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Adapted by Aleshea Harris from her award-winning 2018 play, Is God Is (Amazon MGM, 5.15) is a stylized grindhouse revenge thriller about scarred twin sisters (Kara Young, Mallori Johnson) tracking down their abusive father (Sterling K. Brown). Greek tragedy meets a return to 1970s Blaxploitation. An unapologetic exploration of Black female rage and generational trauma. Did someone say “dark, stylish humor”? Okay, fine.

General HE rule: “If it’s Blumhouse, it blows.” But Blumhouse films do, I’m very sorry to say, tend to be profitable.

Michael Johnston‘s “Bear”: “I was…uhm, calling to see if I can cancel the wish.”

Voice of Obsession director/writer Curry Baker: “I’m sorry, but we don’t really do that.”

Read Owen Gleiberman’s 5.30 Variety essay — “The Shocking Success of Backrooms and Obsession Should Be a Memo to Hollywood: You Need What’s Outside the Box.”

If I’ve ever seen a feature-film trailer that screams “streaming, no theatrical!”, it’s Anthony Maras‘s Pressure (Studio Canal, 5.29), which is clearly a “dad recreates D-Day” movie. Kyle’s Smith Wall Street Journal review says it best, at least as far as I’m concerned since the mere idea of Dwight D. Eisenhower being played by a larducket strikes me as…uhm, offensive:

Smith: “In this clunky D-Day drama, the overly emotive Brendan Fraser isn’t like Ike.”

Smith’s last three words refer to a song in Irving Berlin‘s “Call Me Madam“, which opened on Broadway on 10.12.50.

I’m not necessarily in Spencer Pratt‘s corner, but I know a smart political ad when I see one. Pratt, a non-MAGA rightie, seems to me like a temperamental prankster and showboater.

These Spencer Pratt videos by @dsonoiki are better than 99.9% of political consultant ads. He does it again. pic.twitter.com/hemFACa8xZ

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 29, 2026

Posted on olympics.com on 5.26.26…biofemales only:

California Gov. candidate Tom Steyer just posted this video with trans athlete AB Hernandez, who will compete for a girls' state track & field title this weekend.

"I'm so proud of you for what you're doing," Steyer said. pic.twitter.com/iIq5VqX14J

— Jackson Thompson (@JackThompsonFOX) May 29, 2026

John Wilkes Booth is eight feet tall here, and therefore weighs over 300 pounds. Two guys in Lincoln’s Ford Theatre booth (which is way too large) are wearing 20th Century ties. Booth wasn’t a rootin’, tootin’ buckaroo armed with a pair of six-shooters — he shot Lincoln with a Derringer, which Slim Pickens described in One–Eyed Jacks as a “little popper.” Foam-at-the-mouth AI vandals are truly the new pornographers.

Right now there’s a Criterion 4K Bluray of Bob Fosse‘s Lenny (’74) out there, and I have to be honest — I’m not sure I want a copy of this thing to have and to hold.

Thirteen years ago (3.18.13) I posted the following:

Three excerpts from a criterion.com Lenny piece that Mark Harris posted on 5.26.26:

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I’m telling you that this latest John Carney film — easily his best since Once — indisputably works, and I mean in a naturally behaved, wholly believable, occasionally subtle, well-written and finely-calibrated way. It never feels slick or “theatrical” or tonally off-balance or over-cranked.

I went into yesterday afternoon’s AMC Lincoln Square screening with a “show me” attitude, and I was won over less than 20 minutes into Act One. Hell, earlier than that.

Carney is generally loved for his spirit-vibey, music-themed dramas (Once, Begin Again, Sing Street, Flora and Son); his films always leave audiences soothed or at least sated. But Carney is primarily a hard-working, highly skilled filmmaker par excellence — skilled at pacing, at getting his actors to deliver in a fashion that feels honest and true, at natural-sounding dialogue, at plot construction, at peeling off this and that layer of a story in just the right way.

Boiled down I believed each and every aspect of Power Ballad…every character shading, every modest revelation, every line and performance.

When a confection-type drama advances and unfurls in just the right way, as Power Ballad does, it settles you down while flipping on a relax-and-enjoy switch. I was waiting for something to go wrong or for a bit or a scene to feel somehow mishandled, but disappointment never arrived. And it ends not just happily, but in an emotionally satisfying, un-forced, non-sappy way.

Power Ballad is basically a two-hander — a story about the elusive butterfly of song-writing inspiration**, the every-present seductions of big-time money and fame, and what feelings of disappointment and desperation can do to frustrated or insecure musicians.

Plot-wise Power Ballad is about a kind of rivalry between performers who are 20 years apart but engulfed in a vaguely similar career dynamic — Paul Rudd‘s Rick Power, a 50ish American wedding-band performer, happily married and Emerald Isle-residing, whose rock-star career kinda started to happen in the ’90s but then ran out of gas, and Nick Jonas‘s Danny Wilson, a former boy-band star (as in the real-world Jonas Brothers of the aughts) who, though wealthy and hanging in there, is worried about his ability to succeed as a solo act in the big-time realm.

You’ve no doubt read that Power Ballad is about Danny and Rick jamming together after a lavish Irish wedding, and then Danny stealing Rick’s unproduced love song, “How To Write A Song (Without You)” — a tune that Rick wrote 13 or 14 years earlier but never recorded or even has a digital demo of.

Days later Danny adds a bridge and records the tune in exactly the right Richard Perry way, and a few months later it’s become a number one hit. Danny is suddenly recharged and back in the groove, but Rick, after randomly hearing the track in a shopping mall, is enraged and wants some kind of revenge or payback.

Danny’s conveyance of guilt and inner conflict is fascinating. He never quite lets it out in so many words, but when Rick finally confronts him in the third act — at a lavish, Los Angeles birthday party at his own hillside home — he defensively, half-assedly admits that he plagiarized the song, but at the same time emphasizes that it never would have become a hit unless he’d given it a power-pop makeover with a well-crafted bridge. Which he’s probably right about. (Jonathan Shields made a similar point about Fred Amiel‘s script of The Far-Away Mountain.)

I’d just re-watched Rudd’s performance in Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40, which was shot 14 years ago, and here he is again in more or less the same same spiritual and physical shape.

I hadn’t been paying close attention to the career of Jack Reynor, who played Florence Pugh‘s absentee boyfriend in Ari Aster‘s Midsommar but here he’s Danny’s L.A. manager…a manager who gradually comes to sense that his client is an ethically dicey fellow.

And what a coincidence that Marcia, Danny’s L.A. girlfriend, is played by Havana Rose Liu, who plays the female lead in Tuner, which I saw three or four hours before Power Ballad at the same Manhattan plex.

I really do believe that the critics who’ve pissed on this film have exposed themselves as…I don’t know, pinched or screwed up or emotionally malignant on some level. N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis. Los Angeles Times staffer Amy Nicholson, UPI’s Fred Topel, Fresh Fiction’s Courtney Howard.. These people have urine in their veins.

My approving view of Power Ballad is not, like, “an opinion, man”. I know when I’ve seen a film that’s been assembled with the right kind of charm, humanity, skill, confidence and assurance. This is not something to be debated. I know this.

** how a good song doesn’t necessarily become a hit unless it’s been recorded and produced in just the right way, and with just the right mood and dynamic.

An early trailer for Daniel Roher’s Tuner (Black Bear, 5.22) suggested it was some kind of socially complex two-hander about a pair of piano tuners (Leo Woodall as the apprentice, Dustin Hoffman as the old veteran).

Well, it’s not that. It’s all Woodall, for one thing — Hoffman’s role amounts to a bit more than a cameo but only that. It is, however, my idea of an above-average, character-driven crime thriller with a believable romantic relationship on the side.

Tuner is a solid B-plus — a pressurized crime thriller that starts out in a moderate-amiable vein but gradually becomes more and more of a blend of (a) Michael Mann’s Thief, (b) Karel Reisz’s The Gambler (in a moralistic sense —- Woodall’s protagonist isn’t a gambler) and (c) Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal.

Woodall is Niki, a gifted piano tuner (he has exceptional musical ears, knows all the notes and piano keys) as well as a grade-A safe-cracker (also due to exceptional hearing). He’s burdened, however, with a sensitive hearing condition (hyperacusis). He’s also a brilliant piano virtuoso whose super-sensitivity to strong sound prevents him from playing.

Niki soon feels compelled to work with a team of coarse Israeli thieves out of financial necessity (the aging Hoffman, his piano-tuning uncle, is deeply in debt after a heart attack), but he can’t deal with their crude, heavy-handed behavior and eventually runs afoul.

Niki also hooks up with a beautiful Asian girlfriend (Havana Rose Liu), a skillful concert pianist who composes her own stuff.

Pic becomes too brutally violent toward the end, and the ugliest, crudest and most animalistic character — Lior Yaz’s Yuri, the leader of the thieving Israeli brutes — isn’t punished or disiplined in any way for behaving viciously toward Niki. Audiences always want justice — one way or another the bad guy should always be slapped down.

I basically liked Tuner much more before the Israeli pigs muscled their way onto the narrative.

HE to Weintraub: You knew “almost nothing” before seeing it? You knew it would be a UFO-slash-alien movie. You knew that many in the cast would be wearing “Spielberg alien gaze face” in certain scenes. You knew that a young, watery-eyed British actor with jug ears (Josh O’Connor) would be playing a lead role. You knew that Emily Blunt’s weather-girl character would experience a bullshit on-air meltdown. You knew that Janusz “milky bleachy gray” Kaminski had shot it. You knew Spielberg and Universal didn’t want Disclosure Day playing Cannes, presumably for a reason. You knew lots of things so don’t give me that babe-in-the-woods routine.

HE to Wes Anderson, early this morning…

I quickly realized that the teaser poster for American Empirical’s Heidegger and Arendt was AI bullshit, but for a half-minute or so I was hugely impressed that you were apparently stepping outside the WesWorld realm by tackling an odd relationship story that has real political-cultural teeth…a real grabber of a story about two politically incorrect thinkers.

I was saying to myself “whoa!…Wes is going to make a film that’s actually about something substantial this time…no more Jacques Tati influences!…a film that the woke community will utterly despise, of course, but man, Wes has grown a serious pair of balls!…”

For less than a minute I was envisioning a real-deal romantic and philosophical bond between a pair of big-league 20th Century philosophers and outside-the-box minds. A brief love affair between a Nazi apologist philosopher in his mid to late 30s (Bill Murray would be roughly 40 years too old), and a younger Jewish intellectual who reported about and commented on Adolf Eichmann’s trial for The New Yorker, and allegedly coined the phrase “the banality of evil”. (The 55-year-old Winona Ryder Is 35 years too old as Hannah Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger began in 1925, when she was 19 or 20.)

The fantasy of you actually making this film evaporated in less than 40 or 45 seconds (I was drowsy, wasn’t sipping coffee), but I was hugely impressed before it dissolved. I really was.