Spanish-language queer epic explores forbidden love during wartime
La Bola Negra Starring Guitarricadelafuente, Carlos González & Penélope Cruz Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi Rated R
In select theaters now, streaming on Netflix Wednesday, Dec. 2, 2026
Assuredly a new queer classic, this impressively ambitious drama straddles two centuries with an epic tale of homoerotic love, passion and longing.
It interweaves characters from past and present in a grandiose narrative incorporating magnificent cinematic storytelling and arching historical embellishment, rooted in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s when the fascist right-wing army of Italy’s Benito Mussolini invaded Spain and sparked a revolution.
Carlos (Milo Quifes) is a dashing young man from a wealthy family in Grenada before the war, blackballed (la bola negra) and rejected for his homosexuality when he tries to join an exclusive social club. Should Carlos deny his true self, as his father demands, or live life on his own terms?
A few years later, as the war begins, a village trumpet player named Sebastián (the Spanish singer-songwriter known as Guitarricadelafuente, making an impressive film debut) is conscripted into the invading Italian Nationalist forces. He’s charged with guarding a handsome young prisoner of war (Miguel Bernardeau, playing a character based on the real-life Spanish football player-turned-actor-turned-soldier Rafael Rodriguez Rapún). Both young men feel the force of attraction between them.
And in present day, there’s Alberto (Carlos Gonzàlez), making requests for gay hookups on Grindr while researching queer dissidence in Spanish music when he gets a cryptic phone call from a lawyer representing his late grandfather. His character, too, is based on a real person, Alberto Conejero, the playwright who wrote La Bola Negra along with the film’s two co-directors.
There’s also a horrific local tale about a lynched gay boy and his grieving mother, one that comes full circle at the end of the film. And you’ll learn how everything—the characters, their plotlines and their fates—is connected to a manuscript of an unfinished play by Frederico Garcia Lorca, the real-life poet who became a gay martyr after he was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning the war. In many respects, the film is a “completion” of Lorca’s lost work, existing both within and outside the storyline.
Penèlope Cruz has a dynamite scene in the middle of it all, as a flamboyant cabaret performer who provides the balm of bawdy entertainment for war-weary soldiers…and a message about sexual identity that hits the heart of the movie. Backstage, she tells Sebastián about her dalliance with another performer, a man who posed as a woman. “Transvestitism,” she says, “is the fantasy of possibility. War is its opposite.”
And yes, that’s Glenn Close as an author with a gay connection of her own, who points Alberto toward solving the mysteries of his past.
La Bola Negra is breathtakingly beautiful, and sometimes even dreamlike, with an aching tenderness that makes its moments of war brutality even more wrenching—especially when one character must do something that breaks his heart…and will probably break yours. And if you’ve ever wanted to see handsome young soldiers frolicking naked, or bathing or pissing, here you go. It’s boldly gay all the way, and it’s already been lauded with praise at film festivals, creating a buzz that might even take it to the Oscars like a small handful of other queer-milestone movies, including Brokeback Mountain, Moonlight, Milk and Philadelphia.
And though much of this homoerotic history story is set nearly a century ago, in a faraway time and place for American audiences, it resonates with heightened potency today, and the idea that even fascism and extreme repression are no match for love—even a transgressive love during wartime, a love that dares not speak its name.
John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell team up for a CIA-fueled Easter Island adventure
Wild Horse Nine Starring John Malkovich, Sam Rockwell & Steve Buscemi Directed by Martin McDonough Rated R In theaters Friday, Nov. 6, 2026
A pair of jaded CIA operatives venture to Easter Island as part of a covert coup, on the timeline backdrop of the real-world 1973 military buildup to overthrow of Cuba’s socialist president, in this masterfully orchestrated mashup of political intrigue with buddy comedy, pathos, mysticism and musings on mortality, meddling, conspiracies and cover-ups.
Easter Island, offshore South America in the Pacific Ocean, is the famous site of the móai, the massive stone “heads” that were made from quarried island rock and considered sacred by ancient Polynesian people.
The agents are Sam Rockwell, who plays Lee, and John Malkovich as Chris, who’s older, losing his memory and dying from terminal cancer. The movie unfolds in layers as we learn why they’ve come to Easter Island, what Chris has been carrying in his satchel for a decade, how their past is creeping into their present—and why their boss (Steve Buscemi) is so focused on preventing Chris from spilling the beans about what knows and what he’s done. And, as we watch Chris continually dictating into a handheld recorder what he intends to be his memoir, he’s done a lot and he knows a lot—like the real story behind…well, you’ll find out.
Accomplished director Martin McDonogh (The Banshees of Inisherin, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Minnesota, and In Bruges) blends it all together in a terrifically engaging, tough-but-tender tale that unfolds under the stoic, silent gaze of inscrutable monolithic faces that were carved centuries ago. It’s a powerfully human saga of two friends and coworkers who’ve spent their lives in the shadows, who’ve dealt in assassinations and turbulence the world over, and who now confront another kind of change.
Chris and Lee may snipe at each other, curse at each other, and become exasperated with each other. But they’re joined together with a bond of friendship and camaraderie forged in the fires of time, one that can’t be broken.
To add another wrinkle of intrigue, they meet a couple of young, liberated women (Marina de Girolamo and Ailin Salas), who may—or may not—be on the same side of things as them. “Why do you lie all the time?” one of them asks Chris when he admits to a wild fabrication. “I’ve always done it,” he tells her. “And it’s kinda hard to stop.” And how does Lee’s wife (Parker Posey), her extramarital fling with a clown and her ransacked house play into things?
Grammy-winning singer/actor Tom Waits has a scene as Chris’ estranged brother.
Rockwell and Malkovich make a dynamite screen duo, with rhythms that bounce off each other with natural ease and a chemistry that’s almost tactile. It’s no surprise Malkovich—who’s been making movies since his Oscar-nominated breakthrough role in Places in the Heart in 1984—is an odds-favored front-runner for another Oscar nod.
The setting—the hillsides, blue skies, beaches and giant noggins of Easter Island—is intoxicating and sometimes even other-worldly. Could those wild horses really be spirit animals? Are there moths, or dinosaurs, in heaven? Does it really matter where you die?
Conspiracy theorists will appreciate how the story suggests that certain government agencies have their fingers in, well, just about everything—and how the line between good things and bad things can get blurry, and bloody.
And the Rolling Stones song that plays over the closing credits, “Out of Time,” caps it all off—in a place where time seems to stand still, like the móai, but where more than one timeline is about to run out, and huge faces made of stone take in the ever-changing ocean tides with inscrutable, unfathomable indifference.
Despite a solid cast, this futuristic fable doesn’t have much of a glow
Klara and the Sun Starring Jenna Ortega, Amy Adams & Mia Laura Thara Directed by Taika Waititi Rated PG-13
In theaters Friday, Oct. 23, 2006
In the not-so-distant dystopia of this futuristic fantasy flick, robots that look identical to people will be sold in stores, just like furniture or appliances. Pick one out, take it home, and it’s yours.
Klara (Jenna Ortega) is a female bot, marketed as an AF, an artificial friend. She fervently wants someone to pick her for purchase before her discontinued model gets sent to the AF scrapheap for recycling by the store manager (Natasha Lyonne). Lucky for Klara, another girl, Josie (Mia Laura Thara), selects her from the display window, and boom—she’s boxed up and delivered.
Klara is solar-powered and outright worships the sun; she talks to it, thanks it, asks it for things. She thinks it lives in a barn, on a hill outside her window. Without the sun, her battery would be ka-put. She thinks a robotic harvester is a monster.
Director Taika Waititi (JoJo Rabbitt, What We Do in the Shadows) has a solid cast, including Amy Adams as Josie’s bitchy mom and Steve Buscemi as a shady doctor specializing in a very specific kind of grief therapy. Ortega, just into her early 20s, has been acting since her childhood in Disney’s Stuck in the Middle, and in movies like BeetlejuiceBeetlejuice and Netflix’s Addams Family spinoff series Wednesday.
But here Waititi seems to confuse quirks for substance, despite its capable cast. It’s sappy and soppy, full of peculiarity but coming up empty on most everything else. Its attempts at humor and comedy seem forced and fall flat. It swirls with stuff, but little of it sticks. It glops sentimental hokum over situations of hurt and loss, romps through ideas about love and friendship, takes a quick jab at racism, and touches lightly on the dangers and downsides of genetic engineering and human replicating.
There’s even a flimsy grab at the cinematic coattails of The Wizard of Oz (a robotic scarecrow) and an oddly placed reference to The Little Mermaid. Adams is atrociously cast in evil-stepmom mode that doesn’t fit her at all. Buscemi, known for his wily and menacing performances in edgy films like Fargo and Reservoir Dogs, seems so stiff, constrained and out of place, in his one scene, you can practically see him cashing his paycheck when he’s out of camera range.
Ortega throws herself in her role—sometimes literally—but Klara’s “childlike” innocence, and her first-time experiences in the outside world, come off as contrived and stage-y.
And for a movie taking place, we’re told, after an apocalyptic world war has left everything in ruins, well, those golden fields of wheat—through which Klara likes to leap throughout the film—look remarkably healthy.
At one point, Amy Adam’s character asks a house full of genetically enhanced weirdo kids, “What the hell is going on here?”
I have to admit, by the time the movie was over, I was wondering the same thing.
A far-out romantic fable about a fisherwoman and her super-stud “made man”
Wicker Starring Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård, Elizabeth Debicki & Peter Dinklage Directed by Alex Houston Fischer & Eleanor Wilson Rated R
In theaters Friday, Oct. 23, 2026
Remember how, as kids, we never questioned the absurdity of fairy tales—talking animals, troublesome witches, thundering giants, fire-breathing dragons, a world full of ogres, trolls and elves?
Wicker asks us to take a similar leap of fanciful imagination in its far-out fable of a village fishmonger who weds a man made wholly of wicker.
Award-winning Olivia Colman is the fisherwoman, who makes her living catching and selling fish. When she walks down the street, covered in grime, emanating the odor of fish guts and hawking her fresh catch, the other villagers make fun of her. “We can smell you comin’!” one sneers.
After being chided—at a local wedding festivity—for her undesirability and her lack of a mate, she asks the local basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her one.
Wicker is a bawdy love story about an unconventional relationship and a couple of outsiders—the fisherwoman and her wicker man—who completely shake up their small village and everyone in it.
Alexander Skarsgård, wearing a remarkable full-body “wicker” suit, is sensational as the wicker man. He’s a hunk, even if he’s made of interwoven twigs and tree branches. A wooden man of few words, he’s super handy around the house (or the hut, as it is) and great between the sheets. Yes, in this story, a human female and a fabricated man can indeed have sexual relations, splinters be damned. In fact, their lovemaking is so intense, it breaks the bed.
This isn’t a fairytale for kids.
Peter Dinkage is the basket weaver who creates the wicker man.
Colman, the esteemed British Oscar and Emmy winner, demonstrates her dramatic mastery here, selling the preposterousness and taking her character through a gamut of emotions—and making them all believable.
And the wicker man truly loves his fisherwoman. “I was made to be with you,” he tells her, and he truly means it—and not just because it’s literally true. But he doesn’t want to sit with her by the fireplace. “I’m highly flammable,” he reminds her.
He certainly fires up the village. All the women are a-flutter, the men envious. Why can’t they, too, have earth-shaking, soul-quaking relations like the fishmonger and her wicker man? The tailor’s wife (Elizabeth Dibicki) becomes the movie’s central “villain,” jealously conniving to chip away at the couple’s happiness.
There are twists and turns and surprises, but I won’t give them away. It’s romantic and sensual, sexy and sometimes funny, often poetic and even achingly lovely. It’s a parable about love and marriage, lust, desire and jealousy, outcasts and insiders.
Basing their movie on a 2008 short story by Ursula Willis, co-directors Alex Houston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson have themselves woven a delightful cinematic fable, one that “feels” like a fairytale or bedtime story, although one liberally salted with f-words and sexual innuendo. This is a world away—or at least a couple of kingdoms over—from “Cinderella” or “The Three Little Pigs.”
But like in classic fairy tales, no one in the story is given a real name; everyone is known by what they do—the fisherwoman, the tailor’s wife, the doctor, the baker. It may also remind you a bit of Frankenstein’s “monster” or Edward Scissorhands, two other “outsiders” who made lasting impressions in our collective consciousness.
Wicker will likewise linger in your memory, this story of a man of woven wood who changes everything—and everyone—around him. And wow, how good he is in the sack.
Elizabeth Holmes documentary peels back the layers in a search for elusive truth
You Can See Everything Starring Elizabeth Holmes & Nathan Fielder Rated R Directed by Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim
In theaters Friday, Oct. 16
Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the debunked blood-testing-tech company Theranos, is currently serving an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors of mega-millions. Nathan Fielder is an actor and filmmaker best known for his docu-comedy prank-reality shows Nathan for You and The Rehearsal.
Before she went away to prison in 2023, Holmes invited Fielder into her family for almost a month to make a documentary, ostensibly to show her side of the story and reveal that she had no secrets, nothing to hide about herself or her company.
“You can see everything,” she tells Fielder at one point, before heading down to the beach to frolic in the surf with her partner (and later husband) Billy Evans and their two young children.
With Theranos, Holmes claimed to have invented a new kind of technology that would revolutionize and simplify blood testing for all kinds of diseases and maladies. Only it didn’t, and she was charged—and convicted—of bilking investors after she’d become America’s wealthiest self-made female billionaire.
Fielder’s documentary, which clocks in at just under three hours, is a mesmerizing curiosity that blurs the lines between reality, fabrication and performance art. Fielder becomes an integral part of picture, a character in the real-life drama, asking probing questions, listening in on conversations and watching from the sidelines. We only get a glimpse of his co-director, Lance Oppenheim, whose recent film Primetime featured Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator vigilante Chris Hansen.
At the midpoint of the movie, actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the Hulu miniseries The Dropout, enters the picture to “stage” additional scenes and help steer the project once Holmes has been sent to prison and unavailable for interviews. She’s once again “playing” Elizabeth.
But is Elizabeth also playing Elizabeth? There’s a lot of attention given to a New York Times profile in which Holmes supposedly said that portrayals of her—like Seyfried in The Dropout—are fabrications, not really her. “They’re playing a character I created,” she’s quoted as saying. Holmes insists she didn’t say it, wouldn’t say it—and that she has proof, recordings of the interview. But despite Fielder’s prodding, those recordings never show up.
Is Holmes a manipulator, or is she being manipulated? Is she playing a character, one she created? She tells Fielder that she’s never knowingly told a lie, that she never defrauded anyone. Is she telling the truth? Does she even know what the truth is? In scene after scene, Fielder asks questions and Holmes stares at him, unblinking and grinning, nodding like a bobblehead. It seems fake, an emotionless, rictus-like mask projecting warmth, openness and innocence. But masks always hide something. What is she hiding?
“She just sees things differently,” Evans offers, not quite as insightfully as he might have intended.
The documentary becomes a real-life psychodrama, with a soundtrack that sometimes sounds like what you might hear in a suspenseful horror movie, full of tension and tautness.
Fielder, above, uncovers a murky history of questionable alliances and relationships, like Holmes’ former boyfriend, Theranos cofounder Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, the much older Pakistani businessman—a sugar daddy?—who was also convicted of fraud. Evans also comes off as creepy, insisting to be paid for making the documentary, volunteering that he hacked into Holmes’ Twitter account to impersonate her, creating an AI version of Holmes that he says will be free for anyone to use, even to make pornography. He also admits that he’s out for revenge, and he’s going to “f*uck ‘em all.” Early in the film, we watch him take over in kitchen, unhappy with the way Elizabeth is scrambling the eggs. In a detail that’s more telling than Evans probably realizes, we see his house pets, snakes and lizards, slithering across the floor.
Evans and Holmes both admit they’re anxious to rise from the ashes, to “put the band back together again” and mount an even more monumental return of Theranos, a 2.0 version with new medical tech involving lasers. They insist they’re deeply in love, life mates meant for each other.
There’s an air of ick, of toxicity, of something being “off,” of closely guarded secrets and misdirection, of grandiose greed and ambition colliding with truth and consequences, of refusals to accept reality. The film peels back the layers of an onion only to find more layers. It exposes even more questions than answers.
At one point, Holmes and Fielder have a dinner-table discussion about magicians, like David Blaine, who can make you believe the unbelievable, that what you’re seeing is what there is. But it turns out it’s all trickery, masterstrokes of performance, magnificent manipulations.
Like the manipulations we see in the riveting, almost hypnotically spellbinding You Can See Everything. We may be seeing everything we can see. But what can’t we see? What’s behind the mask? And can we believe any of it?
Gripping belly-of-a-whale drama has an even deeper message
Whalefall Starring Austin Abrams, Josh Brolin & Elisabeth Shue Directed by Brian Duffield Rated PG-13
In theaters Friday, Oct. 16
A young scuba diver searching offshore for the remains of his deceased father instead finds himself in the belly the planet’s largest predator. Euphoria’s Austin Abrams plays Jay, who gets gulped into the massive maw of a sperm whale. Yep, just like Jonah in the Old Testament, or Geppetto in Pinocchio.
But this is no Bible tale, nor a Disney ‘toon.
Director Brian Duffield knows how to rachet up the tension, like he did in the alien-invasion thriller No One Will Save You (2023). Never having been in a whale’s belly, I can’t say for sure, but Whalefall feels alarmingly realistic and genuinely horrifying. The music by Joseph Trapanese, and the exceptionally detailed set design—to depict the oozing, heaving, churning, splashing, squishing, squeezing insides of a whale—create a truly immersive, submersively unnerving experience.
And Abrams—whose other roles include the movies Weapons and Resident Evil, and playing Ron Anderson on TV’s The Walking Dead—knows how to sell it. He makes us feel the panic, the claustrophobia, the intense helplessness and the overwhelming dread as Jay’s oxygen tank begins to empty, and the whale’s digestive system starts to do its thing.
You’d probably scream, whimper, cry and coil into a fetal position, too. And at some point, you’d do just about anything to survive.
And he’s not alone in there. There’s also a giant squid, and it’s not too happy about the tight quarters, either. Thank goodness there’s also an incandescent jellyfish, which Jay uses as a flashlight.
Before all that happens, though, we see the warm relationship Jay had with his mother (Elisabeth Shue) and his sisters (Jane Levy and Emily Rudd) after their salty dog of a dad, Mitt (Josh Brolin), ended his suffering from mesothelioma by becoming one with the sea. We learn that Mitt and Jay didn’t always get along; and that Jay moved away, far inland to Iowa, to get some distance from him.
The most surprising thing about Whalefall (based on 2023 novel by Daniel Kraus) is the poignant father-son relationship central to its story. Even though he’s deceased, Mitt gets a lot of flashback time, and how the movie creates a “reconnection” with Jay and Mitt is one of its impressive narrative feats, interweaving Jay’s dire circumstances with flashbacks in an arc that eventually gives him the much-needed closure for which he’s been longing.
It’s interesting that Whalefall never depicts the whale as a monster; instead, it’s just doing what whales do. Mitt used to say that whales are vital parts of the ecosystem. As Jay fights for his life, it’s almost like father, son and sea beast have become part of the same spiritual loop, the same existential ecosystem, the eternal essence of the water. Has Mitt been reincarnated as the whale? Is Jay hallucinating as he runs out of air?
Beyond its nail-biting undersea drama, Whalefall has a message about how everything is connected. Water, people, family, whales, living and dying, all are parts of something bigger, something as symbiotic and deep and wide, as full of mystery and wonder as the vastness of the sea itself.
Mitt always knew that. “The ocean always provides,” he told young Jay, noting how when a whale dies and sinks to the floor of the ocean—known as whalefall—it creates a thriving biological community for other sea creatures as its body decomposes and its energies are released.
Like the ocean, Whalefall also provides—in this case, a whale of a life-or-death tale with an even deeper message.
Chris Rock’s acerbic tale of tarnished Hollywood dreams hits a nerve of disillusionment
Rosalind Eleazar stars in writer-director Chris Rock’s tale of a struggling actress.
Misty Green Starring Rosalind Eleazar, Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya and Anna Kendrick Directed by Chris Rock Rated R
In select theaters now
This movie made me think of a quote from Marilyn Monroe about Hollywood. She said it’s a place “where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.”
Standup comedian-turned-actor-turned director Chris Rock depicts the soul-sucking underbelly of Hollywood in this bitter kiss about a struggling biracial actress, Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar), trying to make a comeback—with struggling being the operative word.
Rock can be a funny guy. He began his career as a standup comedian and cast member of Saturday Night Live. But Misty Green, which he wrote and directed, isn’t going for laughs. Instead, it’s drilling down to hit a nerve, and it does. It’s about the slippery slope of fame, about concessions and compromises and hard choices, about burned bridges and the challenges faced especially by Black actresses in a town where there are no guarantees, where racism and sexism are more than just subtle undercurrents.
Eleazar (from Apple TV’s Slow Horses) gives a gutsy, committed performance as Misty, at the center of a swirl of trials and troubles. She may have won an Emmy, but now Misty’s getting thrown out from the beachside apartment she’d been sharing with her married manfriend—by his righteously agitated wife (Amy Landecker). Misty’s brother (DanielKaluuya, who starred in the horror film Nope) has mental issues and needs coddling—and help that Misty can’t afford. Adam Driver is Zach, a wheeler-dealer filmmaker who gives her drugs in exchange for sex. Chris Rock plays Misty’s friend Jordan, a casting director working on a big new musical. Hey, maybe there’s a part in it for Misty?
Chris Rock plays Misty’s friend, a down-on-his-luck casting agent.
Or maybe she should just take Zach’s offer to hop a red-eye flight to Dubai in a private jet full of other party girls, to “entertain” a filthy-rich sheik—and return home with a designer handbag full of money.
There’s also Anthony Anderson (from TV’s Black-ish) as an L.A. cop, and Anna Kendrick (Pitch Perfect) as Misty’s friend Naomi. Topher Grace plays a talent agent.
The movie opens with a big-band rendition of the song “If My Friends Could See Me Now,” originally from the 1960s Broadway musical Sweet Charity, about a dance hall girl who comes into a bonanza of good fortune. Misty Green pairs the tune with scenes of familiar Hollywood landmarks and celebrities, but also street hustlers and homeless encampments. It’s a hint that we’re going to see the grit and grime that exists alongside the glitz and glamor, a lot of hardship to go along with a few hurrahs. In another moment, we hear a plaintive piano plinking out another familiar song, “California Dreamin’,” a few shades more somber than The Mamas and the Papas version.
“I am a f*ckin’ star,” Misty tells Jordan. “I just wished people would treat me like one.”
You have to wonder if Rock, who’s spent decades himself as part of the Hollywood hitmaking machine, is mining some of his own disillusioned experiences with the system and channeling them into Misty.
But Eleazar sells it, all of it, with gusto, this flip side of La La Land, this tale of broken dreams. She makes us want things to work out for Misty, to root for her, despite her flaws—her drug use, her promiscuity, her inability to find stability. And when Misty picks up a mic and sings in a bar at the Roosevelt Hotel, she puts a sublime confessional spin on Radiohead’s “Creep” with its lyric about “I’m a weirdo. What the hell am I doing here?”
Rock creates a biting portrait of what it takes to be an actor, to succeed in a town where show business is a machine with monstrous gears that can chew, mash and churn people into so much stardust. Where it’s hard to parse acting and role-playing from real life, and where Misty finds herself “riding the line between ho and hostess,” considering just how much of her soul she needs to sell.
It’s not perfect; sometimes it feels like the movie’s just too small to contain all of Rock’s sprawl of ideas, which come pouring out in conversations between characters, in jarring flashbacks and wrenching twists and turns.
I’m reminded of an old joke, about a group of people leaving the circus. After watching all the razzle-dazzle, the soaring acrobatics and the flashy lion tamers, they come across a guy cleaning out the elephant pen, covered head to toe in grime as he shovels piles of pachyderm poop. What an awful job, they gasp! They ask why he doesn’t find another job, something that doesn’t involve elephant excrement. “What?” he exclaims. “And leave show business???!”
It can be grimy, crappy road, Misty Green tells us, and sometimes—sometimes—it takes you where you want to go. Other times, you may find yourself posing for someone else’s selfie in an emergency room, sniffing and snorting a cocktail of drugs in a bathroom stall to ease the pain, or making a TV commercial—with Ice-T—for an accessory that could come in handy on the mean streets of Hollywood.
Controversial ’70s film still packs a potent power to shock
The Devils Starring Oliver Reed, Vanessa Redgrave & Gemma Jones Directed by Ken Russell Rated NC-17
In theaters Friday, Oct. 16, 2026
One of the most controversial movies of all time is coming back into theaters again.
Director Ken Russell’s The Devils, originally released in 1971, returns to the big screen for an extremely limited run of one week. If you happened to miss all the hand-wringing and moral outrage more than half a century ago, well, now you’ve got another chance.
The film has been newly remastered, posthumously spiffed up and restored as a “director’s cut,” with scenes that had previously been excised, banned or censored. Based on actual events that occurred in 17th century France, it stars Oliver Reed as a rebellious libertine priest, Father Grandier, and Vanessa Redgrave as sister Jeanne, the sexually repressed humpbacked abbess at an Ursuline convent in the fortified commune of Loudun.
Grandier, no stranger to pleasures of the flesh, is a heavenly hunk. The cloistered nuns literally swoon at the sight of him; Jeanne pleasures herself and has fevered fetishistic fantasies, imagining Grandier as Christ, coming down from the cross for her to sensually kiss his wounds before they make love in the Golgotha dirt. The collective longings eventually build into a sexual frenzy, whipped into an orgiastic whirlwind when a priest (Michael Gothard) accuses the nuns of demonic possession—and Jeanne, under extreme duress, whispers Grandier’s name. The celibacy-flaunting Grandier’s an easy target; he’s already married a young wannabe sister (Gemma Jones) and knocked up a nobleman’s daughter (Georgina Hale). He’s accused of heresy, inciting demonic possession, and sentenced to be burned at the stake.
It all takes place against a backdrop of French politics, rebellion and a power-grab plan of King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to eradicate Huguenot Protestants from his realm. The king wants to bring down Loudun’s fortified walls to prevent the town from becoming a Protestant stronghold.
Director Russell, who died in 2011, was known as a flamboyant filmmaker who reveled in the grandiose excesses of cinematic possibilities, and he pulled out all the stops for The Devils, originally rated X but heavily redacted to get an R rating for re-release in 1979. It’s easy to understand how, back in the ‘70s, even people who hadn’t seen it were outraged—and titillated—by what they heard about it. It was labeled as blasphemous, profane, sexually obscene and audaciously sacrilegious, with scenes of female nudity (naked nuns!), self-flagellation, masturbation, candlesticks treated as phallic substitutes, and wrenching torture—and the unmistakable suggestion that religious zealotry and hyper-repressed sexuality were at the root of it all.
Fifty years later, The Devils has lost none of its shock value—most notably in one scene that has been fully restored, when the naked nuns pull down a bigger-than-life-size sculpture of Jesus from the altar and begin, well, grinding all over it. That scene is called, suggestively enough, “The Rape of Christ.”
The new restoration makes itself noticed with another little detail. Back in the ‘70s, watching the movie unspool from grainy 35mm film, it was easy to miss the now well-defined bikini tan lines on some of the actresses. As Shakespeare might have said, get thee to a nunnery…when you get off the beach.
And it’s timely anew, almost preternaturally. When Grandier finally meets his fate in front of a cheering, jeering crowd, it’s impossible to forget the recent announcement from the U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, calling for a return to the savagery of barbaric public executions, livestreamed for all to see.
And when Grandier ask his accusers how they can’t see that “the will of one man can be pushed to destroying a man, a city or a nation,” it’s impossible to miss the movie’s timely message cutting through the lavish luridness loud and clear: When wielded together, religious hysteria and political power can be a dangerous—and devilish—combination, an unholy marriage of church and state, no matter the time or the place.
The 57th Nashville Film Festival kicked off with an appropriately musical bang on Thursday, Sept. 24, setting the course for a week of nearly 150 screenings plus panels, conferences and other celebrations of Music City creativity. Here’s my highlight reel, with three very different films.
Frampton Comes Alive in New Documentary
Pop-rock guitar fixture Peter Frampton, who’s been a Nashville resident for nearly 30 years and operates a recording studio here, opened the film fest with double screenings of his new documentary, Frampton. It’s a sweeping musical biopic, directed by his longtime keyboardist and band leader Rob Arthur, that takes viewers along through the ups and downs of a career that rocketed Frampton into the stratosphere of superstardom with his explosively successful live album, Frampton Comes Alive, making him a household name (and a “teen” idol) in 1976.
Using contemporary interviews with archival footage, there are illuminating side trips into his longtime friendships with fellow British rockers David Bowie (they were school mates!) and Roger Daltry; his studio work alongside former Beatles George Harrison and Ringo Starr; his formative years with the British band Humble Pie and its mercurial lead singer Steve Marriott; the ‘70s movie-flop he calls “disgustingly horrible”; the 1978 car crash in the Bahamas that broke his arm, his hands and his feet; and the discovery soon after that exploitive management had siphoned off most of his money.
Introducing the film in person, Frampton, now 76 years old and walking with a cane, noted it traces “the good, the bad, and not-so-good,” which includes his overindulgence in drugs, and dealing present-day with IBM (Inclusion Body Myositis), a degenerative condition that causes muscular weakness, especially in the hands and fingers.
The film introduces us to his now-adult children, examines the early teenage roots of his guitar prowess and features commentary by a spectrum of celebs. Sheryl Crowe admits that seeing him in concert as a young girl sparked her own musical ambition; director Cameron Crowe and actors Kate Hudson and Billy Crudup recall his essential contributions as a guitar coach to their 2000 film Almost Famous; and a chorus of admirers sing his praises, including Heart’s Nancy Wilson, Alice Cooper and Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones’ bassist who produced some of Frampton’s earliest recording sessions. It’s a sprawling, emotionally rich salute to an artist who’s still faithful to the musical muse that first called out to him as a skinny, blue-eyed, baby-faced guitar prodigy growing up on the outskirts of London, before coming “alive” with a double-disc album that spent 10 spectacular weeks at No. 1
“Breeder” Brews Up Unholy Horror
It’s not a proper film festival without something scary, and Breeder fills that bill. Writer-director Alex Goyette puts an unsettling spin on the horror genre with his tale of Russell (Daniel Doheny), a bright young college student seeking funding for his research on bees. When Patti (Glee’s Dot-Marie Jones), a championship dog breeder, offers to fully finance Russell’s project, he finds out she’s got more than puppies on her mind.
Patti has moved on from breeding dogs to breeding humans, and she wants to pair Russell with one of her adoptive daughters, Ainsley (Maddie Phillips), to produce genetically superior offspring. And Ainsley, it turns out, has her own plans for fleeing Patti’s baby-making breeding farm.
Breeder avoids the jump scares, goop and gore of many horror flicks, instead focusing on moody, claustrophobic terror and wrenching up the weirdness as Russell makes a desperate deal, agreeing to become a “stud” to Ainsley’s “bitch” in exchange for Patti’s unlimited research dollars. The film walks a razor-thin line in its exploration of just how far science can—and should—go when it comes to genetic engineering and manipulation. Is monkeying with bee DNA different from dog breeding, or Patti’s plans to modify the human gene pool through controlling the “birds and bees”? It also gives a nod to generational angst (with Patti’s deep-rooted “mommy issues”) and the trauma of children who feel abandoned when “given up” for adoption.
And for a movie about the forced breeding of humans, sexual activity is scarce. And there’s more full male nudity than female, another departure from familiar horror tropes.
Dot-Marie Phillips is a commanding presence as a bulky barnyard Dr. Frankenstein, fully committed to her monstrous mind games, selling human babies on the black market like miniature poodles and treating her daughters as she would treat and breed dogs, expecting total obedience. Russell’s fiancé (Yellowstone’s Tanaya Bailey) starts wondering what he’s up to on the secluded, rural ranch, with no idea he’s become a captive for Patti’s unholy plan.
How can Russell escape the trap she’s laid for him?
“You’re a special breed,” Patti ominously tells him. Breeder likely won’t go down as a cult classic, but it nonetheless breeds its own blend of uniquely unholy horror.
Breeder opens in theaters Oct. 28.
Stallone’s “Rocky” Road
I Play Rocky is the behind-the-scenes story of how a failing actor fought to make a film that became an all-time classic. That no-name actor, of course, was Sylvester Stallone and the movie was Rocky, the now-iconic 1976 tale of an underdog boxer who became a winner.
It’s the story you didn’t know about a movie almost everyone knows—and one that became a multi-film franchise, a pop-cultural touchstone, a multiple Oscar winner and the launching pad for Stallone’s blockbuster acting career.
Anthony Ippolito (who played another actor, Al Pacino, in the Paramount+ series The Offer, about the backstory of The Godfather) stars as Stallone. But more than that, he becomes Stallone—he’s got the hangdog face, the droopy eyes, the curled lip, the mouthful-of-marbles mumble and the walk. He transforms into his character, inside and out. It’s a mesmerizing performance, one that’s already generating Oscar buzz. That buzz will get even louder once the film is released wide into theaters just ahead of Thanksgiving.
Director Peter Farrelly (Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary, The Green Book) steers the story, showing the long, grueling grind that led to Stallone’s ultimate breakthrough and a movie that made Hollywood history. We see Stallone struggling to find his way as a fledgling actor, falling behind on his rent for a shabby room in New York City, even sleeping on the street. He’s so desperate for cash, he strips down for a cheesy “adult” skin flick.
Then he meets a girl (AnnaSophia Robb), falls in love and moves to Los Angeles to pursue his dream. Inspired by watching boxing on TV in a bar—with world heavyweight champ Muhammad Ali struggling in 1975 to defend his title from scrappy “underdog” contender Chuck Wepner—he writes a screenplay. And he’s thrilled to get a meeting with a couple of big-wig studio producers, Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff (P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell). And even more thrilled when he finds out they want to make his story into a movie.
But he’s crushed when he finds out they want another “name” actor to star in it. Someone bankable, someone hot, maybe someone like Ryan O’Neal.
That’s not at all what Stallone has in mind. He tells the producers he wrote the film with so much of himself, with his own heart and soul and life experiences poured into Rocky Balboa, he can’t imagine anyone else stepping into the role. “This story, this is me,” he tells them. “So I play Rocky.”
And of course, that’s exactly what happened. But Stallone, and his movie, had to jump through multiple hoops and hurdles to get there. Jay Duplass plays John Avildsen, the director who worked with him to get Rocky to the screen. There’s Matt Dillon as Stallone’s dad, and their conversations peel back the raw memories of a difficult, tumultuous and even abusive childhood.
The movie faithfully recreates many familiar scenes from the 1976 film—and what it took to shoot them—like Stallone running through the streets, and up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We see Rocky training, punching sides of frozen meat in a processing plant, working out “in the ring” moves with his costar, Carl Withers (Stephan James), and fighting the sniffles when he catches the flu from his female costar, Talia Shire (Kiko Seto).
But mostly we watch a young Sylvester Stallone “go the distance,” stand up for his dream against all odds, and emerge a Hollywood hero.
In a post-credits scene, there’s a clip from The Tonight Show shortly after Stallone’s underdog tale had become a sensation. Host Johnny Carson tells Stallone, his talk-show guest, that the story of how Rocky came to be would also make a terrific movie.
And now, half a century later, it has.
I Play Rockyopens in limited release Nov. 2, then wide in theaters Nov. 20.
Dakota Fanning anchors an unsteady romantic triangle in Alaskan relationship drama
The Sun Never Sets Starring Dakota Fanning, Jake Johnson & Cory Michael Smith Directed by Joe Swanberg Rated R
In theaters Friday, Sept. 4
“The heart wants what it wants,” wrote poet Emily Dickinson back in 1862, and it’s been echoed across time by pundits and popular culture. But what if the heart doesn’t quite know what it wants?
Dakota Fanning, who successfully progressed from little-girl childhood roles into more matured movie fare, faces a very grown-up dilemma in this indie drama about a messy romantic triangle. She plays Wendy, a young woman whose two-year relationship with Jack (Jake Johnson) has hit a rough patch; he wants them to take a break from each other. Wendy reluctantly agrees, and then unexpectedly runs into a former boyfriend, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith), rekindling an old flame.
Suddenly, she’s adrift in some choppy romantic waters, unmoored and unsure, bobbing between two guys who are increasingly jealous of each other. Maybe she just needs to shove off, in the boat we see that she wants to buy in the opening scene, and drop anchor elsewhere.
Director/writer/producer Joe Swanberg is a Hollywood indie filmmaker who helped establish the subgenre of “mumblecore” back in the early 2000s. Mumblecore movies were low-budget, dialogue-heavy relationship flicks, where characters talked a lot but didn’t “do” much.
That certainly fits here. There’s a lot of talk—about what Wendy, Jack and Chuck say they want, what they don’t want and what they want to do. But there’s minimal “action” to push the story along. Unless you count seeing Dakota Fanning in a hard hat, driving an excavator for Wendy’s job as a construction worker. Maybe that “hole” she’s digging represents the hole in her life, the absence of a stable foundation, a crater that just seems to keep getting bigger and deeper.
The title alludes to the story’s setting of Anchorage, Alaska, where the summer daylight, just south of the Arctic Circle, is prolonged and plentiful and night is just a slightly dimmer and much shorter version of day. It mirrors the movie’s three main characters, living in the dim twilight of relationships that are endless repeating cycles, neither day nor night but something, and somewhere, in-between.
Dakota Fanning and Cory Michael Smith
This isn’t a big blockbuster. It’s a quieter, more intimate film. There are no speeding cars, no fisticuffs, no superheroes or monsters, no explosions. It feels like we’re watching real people, with real lives, jobs, needs and routines. Jack is an elementary-school basketball coach, Chuck an airplane pilot who takes tourists on Alaskan sightseeing trips. It helps that Fanning’s costars aren’t superstar leading men. You may have seen Jake Johnson as Nick Miller, the bartender in TV’s New Girl, but that was nearly a decade ago; Cory Michael Smith played Chevy Chase in 2024’s dramatization of the opening night of Saturday Night Live, and the Riddler on the Fox series Gotham. Casting Leo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet, for instance, would have made Jack and Chuck much less “believable”—and would have cost a whole lot more.
But Fanning is the true crux of the story, giving a standout performance as a woman feeling the tick-tick-tick of her biological clock—especially when she’s hanging with her married friend Lindsay (former Disney star Debby Ryan), who’s positively glowing in the early stages of her pregnancy. As Wendy goes back and forth between her two romantic partners, harboring real feelings for them both, she faces a tough choice. Will she go with the divorced Jack, already a “family man” with two adorable young kids, who says he doesn’t want any more children? Or with the flirty, scruffily sexy “fly boy” Chuck, who, we find out, already burned Wendy once? Or maybe with someone else entirely?
“It’s complicated,” Wendy says at one point.
Yes, it is. Just as life—and matters of the heart—can often be. Because the heart wants what it wants.
And sometimes it just wants to sail away from it all, on a boat.
Is this unhinged road-trip “slob comedy” destined to become a cult-movie classic?
Idiots Starring Dave Franco, O’Shea Jackson Jr. & Mason Thames Directed by Macon Blair Rated R
In theaters Friday, Aug. 28
The movie genre of “slob comedy,” celebrating lazy, anti-social, disruptive or juvenile behavior, became a thing in the ‘70s in the wake of flicks like National Lampoon’s Animal House and Porky’s.
Idiots mines a similar comedic vein, with a pair of mismatched underachievers trying to make a good impression in their new job for a low-budget transportation company. Their first gig: Teaming up to drive a rich, troubled teen to a rehab treatment facility. Simple, right? But that simple assignment derails into a colossal comedic pileup of drugs, danger and situational insanity.
Mark (Dave Franco) and Davis (O’Shea Jackson) are the “transport professionals,” and Sheridan (Mason Thames) the passenger. Mark’s a doper, Davis holds on to his deep Presbyterian roots, and Sheridan’s a spoiled-rotten uber-rich trust-fund kid whose obnoxiously bad behavior has made him a social-media superstar.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, it all starts with a flat tire, and unspools from there. There’s projectile diarrhea, soda spiked with horse tranquilizers, and a blue-collar motel stripper (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka) and her mom (Lynn Wanlass), who turns out to be surprisingly handy brandishing a big blade. There’s a pint-size bounty hunter (Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage) with a big machine gun, a punk-rock rapper who calls himself Pricka Bush da Werewolf (Succession’s Nicholas Braun), and a close call with a hatchet. Bullets fly, blood is spattered, someone gets shot in the eye, someone else in the foot, and a parking lot full of guys in their undies try to chase down a pickup truck.
But as crazy as it might sound, it’s all in good fun—maybe not good clean fun, but fun regardless. Some parts are laugh-out-loud comical, others subversively whimsical, and much is unexpectedly uproarious. But all the yukkery has a soft center, with messages about not judging others too harshly, about getting along, about coming together for a shared cause in adverse circumstances, about doing the best you can do in any situation, and about how all the money in the world can’t make you into a more likable person—or keep you from being held hostage by a guy in a werewolf mask.
Director Macon Blair—whose other films include Gold (2016) with Matthew McConaughey, and Green Room (2015) about a rock band running into real trouble at a skinhead club—capably juggles all the wildness, the weirdness, the wide cast of supporting players and the constantly-on-the-move, road-trippery ruckus. It’s a manic movie on the go, and you never know what’s around its next curve.
Idiots won’t be for everybody. But if you’re looking for a smaller, scrappier indie flick as a palette cleanser for big-budget IMAX blockbusters, come along for the wild ride with this unhinged “slob” comedy. It may become a new cult classic. It’s an Odyssey in its own grungy way, and on its own freaky terms.
Why the sixth installment in the fright-flick franchise is running out of ghost gas and coasting on dental fumes
Insidious: Out of the Further Starring Ameila Eve, Brandon Perea, Maisie Richardson-Sellers & Lin Shaye Directed by Jocob Chase Rated PG-13
In theaters Friday, Aug. 21, 2026
The sixth in the horror/supernatural franchise that began back in 2010 is yet another venture into the spooky realm of ghosts and demons. And these spirits are restless, hungry to walk among us.
In the latest excursion, a young mom, Gemma (Amelia Eve, from Netflix’s The Haunting of Bly Manor), finds that she’s become a portal to “the Further,” a purgatory-like void just beyond the land of the living. And the ghouls want to use her as a conduit to get out of the Further and back into the real world.
Gemma (Amelia Eve) gets lost in a labyrinth made of couch cushions—literally.
If you haven’t kept up with the past Insidious films, you may be a little lost. This isn’t a movie for newbies. It’s made for fans of the franchise who dig the jolts, the grim intensity, the undead menagerie and the return trips into a spooky realm beyond our own.
But these ghouls seem like they’re running out of gas. Not only have we seen many of them before, but the premise itself is getting a little dusty and musty. Horror-flick scream queen Lin Shaye (A Nightmare on Elm Street, Maniacs, Ouija, The Grudge) keeps her track record—of appearing in every Insidious movie—intact, returning (from the dead!) once more as Elise, a helpful spiritual guide from beyond now trying to close the “red door,” the gateway, before the undead start pouring through like a horde of Black Friday shoppers into Wal-Mart.
Oh, there’s a new undead ringleader, Cyrus (Sam Spuell), who looks like a dead ringer for rocker Marilyn Manson. And there’s a new subplot about mothers and daughters, memories, childhood trauma, the terrors of aging, things you inherit—including some things you don’t necessarily want—and an unsettling reminder about how a trip to the dentist can a real nightmare.
This may be the first movie, in fact, to really drill down (sorry) into the terrors of dentistry. There are recurring appearances by a “tooth” plushy, Gemma works in a dental office, and she finds something highly unsettling in one particularly nasty mouth. Another undead character, who’s wearing a dental cheek-retractor device, crawls around as a torso, missing his lower body, smoldering below the waist. And most of the other undead are constantly grinning. It’s meant to be unsettling, but more often comes off as horror-cliché goofy. Maybe they’re just showing off their gleaming white choppers after a trip to the Further’s dental clinic. Look ma, no cavities!
The plot gets a bit confusing, especially for anyone who’s late to the Insidious game. So much so that a crucial plan unfolds using grapefruits to represent various characters, what they’re supposed to do and where they’re supposed to go. Yes, seriously. Or should I say, citrus-ly.
Young Island Austin (yes, that’s her name) does a commendable job in the role of Gemma’s daughter, menaced alongside her mother. Teen actress Charli Penton plays little Gemma in flashbacks. Brandon Perea is Gemma’s squeeze, a local cop who never learned about battling the undead in police academy. Maisie Richardson-Sellers is an entrancing tattoo artist.
But the scares aren’t very scarifying, the terror isn’t really terrifying, the goblins not so horrifying. Maybe, after 17 years and half a dozen movies, it’s finally time to say a fright-night farewell to this beyond-the-grave saga.
Thanks for the monstrous memories, and don’t forget to get your teeth cleaned.
