The Deb

Posted on August 24, 2026 at 5:56 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Not rated
Profanity:	Extremely strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Smoking, teen drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Some scuffles, no one badly hurt
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 25, 2026

Rebel Wilson’s “Pitch Perfect” experience and love of classic Hollywood shows in her first film as director, “The Deb,” with vibrant, ebullient musical numbers featuring an outstanding cast of young performers. It was released in Wilson’s home country of Australia in 2024 but is just now coming to the US on demand.

The basic plot is a classic city mouse and country mouse with one teenage cousin expelled from a posh private school in Sydney and sent to live with her rancher uncle and cousin in a remote rural community. On the surface it is brash and raunchy — the opening musical number with girls in plaid skirt and navy blazer school uniforms is a song about much they suffer from rich girl problems, with the repeated phrase often abbreviated as “FML.” But it is also heartwarming and refreshingly shrewd about cancel culture and teenage identity struggles. While the characters are exaggerated for comic purposes, the film is sympathetic to everyone.

The city cousin is Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes) and we are introduced to her via her podcast, where she disingenuously pretends that showing herself in a tiny bikini is fighting the patriarchy. It is clear that spouting aphorisms about heteronormativity and claiming to be the feminist voice of her generation are just click-bait expressions of teenage angst. As the school principal, who is also her mother, tells her, “You are not Malala. You don’t want change; you want attention.”

After Maeve rips open her shirt to flash the entire school she is sent to a rural community called Dunburn. She is picked up at the bus stop by her cousin Taylah (Natalie Abbott), via riding mower. Maeve’s uncle is Rick (Shane Jacobson), a widower who loves his daughter but relies on her to do farm chores and considers ramen a suitable dinner. Rick is also Dunburn’s mayor, which mostly means applying to the government for relief after a three-year drought that threatens the town’s economic viability.

The town’s most beloved tradition is The Deb, a throwback coming-out (to society, not out of a closet) gala where the girls wear poofy white dresses and are presented via a giant plaster clamshell. Taylah is looking forward to it. Maeve sees it as a juicy topic for a disdainful podcast about an “antiquated heteronormative s***show from hell…uniquely preserved from rural isolation.”

Wilson plays Janette, the owner of a beauty salon called Curl Up N Dye and the mother of Annabelle (Stevie Jean), leader of the trio of Dunburn mean girls, who perform as the Pixie Cups. Janette is grooming Annabelle to be a pop star and Wilson plays her as over-the-top outrageous, including insulting and being cruelly dismissive to her other daughter, who “identifies as a koala.”

Thankfully, the traditional makeover scene is subverted, everyone grows up a little (stay past the beginning of the credits for some reassurance along those lines) and Maeve’s savvy about creating viral content is used for good. What works best in the film are those musical numbers, with a lot of variety from pop to country to hip-hip. The stand-out a duet ballad with Maeve and Taylah singing separately about the impact of a spotlight, brought back later in a reprise. The screenplay is credited to Hannah Reilly, who wrote the play it is based on, with “additional writing by Rebel Wilson,” and it is pretty easy to figure out what Wilson added, mostly for her own character. This makes for some unevenness of tone that makes less accessible for the likely audience most interested in a story of young women trying to establish their identity and direction in a world that has a lot of unrealistic expectations.

Parents should know that this movie has extremely crude humor and very strong language. A character is persuaded by a boy to let him take a picture of her with her shirt off, which he shows off to other boys. There is some teen kissing and a teen who comes out as gay to a parent. There is smoking and teen drinking, and some scuffles (no one badly hurt).

Family discussion: Why is Maeve so angry and impatient? What makes her change her mind about Dunburn? What would you say to Jeanette?

If you like this, try: “Grease,” “Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueburger,” the “Mean Girls” musical, and the “Pitch Perfect” series

Mutiny

Posted on August 20, 2026 at 6:52 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R
Profanity:	Some strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Social drinking
Violence/ Scariness:	Extended, very graphic and bloody perio and violence, many characters injured and killed, graphic and disturbing images
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 21, 2026

Cool action hero name: Check. Tightly coreographed hand to hand combat in tightly constrained space: Check. Pause in the action to have someone read aloud action hero’s heroic but tragic backstory: Check. Holding on for dear life hanging by one hand: Check. Killing many bad guys with sounds of spurting blood and crunching bone: Check. Beautiful and plucky woman: Check. Saving the biggest of the bad guys for a final extended fight scene with many improvised and unusual but handily placed weapons: Check.

In other words, a very generic Jason Statham movie (he also produced), with a sprinkling of plot to allow us to catch our breath between many many many scenes of people being shot, punched, stabbed, and killed by various other means. Does it make sense? No. I mean, the title is just one word and even that isn’t accurate. At least the director’s previous film, “Plane,” was, actually pretty much about a plane and the various fights on and around it. Special props to the entire sound department for outstanding gunfire, crunching bones, neck-twisting cracks, and blood spatter.

Does that matter? Not to people who just want to see the 58- year-old action star take on the bad guys, which, spoiler alert, he still does extremely well.

The main character might just as well be named Jason Statham, but in this movie he is called Cole Reed, bodyguard to Tibu (Ramon Tikaram), a Thai billionaire, CEO of a vast shipping company that began with just one small boat. While Cole waits for Tibu in the lobby of a skyscraper we see how closely he observes every sound and movement around him.

Tibu and his son Kameron (Chaneil Kular) have just agreed to sell the shipping company. It is a bittersweet moment, but as Tibu explains, the company was his dream. His son Kameron wants him to sell and Tibu wants his son to be able to pursue his own dreams.

Cole is treated like a valued confidante and Tibu calls him part of the family. So we know that’s all about to end. Indeed, when Cole is driving Tibu home after the party celebrating the sale, they are ambushed and Tibu is killed, despite Cole’s best efforts, which include killing all of the attackers. The police are involved in the murder so they cannot be trusted. They blame Cole and have the media put out an alert that he is armed and dangerous.

Cole is determined to find and punish everyone responsible for the attack on Tibu. He grabs an American passport from one of the men he killed, and since they are both lean, bald, white men, that enables him to get on the ship with the people behind the murder, including the ship’s Dutch captain (Roland Moller as Marko).

A last-minute substitute has been added to the crew (Annabelle Wallis). She and Cole independently discover that the ship is transporting people who have been captured to be turned over to enslavers. Most of the rest of the film is different set-ups for fight scenes, which are excellent. Adrian Lester shows some gravitas as a canny US Navy captain who receives the brief distress call. A final scene veers from retribution into vigilantism, which might leave a sour tone. But no one is there for gravitas, canniness, or the fine points of restorative justice; just seeing Statham take on lots of scary bad guys, which he still does very well.

Parents should know that this is a very violent film with many bloody and graphic fight scenes and many characters injured and killed. Characters use strong language.

Family discussion: What will Cole do next? What will Kameron do next?

If you like this, try: “The Transporter” and “Hobbs and Shaw”

Tony

Posted on August 12, 2026 at 4:48 pm

B +

Lowest Recommended Age:	High School
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for pervasive language, drug use, and sexual content/nudity.
Profanity:	Constant very strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol and drug use, casual and to excess
Violence/ Scariness:	Scuffles, fire
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 14, 2026

“Tony” begins with a quote from the late author and chef Anthony Bourdain describing himself at age 19: “a spoiled, miserable, narcissistic, self-destructive and thoughtless young lout, badly in need of a good ass-kicking.” Add in depressed, arrogant, angry, terrified, and desperately crushing on a girl he has no possible capacity to attract, and you’ve got the anti-hero in this, I have to say, delicious new film about a pivotal summer when Bourdain was 19.

Dominic Sessa (“The Holdovers“) gives one of the best performances of the year as Bourdain, still called “Tony.” As the film opens, he is explaining with great confidence but very little substance to an academic committee why he should receive a writing grant for the summer. He is so certain his proposal cannot lose that he tells everyone, including his family, that he has won it. But he has not. With no money, no plans, and no idea what to do, he decides to follow a girl who has shown pretty definitively that she is even less impressed with him than the committee. She mentioned she was spending the summer in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, so that is where he goes, with no job, no place to say, and very soon, no money.

I really appreciate the new style of biographical films that pick one pitival moment instead of trying to cram an entire lifetime into two hours, skipping from some trauma in childhood to meeting a series of significant people to being discovered to letting down people who care about him, etc. etc. Here, Sessa keeps us on the side of Bourdain, still being called by the diminutive “Tony,” behaving very badly, making many mistakes, hurting other people, but, in truly thrilling fashion, getting a glimpse of a future where he will become fully himself, fully “Anthony.”

Screenwriters Todd Bartels, Lou Howe, Matthew Miller, and dirctor Matt Johnson sensitively adapted from just a few dozen pages in Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, capturing the reality of the emotions and reactions instead of being overly didactic about the details. This means that three years are encapsulated into one summer and the characters other than Bourdin are composites adjusted for dramatic purposes. In the film and in reality Bourdin worked at a low-end Provincetown restaurant called The Flagship. In the movie, he gets drunk, insults the waitress, gets thrown out, and gets robbed. Then the owner (Anonthy Banderas as Chef) takes pity on him, and lets him sleep on his hammock — waking him up every morning by throwing cold ocean water on his head, and then gives him a dishwashing job in his kitchen. It is unlikely any of that really happened.

But that set-up is just a way of making palpable what is going on internally. Leo Woodall, fast becoming one of the most sought-after actors in Hollywood, gives another outstanding performance as Sal, the louche, amoral sous-chef who carves a chip out of the doorway every time he has sex with a woman so he can keep them as souvenirs of his conquests. Chef is someone the Bourdin we meet at the beginning of the film would have dismissed as simple and uninteresting. But like a cartoon character with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, Sal and Chef present two choices that Bourdin will continue to struggle with until his sad death at his own hand in 2018. It is a tribute to the screenwriters and the performers that the film hits the usual notes of a three-act coming of age story and yet every minute is fresh and specific. So it is fitting that the movie ends with one of Bourdain’s real-life friends from the restaurant world, Eric Ripert, playing an instructor at the Culinary Institute of America. We know what happens next. But the part of Bourdain’s story he dismissed in his book as “the less said about that part of my life, the better, believe me,” makes a very fine film.

Parents should know that this film has a lot of adult material and bad behavior including nudity and sexual references and situations, alcohol and drugs used casually and to excess, and very strong language.

Family discussion: How did Tony’s ideas about what he needed to be happy change over the course of the summer? Why? What food tastes like the future to you? If not food, what does feel like future to you?

If you like this, try: Bourdain’s books and television series and “Julie & Julia”

The Rivals of Amziah King

Posted on August 6, 2026 at 7:51 pm

A-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for language and some grisly images
Profanity:	Very strong and pervasive language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol, references to drugs and drug dealing
Violence/ Scariness:	Very graphic and disturbing images, very sad death, reference to suicide, murders
Diversity Issues:	Diverse characters
Date Released to Theaters:	August 7, 2026

“The Rivals of Amzaiah King” is four or five movies in one, but what could have been jarringly uneven is mostly held together, thanks to the exceptionally gifted writer/director Andrew Patterson, whose acclaimed “Vast of Night” introduced us to a first-time, low-budget filmmaker who already had a deep understanding of cinematic storytelling. This one is part family drama, part crime story, part comedy (that school scene!), part heist story, part revenge, part coming of age, part tragedy, part comedy, so, kind of like life, plus the heartbeat throughout is one of the best soundtracks of the year.

The title character, ideal casting for Matthew McConaughey, who gives one of his career-best performances as a beekeeper and musician in a rural Oklahoma community. We first see him with his friends, performing in the parking lot of a drive-in restaurant. The group includes his lawyer, Rippy (Rob Morgan), and Stephen (Benjamin Hardesty, real-life member of The Last Bison band and composer of many of the film’s songs). Amziah fits comfortably in his life, patient and gentle, as a beekeeper must be, with the gift of deep appreciation for each moment, especially if it involves bees or music. He has a wry sense of humor, sharp observations, and engages in non-stop picaresque commentary that does not hide an essential stillness and absence of judgment that the people around him find reassuring. In this community, anyone can play music or sing and no one minds much if someone has done time in prison. Amziah routinely hires ex-cons who cannot get a job anywhere else.

The local police interrupt the parking lot concert to ask for Amziah’s help in identifying the owner of some stolen vats of honey that have been recovered. He tells them the only possible way is if there is an identifying mark in the bottom of one of the barrels. And the only way to find if there is one is to empty it out, a complicated process because “there’s nothing heavier than honey” and the only way to empty it is to heat it and turn it over to let the honey slide out. They all go to his processing facility and Amziah calls a former employee named Remmick (Jake Horwitz, who also appeared in “Vast of Night”) to come help. Remmick brings along a friend named Komar (Tony Revolori), who knows nothing about processing honey but brags about knowing someone who has a Granada guitar.

It all seems idyllically cozy and we may think we’re in a sort of updated, profane version of Mayberry, until a shocking and very bloody industrial accident sends one of the group to the hospital, the first of several unexpected turns of plot and tone.

Amziah stops at a diner and discovers that his waitress, is Kateri (newcomer Angelina LookingGlass), a young women he and his late wife fostered for two years when she was young. He can see that she is guarded, but he quietly invites her to hear his group perform later in the week and he is delighted when she shows up. Soon she has moved back in with him and is working with him at the hives. He even coaxes her into singing a little bit.

So, now it’s shifted into a family drama about reunion and resilience. Briefly. Another twist is coming and the second half gets into the crime story, with a theft of bees and honey, an amateur detective tracking it down and uncovering some other crimes, a hacker named Oat (Cole Sprouse), a sad death, a police chase, some racial issues (Kateri is native American), a heist, murder, Kurt Russell, and more. Patterson somehow manages to hold it together in part thanks to goregous, roots-infused music throughout (produced by T. Bone Burnett), golden-infused cinematography from M.I. Littin-Menz (also from “The Vast of Night”), and editing from Patrick J. Smith that lends an impressionistic, folkloric tone, adding coherence to the otherwise-jarring shifts.

LookingGlass is a real find, with a luminousness and steadiness that lends eloquence to her expressive face. There are stand-out scenes, one almost slapstick when Amziah is called to rescue an elementary school from a swarm of bees, all of the music scenes, especially the impromptu jam session in Amziah’s small dining room, and an elaborate heist scene with a pause for some heartfelt confidences. A few of the twists are too jarring, and twice-explained analogy of the bee society is a rare instance of Patterson explaining too much, contrary to his usual respect for the audience in leaving just a bit more unsaid than we get in the average film and letting us fill in the rest from our own imagination and experience.

This movie is itself an experience, immersive, moving, shocking, scary, and the kind of characters you will miss when they are gone.

One Night Only

Posted on August 6, 2026 at 12:38 pm

B-

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for sexual material, language and brief nudity
Profanity:	Very strong and crude language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Alcohol and drug references
Violence/ Scariness:	Comic peril, trips to the ER, no one badly injured
Diversity Issues:	None
Date Released to Theaters:	August 7, 2026

A ridicuously silly premise manages to stay out of the way and let the glossy rom-com take over. Extremely attractive people with great chemistry, some genuinely funny situations and a touch of wit in the dialogue, a bunch of top actors in small parts, and some surprisingly sharp satire around the edges (watch for the posters and ads) make this more fun that you might expect. It helps that the movie itself does not take the premise too seriously.

According to the opening text, three years ago, Congress passed a law criminalizing sex between unmarried people except for just 12 hours on one day a year, non-procreative sex only. It’s known as the Mandate. How is this monitored and enforced? Red biomarkers on the wrists of unmarried people turn green only for the one permissible 12 hour period. No reason to think about this too hard except that people get to choose the symbol, like a tattoo, a tattle-tale biomarker that reports their activities to the authorities. Why this annual exception? Political compromise. In present day, it is just hours before the markers turn green and almost all of the young singles are extremely excited and focused, dressing to impress and, for those not in relationships, trying to find someone as quickly as possible. Condoms are sold out all across the city, a scarce few left are going for very high surge prices. Lubricant is being handed out on the street.

And so we meet the couple we will be rooting for and through many obstacles and wrong turns they will make on the way there. Owen (Callum Turner, holding his own as a romantic lead) owns a small pizza parlor and is looking forward to having sex for the third time with his live-in girlfriend (Maya Hawke). But she tells him she is planning to have sex with their neighbor instead. Allie (Monica Barbaro) is still hurting from the guy who had sex with her and then ghosted her the year before. She agrees to go to a bar with her friend, but the friend immediately abandons her to go off and have sex with someone she met in the line for the bathroom.

Allie and Owen keep running into each other as they keep trying to have sex with people that never happens for a variety of reasons, ranging from slapsticky to more slapsticky. You’ll have time to watch for some details on ads and signs that are funnier than anything in the story. But the travails of the two give them time to get to know one another and time for us to want to see them together. Barbaro (Joan Baez in “A Complete Unknown”) shows an engaging warmth and a gift for comic timing. And some of the people they meet along the way are so game that they keep things going. The excellent supporting cast in even the smallest parts includes Mike Birbiglia, “SNL’s” Ben Marshall, Molly Ringwald(!) as Owen’s mother and LeVar Burton(!!) as her boyfriend, plus Ziwe, Este Haim (who provided the very fine music), Julia Fox, and King Princess.

Hey, it’s difficult these days to find a way to keep romantic couple we want to be together apart for the length of a movie, and this is no more artificial than, say, having one of them be a vampire. The movie has one wise choice — it doesn’t waste much time on the premise. And it has one advantage — some recent political developments may make that premise less outlandish than we thought. A lot of stuff we thought was impossible now seems more like…improbable. That considered, with some funny moments and an unexpectedly sweet conclusion, it’s very watchable.

Parents should know that this is a movie about sex and it is filled with sexual references and situations and brief nudity. Characters use strong and crude language and drink alcohol, there are references to drugs and comic mayhem that includes injuries and some visits to the ER.

Family discussion: What kinds of laws have governments made to put restrictions on sex? What rules should there be? Did Owen and Allie make the right choice as the exception hours were coming to an end?

If you like this, try: “The Broken Hearts Gallery”