- Jason Voorhees Gets Stuck in the Mud of Atrocious “Crystal Lake” (October 13, 2026)
It’s hard to say whether the tumultuous production is to blame, but something went very wrong as seemingly talented people made Peacock’s “Crystal Lake,” a disastrous reboot in almost every way. The director of the wildly influential original film, Sean S. Cunningham, had been talking about bringing the franchise to TV for over 20 years, but it really came back to life in 2022 when A24 and the incredible Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal”) announced production on a new series.
The excitement in the horror world was palpable. Jason Voorhees, through the lens of the man who redefined Hannibal Lecter, with one of the craziest things ever to appear on network TV? It couldn’t get here fast enough. And then the strike brought production crashing down in 2023. When it ended, Fuller and even the once-also-involved Kevin Williamson (“Scream”) were gone. Did their departure make this a disaster, or did they leave because it had already become one?
Brad Caleb Kane, a writer on “Tokyo Vice” and “IT: Welcome to Derry,” took over his first Creator credit, and the plot of “Crystal Lake” jumped to the early ‘70s, announcing that Jason wouldn’t even be the lead: That would be Pamela Voorhees, the true villain of the first film. How Pamela went crazy enough after the death of her son to murder a bunch of camp counselors sounds like a promising set-up, but to say that “Crystal Lake” is barely that show would be an understatement. It’s never long enough, jumping around in tone and character motivation so wildly that it resembles that old writing class or theater game where one person keeps the story going after someone else starts it.
As a season, it’s one of the most muddled and inconsistent outings in a long time, constantly hampered by a lack of direction and motivation until a final sequence of episodes turns it into something else entirely, yet again. Characters disappear, subplots shift meaning, and it all eventually rewrites the canon of Jason’s origin story in a way that’s about as ridiculous as “Jason X.”
CRYSTAL LAKE — Pictured: William Catlett as Levon — (Photo by: Jocelyn Prescod/PEACOCK)
It starts with familiar, promising beats. Linda Cardellini, so good on “DTF St. Louis” that she just won an Emmy, plays Pamela Voorhees, a cook at Camp Crystal Lake in the early ‘70s. She’s protective of her deformed son Jason (Callum Vinson), who is mocked and bullied by the other kids at camp. In one of the show’s early interesting choices, Jason dies in the first episode, left to drown by counselors who weren’t doing their job. But instead of leaning into the guilt that would turn Pamela into a movie icon, Kane and company start getting weird before the end of the first episode, when a couple of tough guys from out of town show up looking for Pam.
It turns out that Pam and Jason were on the run from someone, hiding out in Crystal Lake, and if I gave you a hundred guesses, I don’t think you’d guess how this subplot entirely reshapes the legacy of Jason and Pamela in a way that’s truly antithetical to the entire allure of the “Friday the 13th” series. We don’t need conspiracies; we need an unkillable monster in the woods.
“Crystal Lake” also makes the mistake of trying to be more than just a prequel or homage to the first film, perhaps thinking that a show in this series can’t lose sight of Jason himself. Without spoiling, the show picks up again a year after Jason’s drowning, but they never found the boy’s body, and there are signs that he may still be alive. And maybe bigger? And homicidal? Again, the new origin story tries to explain some of this, but it just makes for a show that often feels downright incoherent through its midsection, unsure of who its heroes and villains should be.
For example, no one sat down and decided who Pamela truly is in this version of this universe. Without spoiling, she becomes the Pam from the first movie for a bit, but then the show almost forgets her. She also becomes the mother of a potentially new troubled child, but the show discards that too for an ending that clearly feels like the product of rewrites, though it does include a fun, villainous performance from Hamish Linklater. The “Widow’s Bay” nominee is one of the few performance spotlights.
Cardellini gets lost in a constantly rewritten character while poor William Catlett (so good in “Color Book”) gets the thankless role as town sheriff, a love interest for Pamela but more of a plot device to move things from one death to the next. Shows like “Widow’s Bay” and “Below” have reminded us of the need to fill out programs like this with interesting ensembles, but the creators of “Crystal Lake” fundamentally fail to do so, spending so much time with counselors and even a group of local hippies/victims that have about as much personality as the hapless souls in “Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.”
CRYSTAL LAKE — Pictured: Linda Cardellini as Pam Voorhees — (Photo by: Peacock)
If you’re coming to “Crystal Lake” for the bloody stuff, this camp kitchen serves up a bunch of it. The showrunners clearly prioritized practical effects in what horror nuts used to call “Quality Kills,” and they give viewers a bit of it almost every episode. Faces are sliced off, body parts are shed, and the red stuff flows. At least “Crystal Lake” comes to life a bit during its intense-violence scenes, even if many of them lack any emotional heft or permanence.
One could easily argue that no death in the “Friday the 13th” legacy has ever had true emotional heft or permanence, and that “Crystal Lake”’s disposability is a feature, not a bug, but the show needed to be more escapist fun to pull that off. It’s not funny or inventive enough to be a true slasher, partly because a season of hour-long episodes demands something deeper than a 90-minute gorefest. All that being said, “Crystal Lake” finally gets someplace tonally consistent in its final run; even if it gets there thanks to some silly plotting (and aesthetic/directorial choices in the penultimate episode that literally had me shaking my head, but I won’t spoil here), the finale does produce some captivating showdowns.
That said, I was struck by how little the six episodes between the premiere and the finale actually mattered. You could literally watch the first and last episodes and miss little of the story. Again, perhaps the creators of “Crystal Lake” thought they needed to intentionally keep Jason Voorhees in the B-movie muck, but then they needed to lean into the POV murders and unforgettable soundtrack instead of even pretending to profile grief, culture clashes, and government conspiracies. The result is a show that’s never serious enough and never fun enough. Jason Voorhees deserved better.
Whole season screened for review. It premieres on October 15, 2026.
- There is Always a Different Story to Discover: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Curator Ryan Linkof (October 13, 2026)
The new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is a dazzling collection of art that tells stories, featuring iconic images like Norman Rockwell’s painting of a runaway boy sharing a soda with a sympathetic cop at a diner. It hangs next to an updated display featuring Anthony Freda’s modern reimagining of the scene: a young Black boy and a cop in riot gear in the same setting. Seven percent of the collection is “Star Wars”-related, with some original miniatures and life-sized dioramas featuring Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, and R2-D2.
There are gorgeous rooms filled with paintings by illustrators like N.C. Wyeth, Rockwell, Frank Frazetta, and Maxfield Parrish, and rooms with art arranged by subject, from sports to work to children to romance. Also on display: Banksy’s girl with a balloon, the Adrian costume for the Cowardly Lion from “The Wizard of Oz”, and comic and cartoon art from Charles Schulz to Jack Kirby, Alex Raymond, MAD Magazine, and Winsor McCay. A second-floor exhibit explains how narrative art—art that tells stories—goes back to the very first art: cave paintings from 5000 BC. The building itself is a marvel by architect Ma Yansong, who said that while some people think it looks like a spaceship, he saw it more as a cloud.
At the event we attended, founders George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, spoke movingly about their passion for paying tribute to artists often overlooked or marginalized as “representational” or “commercial.” Lucas said, “People ask me if this is fine art. I tell them this is finer art.”
I got a special kick out of the two movie theaters, named for similarly unsung figures from the earliest days of filmmaking. One is named for Robert Flaherty, who made the first feature-length documentary, “Nanook of the North.” The other is named for Slavko Vorkapich, a key figure in developing cinematic language, like calendar pages falling off to show the passage of time.
In an interview with RogerEbert.com, Lucas Museum curator Ryan Linkof discussed hihlights from the collection, from Frida Kahlo to dogs playing poker.
Many people would consider this a dream job. How did you get here?
I joined the project in July 2018, shortly after construction started in Expo Park. I have been in Los Angeles for over twenty years, initially to attend USC for graduate school, and I have worked as a curator at Los Angeles museums since 2011. In my previous roles, I developed exhibitions on film, photography, and popular culture, so when this opportunity arose to work for a museum that combined those elements, I jumped at the chance to join the team in its early stages.
What in your background has been unexpectedly useful in pulling all of this together?
My academic and curatorial experience is rooted in exploring the intersection of art, popular culture, and film, so helping shape a museum that treats visual storytelling so expansively builds on that experience. My work at LACMA and the Academy Museum taught me how to think across different kinds of collections—not just paintings or objects, but film, design, popular culture, and the stories they tell. That has been especially useful here because the museum is not organized around one medium. It focuses on how images tell stories, whether they appear in paintings, comics, murals, photographs, or film.
What is “narrative art?” How has the museum’s emphasis on storytelling through images been reflected in the way the collection is displayed and explained?
Narrative art illustrates stories. While this may sound like a new term, it’s actually one of the oldest forms of art—humans have always used images to tell stories. An exhibition on our ground floor explores this deeper history, tracing 30,000 years of image-making from prehistoric cave painting through Renaissance frescoes and beyond. The remaining galleries highlight our unique collections, which are rich in illustration, including art made for book covers, comic books, children’s literature, news and editorial photography, and cinema.
These are the kinds of visual culture we consume every day, and they therefore help to shape how we understand the world. In the galleries, we wanted to reflect that by showing how certain kinds of stories move across time and media, from historic works to comics, illustration, film, and popular culture. The display encourages visitors to make their own connections: notice recurring themes, recognize familiar visual language, and see how artists keep returning to the same stories, told through different means.
Is there an artifact you think viewers will be especially excited about?
I think visitors will be especially excited to see the Frida Kahlo work on display. It is the kind of object people may already come in curious about, but seeing it in this larger narrative context gives it a different kind of resonance. Other pieces throughout the museum connect to popular culture in an immediate way, so visitors may have the wonderful experience of recognizing something they love.
One piece that has received a significant response since we opened is A Pat Hand by Cassius Coolidge, a 1894 painting created as a whiskey advertisement that launched the “Dogs Playing Poker” series, which became a ubiquitous fixture of American popular culture in the 20th century.
What items have been the biggest challenge to preserve and present to prevent deterioration?
Some of the biggest preservation challenges are paper works, especially comics, posters, and other printed materials not always made with long-term preservation in mind. They can be extremely sensitive to light, humidity, and handling, so we have to be very thoughtful about how long they are on view and how we protect them. Interestingly, these are often the objects that feel most familiar to visitors: things that may have once been held, read, or collected casually, but require very careful stewardship in a museum context.
There have been many innovations and changes of perspective in the way museum collections are displayed over the past 20 years. What do you think is most useful on wall cards? Who designed it? Its significance in the story? Materials used?
I think the best wall text gives visitors a foothold without getting in the way of their own experience. Our object labels are intentionally concise—identifying who made it, when it was made, and what it is made of—providing essential information without telling people how they are supposed to feel about it. The museum founders wanted to create that kind of unmediated encounter with works of art.
At the same time, the curatorial team has spent years researching this collection and working with our digital team; we created a digital guide that includes gallery-level descriptions and detailed information about nearly every object on display, often including original source materials and documentary content about artists. We feel this balance gives people the option to learn more, while still letting visitors form their own subjective relationship to the works of art as the primary experience.
Are there any parts of the collection that are interactive or participatory? Anything visitors can touch or sit in or be photographed with?
I think visitors will naturally want to photograph parts of the experience, especially the Star Wars material in the Cinema Gallery, because those works are so tied to people’s memories and imaginations. The broader idea is that participation doesn’t just mean pressing a button or touching an object. It can also mean seeing yourself in a story, bringing your own associations to an image, or moving through the galleries in a way that feels personal and self-directed.
What were George and Mellody’s priorities for the building, its style, its symbolism, and the display spaces?
George and Mellody wanted the building to make a statement, while also feeling open and welcoming. The building, the park setting, and the galleries all work together to invite people in. The priority was to create a place where visitors from many backgrounds could feel comfortable, curious, and inspired, while also helping people connect with the art.
What kinds of events will the museum host? Classes? Lectures? Screenings?
The museum will be a place for people to return to, not just a place they visit once. While we aren’t ready to announce every detail yet, we’re developing the programming around the same ideas that shape the collection: storytelling, access, and connection. The goal is to make the museum feel active and dynamic, a place where there is always another story to discover.
What kinds of materials do you have available for scholars? What is in the archive?
We have many resources for scholars and visitors who are interested in learning more about the collections and artists on view. Our film program includes documentaries about narrative art and artists, including some of the key artists in the exhibitions. In addition to holding copies of the museum’s two-volume collections book—produced with Taschen—the library has extensive holdings related to our collections as well as the broader fields of art history, anthropology, and storytelling.
We also have special collections materials related to different aspects of our collections. The digital guide is also a helpful resource for people looking to dig deeper into our holdings.
You must have a favorite item or two in the collection. What are the ones that are most meaningful to you? What about in the illustration collection?
I have a fondness for the fantasy painters, especially Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and Julie Bell. I grew up with that material and many of the characters they depicted: Conan the Barbarian, Vampirella, John Carter of Mars. Their work is incredibly skillful and is the kind of painting that is almost never taken seriously by art historians or art museums. It is art that you will really only see at the Lucas Museum.
Is there a can’t miss dish on the restaurant menu? Something special in the gift shop?
The menu at the restaurant is truly exceptional. It offers elevated American classics, so it is refined but also deeply satisfying. I am a fan of the Chinese Chicken Salad and the Pigs in a Blanket. The unique merchandise in our store is a major reason to come to the museum! The letterman’s jacket is an instant icon and the dishware with works from the collection is a personal favorite. People can also buy a copy of the collection book, created in partnership with Taschen.
How can people outside LA stay connected to the museum?
People outside Los Angeles can stay connected through the museum’s digital channels, including social media and email updates where we share information about our collection, exhibitions, and programs. We want people everywhere to feel invited into the conversation and to keep discovering the artists, objects, and stories that make the museum unique.
- “Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse” Whips Landmark Franchise Back into Shape (October 13, 2026)
Here’s what fans of the legendary “Castlevania” series want to know: “Belmont’s Curse” is as good as you hoped, maybe even better. It is a rollicking throwback to the side-scrollers that were so formative they helped launch a genre—the term “Metroidvania” owes half its portmanteau to this series—while still feeling clearly made by modern, brilliant developers.
It seems like we get a couple of great Metroidvanias every year lately, with series like “Dead Cells” and “Hollow Knight” taking the gaming world by storm, and “Belmont’s Curse” is the best, at least so far, for 2026: A gripping reboot that remembers what made this franchise an influential success in the first place while never feeling like pure homage. It’s fun, challenging, and addictive. Just like the “Castlevania” games you remember.
“Castlevania” turned forty last month, but its most definitive game arguably didn’t arrive until 1997’s “Symphony of the Night,” a masterpiece that shaped player expectations for a Metroidvania with its puzzles, nonlinear level design, hidden secrets, and RPG elements. You can see the DNA of “Symphony,” one of my favorite games of all time, in “Belmont’s Curse,” a game set chronologically between 2005’s “Castlevania: Curse of Darkness” and 1989’s “Castlevania: The Adventure.”
“Belmont’s Curse” opens with Rose Belmont (Abby Trott) arriving in a skeleton-infested Paris with her father, Trevor Belmont (JB Blanc), one of the Castle-verse’s most famous characters. Shortly after arriving, Rose discovers she’s on her own, pushed into a hero’s quest that includes infamous characters from history, literature, and even recent iterations of this universe—Alejandra Reynoso and Graham McTavish return to voice Sypha and Dracula, respectively, as they did in the animated series. Of course, the main goal is to stop Dracula from unleashing Hell on Paris, but that’s only a slice of the storytelling pie here, one enriched by characters from across the games.
To gather enough strength to take on Dracula himself, Rose seeks out a series of enemies, starting with The Fallen (Ray Chase), then moving on to Joan of Arc (Erica Lindabeck) and Medusa (Melique Berger), before facing about a dozen others. When Rose defeats a boss, she not only gains a power from that enemy—like Petrifying Gaze from Medusa or an amazing power to shoot flames from the ground from Joan that became her go-to through most of the game—but they become a sort of ally, a character to whom Rose speaks as if she’s keeping it in her satchel. The narrative structure of “Belmont’s Curse” keeps it fresh: Rose isn’t just growing stronger like a standard RPG with new weapons and spells, but is almost assembling her own team of Castle-vengers.
Of course, to do so requires an incredible amount of traversal. The Metroidvania is defined in part by nonlinear level design, and how it works can be essential to a game’s success or failure. “Belmont’s Curse” doesn’t have a gigantic map, but it does have one that keeps opening up new sections as Rose gains power. For example, a section may be unreachable until Rose learns to dash or double jump, so you’ll have to come back later.
The developers of “Belmont’s Curse” use this technique to guide you through the game without ever feeling like you’re moving in a straight line. In a time when hand-holding has become a hot topic with the controversy around “Marvel’s Wolverine,” this game does just the right amount of it, although I’ll admit to wandering for about an hour at one point because I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what the story wanted me to do next.
Other than that little blip that could be written off as a long week, “Belmont’s Curse” brilliantly rewards exploration, forcing you to backtrack and check your map to see what you might have missed, but also designing the game in such a way that you will often organically stumble upon where you need to be. One can tell that it was developed by the team behind the incredible “Return to Castlevania” expansion for “Dead Cells,” one of the best games of its era. Konami saw how well that worked and passed the whip to them for this revival, which is one of the smartest decisions this historic company has ever made.
While combat in “Belmont’s Curse” might look rudimentary to an onlooker, there’s more nuance to it than merely strike and dodge. Rose comes across over a dozen weapons of increasing strength that can be chosen based on preferred gameplay, and she utilizes the aforementioned Arcanas or powers of those she defeats, which can also be upgraded through gameplay. It’s not overwhelming RPG customization, but just enough to make a playthrough feel personal and pliable.
Finally, there’s the look of “Belmont’s Curse,” something else that might initially seem dated to someone stumbling into the room but hides remarkable detail, often in the painterly backdrops. From levels set in Paris & Notre Dame, from a wicked Clock Tower down to slimy Catacombs, the levels in “Belmont’s Curse” are one of its greatest strengths, filled not just with challenging puzzle design but marvelous visual cues and inspirations.
If the game has a technical weakness, it’s a repetitive, somewhat exhausting score that feels like a throwback to the ‘80s and ‘90s iterations of this franchise, but it can be an aural enemy when you’re struggling with where to go next.
In the end, “Castlevania: Belmont’s Curse” should totally satisfy both hardcore fans of this series and those who have never picked up a Vampire Killer. With great voice work, beautiful level design, and vibrant storytelling, it’s a reminder of why Metroidvanias became an entire genre. And maybe that no one does it better than Konami.
The Publisher provided a review copy of this game on PS5. It will be released on October 15, also on Nintendo Switch, Windows, and Xbox Series X.
- NYFF 2026: “Artificial” and Closing Thoughts (October 13, 2026)
“Brilliant. And scary.”
That was my instant reply to a text from a friend the morning after we saw the world premiere of Luca Guadagnino’s “Artificial” at the New York Film Festival. The NYFF hasn’t been known for world premieres, or at least it wasn’t until last year, when A24 unveiled Josh Safdie’s “Marty Supreme” in a surprise screening event, launching it to major critical acclaim, a world box office near $200 million, and Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. That success reportedly inspired other distributors to see the festival as a place for world premieres, and it may have inspired the NYFF as well: this year it hosted seven.
As widely reported, Amazon MGM produced Guadagnino’s film, but then dropped it and Neon picked it up. Did the larger company fear Silicon Valley’s reception? While “Artificial” takes a probing approach to AI, it doesn’t come across as an indictment of the forces producing it. Rather, it is a very engaging, dramatic and sometimes quite funny portrait of a particular slice of that culture, one that developed over several years and led to a particularly notorious incident: the attempt of the board of OpenAI to oust its charismatic CEO, Sam Altman, and his fast and successful campaign to turn the tables and overthrow his opponents.
What do such boardroom machinations have to do with the promise and perils of Artificial Intelligence? Actually, “Artificial” makes a strong case that the human element, all the imponderables of personality, ego, and conflicting agendas, shapes how this technology is being ushered into the world, and what it may do to it.
The film, please note, doesn’t predict anything–neither utopia nor dystopia. Yet by focusing on the recent past rather than the impending future, it shows how AI’s rapid development has raised an accelerating set of questions and problematic possibilities.
At the Q&A following the NYFF premiere, the film’s original screenwriter, Simon Rich (former SNL writer and son of columnist Frank Rich), said he’d been concerned about AI since a childhood friend warned him of its dangers. He’s clearly studied the subject in depth, because “Artificial”‘s script brings a sense of authenticity to a complex story, even as it necessarily condenses it. That Rich’s fast-paced dialogue may sometimes overwhelm viewers with flurries of tech jargon, but it only serves the story’s immersive flow.
It begins in Toronto in 2003 when a 17-year-old native of Russia, Ilya Sutskever (Yura Borisov), enters the lab of future Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton (a terrific Mark Rylance) and so impresses the brilliant professor that a partnership is soon born, one that will take them to Silicon Valley and the hallways and workspaces of Google. A decade-plus later, their pioneering AI work attracts the interest of Stanford dropout Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield) and his pal Elon Musk (Ike Barinholtz). The charming but morally slippery Altman recognizes the genius of upright, idealistic Sutskever and offers a corporate collaboration meant to bring immeasurable benefits to the human race, while, of course, enriching the technology’s masterminds.
OpenAI was founded in 2016. The boardroom battle that forms the story’s crux comes in 2023. In the intervening years, we see the rise of a fast-paced, celebratory culture among young people, forcing a technological revolution whose nature no one understands. For viewers who’ve followed this tale in news reports and magazine articles, it’s fascinating to see how Guadagnino and Rich bring the characters, their labors and conflicts to life. But perhaps the best thing about the film is that it doesn’t require any advance knowledge of its subject and milieu; newcomers are just as likely to be swept up in its torrent of events and emotions.
This is filmmaking of a very high order. Arguably Guadagnino’s best work (it’s leagues beyond his “After the Hunt,” which opened the NYFF last year), “Artificial” has a great sense of atmosphere and a constantly evolving narrative drive. As for the acting, it might be best described as a semicircle. On one side, there’s the film’s most focused and realistic performance (and the one that will deservedly garner the most praise), Borisov’s Ilya Sutskever. On the other side, Barinholtz’s cartoonish Elon Musk is so broad it almost doesn’t work.
Between these extremes, and borrowing elements of both, Garfield’s Sam Altman is forceful but duplicitous: a gifted leader and a quasi-sociopath. As the story progresses, especially at the climactic showdown with Sutskever and OpenAI’s board, Altman’s personal power becomes increasingly crucial. He’s obviously not the only billionaire calling the shots in the AI game, but he makes you wonder: Do we really want the planet’s future in his hands?
The world premiere of “Artificial” at the NYFF felt eerily timely. Although it could not have been predicted by the filmmakers or the festival, just a month before the film’s screening, a 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon, who had worked at OpenAI and resigned from Anthropic, issued a statement saying, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade…[M]any executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
That warning has reverberated worldwide and sparked wide discussions about the dangers of AI and the need to contain it. Among other greater consequences, it might well make “Artificial” the most important dramatic movie of 2026. And while I understand Neon’s Oscar strategy of releasing the film on Christmas Day, I left its world premiere not only shaken and dazed, but also wishing it could go into theaters the next day.
Notes on some of the other world premieres at the 2026 New York Film Festival:
Mani Haghighi’s “I Deserve a Lover Whose Every Rise Sets Fiery Dooms Raging Across the Skies” is a documentary portrait of two Iranians as eccentric as the film’s title: painter and conceptual artist Nasser Bakshi and his partner Roghayeh Najdi. The duo has assembled a vast archive of artworks and found objects that chronicle the lives of ordinary Iranians across generations, and the film (shot just before the current U.S./Israel war on Iran) explores their world in an amusingly digressive, unconventional way. A leader in the post-Kiarostami generation of Iranian filmmakers, Haghighi isn’t primarily a documentarian (his masterpiece “A Dragon Arrives!” really deserves a belated U.S. release), but it’s great to see one of his films at the NYFF.
I imagine that Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!” will have its admirers, but I am unfortunately not one. Which is a shame: I’m a fan of Gilroy’s Jason Bourne scripts and especially his complex, brainy 2007 thriller “Michael Clayton,” which he wrote and directed. His new film starts promisingly: a professional cellist (Pedro Pascal) enters a Los Angeles recording studio to work on the score for a new movie.
Gilroy reportedly worked with nine composers to shape the drama’s musical dimension, and that element has its pleasures and fascinations. But they merely form the aural wallpaper of a hodgepodge story that jumps around in time and space, chronicling the cellist’s soap-operatic life. While Pascal, one of our best actors, gives an energetic, committed performance, the character never rises above a philandering boor.
Tom McCarthy’s “The Statement” is even more tiresome than Gilroy’s film. This numbing talkfest dramatizes a literal meeting that took place over three days in October 1980 at a Florida hotel. About 20 scientists and policymakers, appointed by the U.S. Congress, drafted a statement on carbon dioxide and climate change. The film offers some strong performances from John Turturro, Paul Rudd, and Paul Giamatti, but its drama is as boring as its premise sounds.
In my ranking of 2016 films, I put Ava DuVernay’s “13th” in the number one spot. This terrific documentary looked at the way the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was misused to create a new form of slavery in the American prison system. The film earned and deserved widespread critical acclaim, but its sequel, “14th,” which premiered in the Closing Night slot at the NYFF, almost certainly won’t get the same general approbation. See Jourdain Searles’ review to find out why.
- In “VisionQuest,” Identities Might Change, but Family Is Forever (October 12, 2026)
The trilogy that started with “WandaVision” and continued in “Agatha All Along” culminates in Marvel Television’s “VisionQuest.” And that title is more than wordplay. Like the previous seasons, this final chapter in the “WandaVision” Trilogy explores a different side of the Maximoff Family Saga, yet it follows franchise rules. How? By holding up a mirror to its main character, watching them shatter, and seeing whether they can rebuild the pieces into someone new.
“Who could it be? Believe it or not, it’s just me.”
Named for indigenous rites of passage, a vision quest is a spiritual, self-reflective tradition that typically marks the transformation from boyhood into manhood. Here, series creator Terry Matalas—and his writers’ room—guide White Vision (Paul Bettany) on a quest to go from synthezoid to personhood. Wish him luck. The obstacles are more than a notion, and Vision’s head is filled with more personalities and emotional upheaval than Riley in “Inside Out.”
Arriving exclusively on Disney+ on October 14, we find White Vision in Edinburgh, working in a pub and trying to relearn what it means to be human-ish. The original Vision earned his humanity and died with it intact. The hexed version, resurrected by Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), was a husband and father. This new iteration of Vision is confused. He’s not the empathic being he used to be, but he isn’t the weapon the S.W.O.R.D. Agency (Sentient Weapon Observation and Response Division) wanted him to be. The question of who he’s become bothers him more than the antagonistic Ultron (James Spader) who lives in his attic.
“This house is architecturally and emotionally unstable.”
(L – R) James Spader and Paul Bettany in VisionQuest exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Marvel. © 2026 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.
Yes, Ultron lives upstairs. Yet Vision’s home doesn’t exist in the real world. It’s a virtual reality replica of a family manor that he shares with various A.I. siblings from Tony Stark’s lab: J.A.R.V.I.S. (James D’Arcy), E.D.I.T.H. (Emily Hampshire), F.R.I.D.A.Y. (Orla Brady), D.U.M-E (Henry Lewis), U (Jonathan Sayer), and the previously mentioned big daddy Ultron. That “Inside Out” reference comes into finer focus here. They all live together in Vision’s head, helping with his daily life, while serving functions closely aligned with their original purposes. “VisionQuest” is all about family—whether fast, furious, or otherwise. That’s why I gave Ultron a patriarchal title; despite villainous tendencies that are as deadly and hilarious as ever, the MCU’s Evil Pinocchio sees himself as Vision’s father.
“When a monster has your son, don’t be the ship. Be the goddamn king.”
In a surprising reversal, White Vision doesn’t see himself as a father. In his mind—if not in his heart—those memories and that life belong to someone else. That’s bad news for Thomas Shepherd (Ruaridh Mollica), a Scottish lad who emerged from a near-death experience with Tommy Maximoff’s memories (and his speed powers). Which is why the assassin known as Paladin (Todd Stashwick) is holding him hostage.
If that sounds complex, this game of cyber cat and mercenary mouse has only begun. Or maybe that’s mercenary cat and cyber mouse. Turnabouts, twists, and callbacks come at us fast in “VisionQuest,” but even without knowledge of the “Avengers” movies or the rest of the trilogy, it’s not hard to keep up (although it’s a lot more fun when you recognize the Easter eggs). Either way, this 8-episode run is fun and funny. It’s also high-octane and deadly, while interrogating the nature of identity.
“What is grief, if not love persevering?”
“WandaVision” was a psychological sci-fi thriller, “Agatha All Along” was a paranormal portal fantasy, but “VisionQuest” is a cyberpunk family adventure with big nods to classic TV and pop-culture films, and embellished with a cake topper of a serial killer known as Butcherbird. Underpinning the action and drama, the series leans on the history of synthezoids, going back to 1939 and the Synthetic Man—the original Human Torch. Along with that touch of Marvel trivia, it mentions Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Daredevil, Punisher, and Werewolf by Night, or possibly Man-Wolf. A lot is going on. One could call it an MCU and Marvel Comics smorgasbord, but the show takes moments to breathe. That’s when it gets philosophical: When does something synthetic become “real”? What defines family? Is a soul defined by the body it inhabits or the memories it holds?
With its delightfully retro world-building, layered banter, and performances that paint rich character arcs filled with yearning for greater meaning in a universe that questions their value, “VisionQuest” may lean too hard into its poetics. Perhaps? The storytelling operates in the slipstream of lines like “What is grief, if not love persevering?” Yet, in its earnestness, “VisionQuest” is charmingly enthralling with just enough interplay between light and darkness to make us feel it—even if it’s a little goofy at times.
(L TO R) James Spader as Ultron and Paul Bettany as Vision in VisionQuest exclusively on Disney+. Photo courtesy of Marvel. © 2026 Marvel. All Rights Reserved.
One of the smartest things the creatives behind the series do parallels something the great horror writer Junji Ito does so well: they utilize our understanding of everyday objects, scenarios, and relationships to ground the fantastical in the relatable. Whether it’s sadness, science, sanity, second chances, or a good giggle, its sense of connection allows “VisionQuest” to stick the landing.
Fathers and sons, siblings and sacrifice are the lifeblood of the series, but it’s also about love in every form, including the trilogy’s penchant for epic love stories. The cast is vast; there are too many players to name, but here are a few highlights. Mollica gives us a fully 3-dimensional Thomas, rendered in mercurial shades and depth. Meanwhile, Spader and T’Nia Miller, as a new version of the comic book character Jocasta, give equally complex, emotionally complicated performances with dubious motivations. The pair could easily win Emmys for their performances, especially in Episode 6. Beyond Bettany and Spader, who live up to their calling cards, Mollica and Miller are the revelations here—bar none. Yet that praise comes with a nod to Lauren Morais’s kleptomaniac Lisa, and Hampshire’s E.D.I.T.H.
As I mentioned, this series overflows with plot and character dynamics, but revealing its secrets would spoil it. “VisionQuest” is the Vision’s identity crisis. It’s also about artificial intelligence and personhood—especially poignant topics these days. At the crossroads of science fiction and the MCU, it tackles the poetic and the philosophical while avoiding pretentiousness by leaning into cheesiness and pop-culture nostalgia.
“VisionQuest” does many things, but it’s never boring. Fans of the franchise are being rewarded. This is what happens when the MCU takes its time developing a series, and it’s a fitting finale to what “WandaVision” jump-started.
Full season screened for review. Premieres October 14th on Disney+.
