Quietly Watching

  Jodie Foster has spoken French since she was a child. She spent twelve years at the Lycée Français in Los Angeles, and for decades she has dubbed her own performances into French for the release prints, so audiences there have been hearing her, in her own voice, all along. The one thing she had never done was carry a French film alone. Directors asked. She kept saying no, and she has been candid about the reason: she was afraid. A Private Life, Rebecca Zlotowski's sleek Netflix mystery, is the role she finally stopped being scared of, and she plays it start to finish in a language most Americans never knew she had. That fear turns out to be the right way into the movie, because A Private Life is about a woman who is fluent in something and still cannot make herself hear it. The Death That Will Not Sit Still Foster plays Lilian Steiner, a respected Paris psychoanalyst who learns that one of her patients, Paula, has died. Paula overdosed on medication Lilian had prescribed, and at ...

 Every Robin Hood movie you have seen ends long before this one begins. The arrows find their mark, the Merry Men scatter into the greenwood, the Sheriff gets his comeuppance, and the legend rides off intact. The Death of Robin Hood, the A24 drama starring Hugh Jackman that opened in theaters in June and has since arrived on digital, starts where all of those stop: with an old man, alone, waiting to die. Directed by Michael Sarnoski, who made Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One, it is less an adventure than a deathbed, and it means that as praise for itself. Set in 1247, decades after the exploits that made his name, Robin is a haunted recluse who gets pulled into one last raid to help Little John, played by Bill Skarsgård, take back his farm. The raid goes wrong, Robin is badly wounded, and a prioress takes him into her care. What happens next is not a rescue. It is a reckoning. The Story the Ballads Kept Quiet The title is not a spoiler; it is a promise, and it comes from a real place...

 Pickleball is the sport serious tennis players love to roll their eyes at: too easy, too social, played on a shrunken court with a wiffle ball and a paddle. The Dink, now the number one movie on Apple TV+, is the film version of that eye-roll and its answer at the same time. It is small, friendly, a little goofy, and perfectly happy being all three. Jake Johnson plays Dustin Boyd, a former junior tennis prodigy who peaked at seventeen and has coasted on the nickname "The Hammer" ever since, license plate included. A bad shoulder and a blunt doctor push him toward the one court he has spent his whole life mocking. What follows is a redemption arc you can see coming from the opening serve, and the movie is relaxed enough to admit it. That ease turns out to be the entire pitch. Even the title is a wink at it: a dink is pickleball's softest shot, the little drop that wins on touch instead of power, which is the exact opposite of a guy who built a whole identity around being ...

 Most true crime hurries toward the person who did it, angling for the interrogation room, the profile, the scene where a detective finally explains the mind behind the knife. The Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, the three-part Netflix series that landed on July 29, walks the other way, and that decision is the most interesting thing about it. The facts are grim and, by now, widely known. In November 2022, four University of Idaho students were stabbed to death in an off-campus house in the small town of Moscow, Idaho: Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, and Xana Kernodle and Ethan Chapin, both 20. Bryan Kohberger, a criminology graduate student who lived a short drive across the state line, was arrested weeks later. What the series does with that story is quieter and stranger than the coverage that surrounded it. A Case Solved Without an Answer In July 2025, Kohberger pleaded guilty to all four killings and accepted a life sentence, a deal that spared him the death penal...

  In June, Supergirl was a punchline. DC's new film, only the second in a rebooted universe, opened to brutal reviews and worse math, one of the loudest box office misfires of the year. Six weeks later, the same movie is the number one title people are renting at home. It did not get recut. Nothing about it changed except the room you watch it in, and that turns out to be everything. Directed by Craig Gillespie and starring Milly Alcock as Kara Zor-El, Supergirl was sold as a tentpole, a franchise cornerstone meant to prop up a shaky new DC Universe. That is the version audiences rejected in theaters. The version now climbing the rental charts is a much smaller, stranger movie than the marketing ever admitted. What Supergirl Actually Is Underneath the cape, this is a space western about grief. Kara spends much of the film drunk and adrift, bar-hopping on red-sun planets where she has no powers, trying to drink away the loss of her home and her people. She gets pulled into the orbit...

  Ordinary Angels opened quietly in early 2024, to modest business and politely mixed reviews, and then slipped off to streaming the way small faith-based dramas usually do. Two years later it sits in the Netflix top three, and plenty of people are meeting it for the first time. The strange part is that the movie itself is not really what pulled them in. The true story it tells is. Directed by Jon Gunn, the film stars Hilary Swank as Sharon Stevens, a hard-drinking Kentucky hairdresser, and Alan Ritchson, the mountainous star of Reacher, as a widowed father with a dying child. That casting is a curiosity on its own. But what actually happened in Louisville in the winter of 1994 is something else, and it is the reason this small movie refuses to disappear. What Actually Happened in Louisville In 1994, Ed Schmitt was a widower raising two young daughters, Michelle and Ashley, both born with a congenital liver disease. Three-year-old Michelle was running out of time on the transplant ...

  For most of its first hour, The Drama behaves. Zendaya and Robert Pattinson play Emma Harwood and Charlie Thompson, a couple a week away from their wedding, and the film hands you the movie the trailer sold: two of the most photographed actors alive, a gorgeous engagement, the low comic hum of a big day closing in. Then Emma tells Charlie the one thing she has never told anyone, and the floor tilts under both of them. The Drama arrives on HBO Max on July 31, and anyone hitting play for a glossy movie-star romance is in for a stranger evening than that. That is because the credits carry a name that should have been the warning. The film is written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli, the Norwegian filmmaker behind Sick of Myself and Dream Scenario, and yet it is the most Borgli premise he has ever filmed. He keeps making a single movie, over and over, about the distance between the self a person performs and the self they keep out of sight. No premise has ever handed him a better st...

  When Steven Spielberg made War of the Worlds in 2005, he said something revealing about it. For the first time in his life, he told Empire, he was making an alien picture with no love in it and no attempt at communication. It was his fourth story about visitors from elsewhere, and it was the bleak one, extraterrestrials as pure catastrophe in a jumpy post-9/11 world. Disclosure Day, his first alien film in the two decades since and now on digital after a 239 million dollar theatrical run, plays like the answer he needed to give himself. It is a movie made almost entirely out of love and the attempt at communication. The UFO Story That Started It The seed was real. Spielberg has said a 2017 New York Times report on the Pentagon's secret UFO program rekindled a belief he has carried since childhood, that we are not alone, and he spent two months in the summer of 2023 writing a sixty-page outline. "I always had a core belief that we are not alone in the universe," he has s...

  You know the image even if you have never set foot in Pompeii. A body curled on its side in the ash, knees drawn up, caught in the instant the mountain took it. For the better part of three centuries those plaster casts have taught the world one lesson about the city: that death arrived all at once, and nobody had the chance to run. Pompeii: Out of Time, the three-part documentary that puts Tom Hiddleston among the ruins and reached number one on Disney+ this month, exists to overturn that lesson. Its quiet claim is that a great many Pompeiians did have the chance, and took it. The Eruption Took Its Time The picture of instant death was always partly a trick of preservation. What froze those bodies was not the first hour of the eruption but a later one, and Vesuvius did its work across roughly a full day. The morning began with a towering column of ash and a rain of pumice that buried roofs and blocked roads but killed slowly, if at all. The lethal pyroclastic surges, the superhe...

  The first Mortal Kombat movie, back in 2021, made one famously strange choice: it never held the tournament. Two hours of gathering fighters and training them, and the actual Mortal Kombat got pushed to a sequel that took five years to show up. Mortal Kombat II, on HBO Max since July 24 after a 129 million dollar theatrical run, is that sequel, and it settles the debt in its opening stretch. It finally stages the tournament. Then it does something blunter than fans expected. It kills off the hero the first movie invented to carry it. The Tournament the First Movie Owed You The 2021 film spent its runtime assembling Earthrealm's champions and teasing a fight it never delivered, so the one job a sequel had was to hold the real thing. The tournament is what the name promises, the ritual the games are named for, and skipping it in a Mortal Kombat movie was a little like a heist film that ends before the vault. Mortal Kombat II delivers, staging it across three fronts at once: Raiden...

  Judith and Debbie have been best friends for twenty years. They travel together, they haunt antique shops, they belong to the same book club. Debbie believes Judith is a forensic accountant. Judith is actually a contract killer who has spent those same twenty years billing millions to a shadow agency for the people she makes vanish. Ride or Die, the eight-episode series that dropped all at once on Prime Video on July 15, rests on that single lie, and on the friendship the lie has been living inside all along. The reviews have been polite and a little tired. Variety called it a middling action dramedy, The Wrap filed it under standard buddy comedy, and almost everyone agreed the plot is overstuffed and the villains run thin. But almost everyone also agreed on the exception, and that is the part worth paying attention to. Whatever the show gets wrong, the two women at the center of it are the real thing. The Action Is the Disguise Ride or Die is shot like a spy thriller. Peyton Ree...