game Bloodborne. In fact, just a few weeks from now, the horror film Backrooms will be released, which was directed by YouTuber Kane Parsons, whose own project the film is based on. This modern wave of online personalities breaking through in the industry is fascinating, and another example of this new wave is Curry Barker, previously best known for his online sketch comedy duo, that’s a bad idea, with Cooper Tomlinson. After years of making short films and online skits to feature on YouTube and TikTok, he self-released his hour-long found-footage horror film, Milk & Serial, in 2024, the positive response to which likely landed him on the radar of many people in the industry. Just a year later, his second feature, Obsession, premiered to raves at the Toronto International Film Festival, and major industry companies like Blumhouse and Focus Features attached themselves to and acquired it. Now, Obsession is out in theaters all around the world. I just saw it last weekend, and I can say that it is not only Barker’s best and most ambitious project yet, but it’s a fantastic horror film with a jaw-droppingly good performance at its center.

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