The Content Moderation TWIRecap was the first of what I intend to be a broader shift towards slightly more thematic recaps. This one is just new releases that are currently in theaters!

(I’ve also started writing a longer review of Resident Evil which I will hopefully finish before something else cannibalizes my interest. I really liked it!)

Primetime (Lance Oppenheim, 2026)
Lolwat.

The thing that ties 75% of the things discussed here today is that they’re weird. And Primetime might be the weirdest one of them all.

It’s not entirely surprising that a documentary filmmaker would take on a subject like this for his narrative feature debut: the suicide of Dallas-Fortworth Assistant DA Bill Conradt, triggered by Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator. It is an unflinching look at the apparatus that was/is reality television and a scathing indictment of the kind of people who want to be part of that world.

It also, maybe, argues that everyone featured on the show was a literal demon. (Or at least that Chris Hansen saw them that way.)

The act of observation inherently changes the thing that is being observed. This is as true in quantum mechanics as it is in human behavior. And the death of Conradt was an inevitable consequence of To Catch a Predator’s specific kind of observation, particularly as they pushed harder and harder for higher and higher ratings. They needed to beat Lost in that primetime slot, and they didn’t really care who got hurt or how in the process as long as they could get it on tape.

It’s a bit like Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, and Robert Pattinson’s Chris Hansen is similarly slimy. Between The Drama, The Odyssey, Primetime, and apparently still Dune Part 3 to come, Pattinson’s just having a bonkers year, and I genuinely think this may be his best performance to date. He absolutely embodies Hansen’s on-camera persona but that is just a small piece of this character who is trying and rarely succeeding to keep all the pieces of his life and his mind together.

More of Oppenheim’s work will be in theaters soon, since he co-directed the incomprehensibly strange looking Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, and I’m really curious to see where his work goes from here. If he feels like he said what he needed to say about the kind of people who document people and wants to go back to just doing that, that’s totally fine.

But I’d be stoked as heck for him to make make more bizzaro narrative features as well.

Hope (Na Hong-jin, 2026)
I wonder if the people marketing Na Hong-jin’s Hope were uncomfortable that their latest film shares a localized title with a film that is broadly regarded as one of South Korea’s best, Lee Joon-ik’s 2013 drama about the sexual assault of a young girl. There's nothing they could have done about it — this movie is actually named “Hope” while the other more directly translates to “Wish” — but it is something I couldn't stop thinking about.

Even while I was watching the movie! Not because the two had anything in common (they do not (mostly)) but because Hope (2026) gave me a lot of downtime/desire to think about literally anything else.

I’ll admit to not being the biggest Na Hong-jin booster, but The Chaser is an utterly brutal thriller I still point to when trying to explain that makes Korean cinema unique, The Yellow Sea is a less memorable but very solid action thriller in its own right… and The Wailing? Well that movie is just so stuffed with various horrors that it's genuinely shocking it doesn't burst.

But Na Hong-jin learned the wrong lesson from that, stuffing Hope even fuller, but this time it can’t contain the ideas, and it bursts hard.

It starts well: you’d hope the most expensive Korean movie ever made would look expensive and oftentimes it does. Like, those wrecked-town sets are amazing, and real tension develops as we wait to see the monster ravaging the folks… except when that tension is absolutely deflated by the film’s true focus: comedy. I wish I’d known going in that Hope is a deeply unserious comedy action sci-fi movie; I definitely would have enjoyed my time a lot more, because I wouldn’t have needed to spend the whole thing recalibrating.

Which I did: it was 156 minutes of me trying to get a handle on it. First, it was the overlong jokes that threw me, and then it was genuinely the worst CGI in a decade. The models look like something from a PS3 game. The animation looks even worse than that. And it uses dumb game logic too: shoot the monster running at you and it falls over and then gets up and starts running at you again? I can’t even count how many times I’ve played that stupid setpiece.

This is a case of a violently mishandled budget. Those amazing sets meant that the aliens inhabiting the sets ripped me straight out from the experience and never let me back into it. It’s truly shocking for a movie I saw in a theater — a Dolby Cinema theater(!) — to have VFX like that.

It’s such a shame, because despite everything some interesting ideas flow out of the husk e.g. the ones about the societal damage that is caused by fearing The Other… but this movie cannot contain that idea alongside everything else.

Ultimately, I think there’s a decent 2-hour movie in here and a mostly great 90-minute one… but even so neither would be able to survive maybe the stupidest cut-to-black in the history of stupid cuts-to-black.

Just baffling. And frankly depressing.

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Bassam Tariq, 2026)
The next two movies on this list I knew basically nothing about. I only found out Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother was about a hitman when I read the first 10 words of the AMC description while buying my ticket.

And I’m glad I knew it was about a hitman and equally glad I didn’t know anything else, because this movie is pretty bizarre. When it opened with Mahershala Ali getting to live out the sword-wielding fantasies Marvel denied him (and us?) by canceling that Blade reboot, I thought that this might be like a Muslim John Wick thing? When he finds out that his wife has died and then tries to leave and is brought back in by an older man and his annoying nephew, I was really thinking “Hey this feels like the first John Wick” but it’s… not. There are a handful of very fun action sequences and they escalate in terms of scale… but the gaps in between each fight is long enough that it doesn’t really feel like a natural progression between those scenes.

Instead, the film is much more focused on the dramedy of life as a Muslim now-single-father trying to get breast milk for his baby with one extremely devout son and another furry-appreciating daughter.

And it speaks to Ali’s range that he is actually able to sell every tone that writer/director Bassam Tariq throws at him. It would be really easy to feel unmoored as it cycles between grounded and deranged, but Ali keeps you locked in from start to finish.

And I also appreciate that the movie is unabashed in its, uh, Muslim-ness. We see a lot of Christian protagonists grappling with faith and their religious communities, but not so much Muslims (and this film’s depiction of a Christian cult is about as respectful as your average Christian cult’s film’s depiction of Islam).

All in all: real good time.

The Weight (Padraic McKinley, 2026)
As little as I knew about YMYMYM, I knew even less about The Weight. Ethan Hawke movie that people on Letterboxd seem to like that’s playing at a convenient time? That’s what I got AMC A-List for, and this is a perfect movie for that. Set in the 1930s, Hawke plays an angry father whose daughter is put into a home when he’s thrown into prison for punching a cop… and in order to get released in time to not see his daughter put up for adoption he’s gotta do a job for labor-camp operator Russell Crowe, carrying some weight a ways with some other folks who also have to carry weight.

And, ya know, it’s really good! There’s really not much more to say about it in this kinda blurb-y context other than that if Train Dreams had been more like The Weight, it would have been way higher up on my Oscars Best Picture ranking. We get the beauty of natural forests that that movie reveled in, but we also get, like, action and shit. It’s cool.

It’s also Ethan Hawke’s worst-performing film in 35 years, which means there’s a 100% chance you didn’t see it, but you absolutely should. By the time this newsletter comes out, it’s probably close to disappeared outside the minds of those who enjoyed it… but I think it’s equally possible that it’ll surge in 5-10 years as, like, an unseen gem in the Hawke/Crowe catalog. And you should see it now so that you can be cool then saying “Oh yeah I saw that when it came out.”

A person of taste, you’ll be.