“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

“A stunning piece of filmmaking, using rigidly locked-down frames and careful placement of characters within them to indict an entire worldview. Manuel is working in a complete, visionary tradition, telling the story through color, costume and intensely controlled production design. Filipiñana is full of blistering social commentary, but it’s all in the images.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 09/11/2026

“One of those sequels that immediately undoes the emotional arcs and hard-won conclusion of the previous picture, rebooting the characters to factory settings so we can watch the same conflicts play themselves out a second time to diminished returns. Bullock’s daughters literally have their memories erased to make the plot possible.” – WBUR’s Arts & Culture, 09/10/2026

“As crass and morally repugnant as any movie made this year, with the possible exception of Melania. It’s more of the gross Green Book fantasy in which a streetwise white slob has to teach the uppity Black guy in a suit how the world actually works. Once again, Wahlberg is playing dress-up and telling us it wouldn’t have gone down like that if he’d been there.” – Spliced Personality Substack, 09/06/2026