I appear on “CTV News at 11:30” with anchor Andria Case to talk about the music bio “California Schemin’,” the Crave series “American Hostage” and Mikey Madison in “The Social Reckoning.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
I sit with NewsTalk 1010 host Jim Richards, sitting in for Deb Hutton on NewsTalk 1010 to talk about a recently uncovered song by John Lennon, a new son for Michael McDonald and I review “The Social Reckoning” and “Run terry Run.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I sit in on the CFRA Ottawa morning show with host Bill Carroll to talk about the new movies coming to theatres including the Facebook drama “The Social Reckoning” and the documentary “Run Terry Run.”
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” to talk about the number one movie ever and one of the lowest grossing films of the year. Then I review “The Social Reckoning,” now playing on theatres, and suggest some viral cocktails to enjoy with the movie!
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “The Social Reckoning,” a new legal thriller starring Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White now playing in theatres, a whistleblower leaks secret Facebook internal research. “The firehose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply is becoming jet powered.”
CAST: Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White, Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Billy Magnussen, Bill Burr, Jeremy Strong. Written, co-produced, and directed by Aaron Sorkin.
REVIEW: A companion piece to Sorkin’s 2010 film “The Social Network,” “The Social Reckoning” is based on the 2021 Facebook leak by whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White).
When Haugen, a data engineer for Facebook, uncovers documents proving the social platform’s executives knew its products were amplifying misinformation, hate and causing body-image issues in teens.
Instead of looking for remedies, however, Facebook’s parent company choses to ignore the research in favor of engagement and growth. “Almost no one outside of Facebook,” Haugen says, “knows what goes on inside Facebook.”
Putting it all on the line, she contacts Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz with data that implicates the company’s billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) who fights to suppress the story, now known as the Facebook Files. “I’m an investigative reporter,” says Horwitz, “and that guy and this company are playing an unprecedented role in our lives.”
Just in time for the US midterms comes a movie about how easily voters are manipulated. Unfortunately, the movie’s timely messaging of Facebook’s (now Meta) commodification of outrage, misinformation, cyberbullying and social isolation, feels like old news.
Had the film, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin with cool elegance, been released in 2021 when The Wall Street Journal unleashed the Facebook Files, it may have packed more of a punch. Today, the detrimental effects of social media are known and ingrained, so the blockbuster disclosures of 2021 aren’t dramatically compelling no matter how many times Sorkin cuts to intense footage of the storming of the United States Capitol.
As a result, watching “The Social Reckoning” in 2026 feels like the cinematic equivalent of doom scrolling, two hours of time spent learning nothing new.
Direction wise, the movie is straightforward and solid, reminiscent of prestige television from the 1990s, long before Facebook drained eyes away from the boob tube. It’s graceful, if a little dull, missing the paranoid vibe that made investigative movies like “All the President’s Men” and “The Parallax View” so compelling.
Of the headliners, Mikey Madison, Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong, it’s Madison who impresses.
White leaves the chef jacket of “The Bear” behind to hand in a restrained performance as the slow-and-steady Horwitz.
Strong plays Meta Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg as a po-faced robotic villain, the powerful embodiment of free-speech absolutism and profit. His line reading of, “This is a business, Charlie. You know why we don’t fact-check ads: because we don’t have to,” is chilling in its repercussions.
Madison impresses. The external performance of “Anora” has been turned inward as she makes the self-confessed nerdy whistleblower whose actions are driven by idealism, not malevolence, the film’s most persuasive character. “Connecting people, it’s a virtuous mission,” she says. “Something changed.”
Bill Burr also earns a nod as Charlie, an early Facebook investor who becomes one of the few who will speak truth to Zuckerberg’s power. “The firehose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply is becoming jet fuel,” he says.
These performances provide “The Social Reckoning’s” vigor even when the movie takes on the tone of a lecture on profit vs. social harm.
SYNOPSIS: In “Sinners,” a new Southern Gothic now playing in theatres, Michael B. Jordan stars in a dual role as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, World War I veterans who came of age as part of Al Capone’s gang in Chicago. With a bag of Capone cash, some illegal prohibition hootch and a hope for a new beginning, they buy an old sawmill in their Southern, Jim Crow-segregated hometown with the intention of opening a juke joint. When Remmick (Jack O’Connell) shows up at their door, they are exposed to an evil like they’ve never experienced before. “You keep dancing with the devil,” says a preacher, “one day he’s going to follow you home.”
CAST: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Miller, Li Jun Li, and Delroy Lindo. Directed by Ryan Coogler.
REVIEW: Rich in detail, ambitious in its themes and knee deep in blood, “Sinners” defies easy categorization. Director Ryan Coogler calls the movie mashup “genre fluid,” and even that clever descriptor doesn’t come close to capturing the width and breadth of the story.
What begins as a portrait of brotherly ambition in the Jim Crow South broadens to become a story of building community, the spiritual impact of music and racism filtered through a Southern Gothic lens. That it is also a kickass vampire flick, with overtones of African folklore, doesn’t feel like an overstep. Great speculative fiction is never only about the scares or the monsters; they are comments on the society in which they are set. Coogler’s vampires are bloodthirsty predators hell bent on consuming the cultural identity of Smoke, Stack and their Juke Joint customers.
The film’s climax, (SLIGHT SPOILER) a battle between humans and vampires isn’t simply a blood splattered way to bring the movie to a close. In context, it’s a fight for survival, both physical and cultural. The vampires are, of course, supernatural creatures, but the threat they represent feels all too human.
It’s heady stuff wrapped up in an entertaining package. Coogler regular Michael B. Jordan—their previous films include “Fruitvale Station,” “Creed,” “Black Panther” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”—impresses in the dual role of twin brothers. As Smoke he’s hardened, quick to temper. His take on Stack reveals a softer, more hopeful side. In totality it’s seamless work that doesn’t feel like a gimmick.
“Sinners” is ambitious, audacious and while it may rely a bit too heavily on flashbacks and feels like it goes a step or two too far to find its resolution, the boldness of its filmmaking delivers on both the pulpy and poignant aspects of the story.
“Alice, Darling,” a new psychological drama starring Anna Kendrick, now on VOD and in select theatres, is a portrait of a woman who rediscovers both her essence and courage in the aftermath of an emotionally abusive relationship.
Kendrick is Alice, a young woman under the control of her emotionally manipulative artist boyfriend Simon (Charlie Carrick). In the film’s opening scene, she is out for dinner with best pals Sophia (Wunmi Mosaku) and Tess (Kaniehtiio Horn), but is anxious, agitated, repeatedly checking her phone and bristling when her friends joke about the waiter having a thing for her.
When the three plan a remote weekend get-a-way to celebrate Tess’s birthday, Alice lies to Simon and spends the whole time on tenterhooks.
“You can’t tell your life partner that you’re going on a trip with our best friends?” asks Tess. “I can’t think of a bigger red flag than that.”
“I don’t know how any of this is any of your business,” replies Alice.
Tensions between the friends bubble over during the time away until Alice comes clean about the nature of her relationship with Simon.
“You never know what is going to make him angry,” she says. “I spend all this time trying to be good. Trying to be better. I’m never good enough.”
Just as it seems the clouds have lifted and smiles appear on their faces for the first time in days, Simon, who has been unable to reach Alice, shows up at their cabin. “You look different,” he says. “She looks like herself,” say her friends.
In a brisk ninety-minute running time, “Alice, Darling” conveys the warning signs of Simon’s gaslighting, and the effect it has on Alice. Simon’s brand of abuse is insidious. “He doesn’t hurt me or anything,” she says. But he does get into her head, using his narcissism like a shroud to cloak her own feelings and desires. Simon’s actual role in the film, in terms of screen time, is fairly brief, but his presence is felt throughout.
Carrick personifies the kind of malevolent, arrogant jerk who demands to know, “Why would you hurt me like this?” at the slightest of provocation, but it is Kendrick’s work that gives the movie its power. In a performance that mixes the introspective with the physical, she portrays Alice’s turmoil. From pulling her own hair out, to her hollow-eyed stare, Kendrick is an authentic and believable victim of Simon’s brainwashing.
Director Mary Nighy (daughter of recent Best Actor nominee Bill) relies on Kendrick to carry “Alice, Darling’s” weight. The film wraps things up a bit too tidily at the end, but the power of Alice’s story remains undiminished.
Haunted houses and Halloween go hand in hand. Fairground ghost houses, with their flickering lights and carnies dressed in store bought costumes, have been making hearts race and teens scream for decades but a new movie, “His House,” now streaming on Netflix, brings those cheesy thrills into a terrifyingly real world.
Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) are refugees from war torn South Sudan. Their journey to freedom is fraught. They’re crammed into busses and pick-up trucks, then loaded on to a leaky boat in rough waters. At sea they lose their young daughter who drowns when the boat flips.
They survive and land in an English detention centre, living there until temporary permission to stay in the U.K. is granted. While they wait on their claim of asylum, they’re moved into a dilapidated community housing. “You will be sent to a home of our choosing,” they are told. “You must reside at this address. You must not move from this address. This is your home now.”
The filthy fixer-upper (to put it mildly) has holes in the walls, garbage piled out front and an evil secret, possibly a spirit from their former country. “There is a great beast in this house,” says Rial. “It followed us here. It is filling this house with ghosts to torment my husband.”
What follows is a classic haunted house film with a deep subtext that breathes new life into the genre’s desiccated old lungs. Set against a background of cultural displacement, survivors’ guilt, and the psychological wounds of a life spent in trauma, “His House” is no “Amityville Horror.” Sure, strange things happen in the home. Voices come from behind the drywall, a spirit appears and dreams manifest themselves in the most horrific of ways, but the context is different.
British writer-director Remi Weekes knows his way around a supernatural thrill but he also weaves in real life experiences of racism, otherness and genocidal suffering into the story, forming a rich tapestry of chills—some from beyond our mortal coil, some not—that move the tired old haunted house horror story to new, deeply felt places. It may drag in spots but “His House” is a thrilling rethink of what the genre can be.
