- Locarno 2026: Objet A, Tear Gas, Fire Flower (Hanabi) (August 13, 2026)
In this first dispatch from Locarno is a trio of films one might call “elusive.” They all capture weighty, human subjects: sensuality, war, and disaster—with a visual and sonic approach that’s difficult to grasp and, sometimes, even harder to love. They are all formally provocative works, made to push the audience to its breaking point. Consequently, they’re like little I’ve seen this year, and I’m sure unlike anything I’ll watch in the coming months.
A sensual exploration of the body and senses, Ann Oren’s “Objet A” assuredly follows in the footsteps of her equally playful film “Piaffe,” a film about a woman foley artist whose surprising growth of a horse tail draws her into an S&M world.
Her latest is about two married star surgeons—Ingeborg (Aenne Schwarz) and Adam (Louis Hofmann)—who’ve risen to fame by using fungi to generate skin. In scenes that recall “Phantom Thread,” they share the same daily routine: Ingeborg prepares breakfast (boiling eggs and toasting bread) while Adam works out (he does stomach crunches and uses an exercise ball). They sit in their austere black suits reading the newspaper before heading to work, where they perform hand surgeries. With one patient, a mysterious Gaia (Simone Bucio), they remove a sixth finger growing from her fist.
Through a confluence of events—Ingeborg, a kleptomaniac, fractures her leg after stealing a gold lighter from a man, requiring her to use a steampunk stump—Gaia becomes part of the surgeons’ world. The creation of this throuple causes disarray in Ingeborg and Adam’s relationship, revealing their physical distance when it comes to their physical attraction.
See, Oren is greatly intrigued by how we express our sexual desires and gain sensual pleasure. Here, the surgeons rely on their senses: touch, smell, and feel—to arouse one another. But there’s no penetration or even kissing. By simply rubbing Adam’s collarbone, Ingeborg gains satisfaction. Upon Gaia’s arrival, however, they lose appeal for one another. Ingeborg takes to licking her leather-bound stump and flirting with Gaia, while Adam peruses a bar where a nun hangs out. The latter attraction opens the film to having a religious theme, recalling Adam and Eve, especially as Gaia begins introducing apples, moss, and even mushrooms (mostly for smelling and licking) into the couple’s home.
In the film’s most climactic scene, Ingeborg and Adam engage in a naked orgasmic fever dream led by a scene of the pair crawling through the woods and into one another’s psyches. Oren isn’t much for explanation or clear characterizations. Much like Peter Strickland, she makes evocations to the viewer’s desires and phobias throughout her films in a bid to elicit impulsive yet revealing reactions.
If some filmmakers want to make it clear that we’re watching a movie, for instance, then Oren makes it obvious that we’re watching human acts whose close relationships or sexual wants are only shown to be outlandish upon reflection. And while “Objet A,” like any of Oren’s works, could be accused of overt obliqueness, the sensorial craft on display, the committedness of the actors, and the provocative subject matter make Oren’s vision overwhelming and indelible.
The writer/director Uta Beria takes a decidedly political bent with his rebellious coming-of-age narrative “Tear Gas.” This is a harrowing film filled with nightmarish imagery and chilling sounds. It begins, almost fittingly, with a funeral. Alvo (Gaga Shishinashvili) and his family are taking his deceased father to be buried over the Russian border. Alvo, along with his 18-year-old daughter Elene (Taisia Eradze) and his stern mother Dali (Mzia Arabuli, “Crossing”), conversely, occupy Georgia. Like the solemn ceremony they are attending, their country and their family are on the verge of change.
Elene serves as the eyes to the oncoming upheaval. The green-haired teenager navigates the testy relationship between her parents—her father, Alvo, is a cop, and her mother, Tina (Kato Kalatozishvili), is a reporter—with a similar dexterity required of her fellow citizens to work through a government that cracks down on civil disobedience via extralegal avenues. She also takes Judo classes that she doesn’t particularly care for as she regularly allows herself to be chokeheld to the point of passing out.
Like many around her, she feels as though she’s trapped in inaction. So when her grandmother and neighbors decide to attend a demonstration in Tbilisi, she does so with incredible eagerness. But when she arrives among the throng of protesters, she neither remains with her grandmother nor searches for her mother, who’s reporting on the demonstration. She instead becomes interested in a few defiant teens, particularly a young boy, who excite her.
In these protest scenes, which appear to explicate how several generations are united yet experiencing several different rebellious wants at once, Uta captures the frantic kineticism of protest. That’s because he filmed inside actual demonstrations, which grants his framing a kind of spontaneity around the many moving figures within this amorphous crowd. He also somehow grasps a poeticism, like when tear gas is thrown at Elene and her friends; Elene stumbles through the smoke as strobing lights and sounds of sirens invade the frame.
In another instance, her father Alvo is silhouetted by the gas as he beats a demonstrator with his nightstick, making for a bold contrast between the oppressed and the oppressor. Uta bends these imaginative moments toward groundedness by including real archival footage of past demonstrations. The result is a double coming of age, so to speak, for a teenage girl and for a country.
Uta accomplishes this balance by sometimes cutting away from the protests for familiar beats—the locking of eyes between avarice teens—and to the search by Elene’s parents and grandmother to find her. Each actor approaches the fast-moving material with assuredness, which makes the somewhat broad ending somewhat disappointing (then again, I’m not sure how else Uta would’ve concluded this film). “Tear Gas” doesn’t necessarily offer a resounding rebellious chime in its closing minutes, but it does keenly say that the work is yet to be finished.
Of all the films I’ve watched at Locarno, the most impenetrable is Anna Vaz’s experimental essayist documentary “Fire Flower” (“Hanabi”). An adaptation of Yoko Hayasuke’s Journal of a Radioactive Brain, the film, which was captured over the course of a decade, is a reaction to the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that caused the Fukushima Daini Nuclear Power Plant to melt down. The stream-of-consciousness narrative oscillates between a meditative narrator describing their anxieties about radioactive elements in the food they consume, the air they breathe, and the ground they walk on, and interviews with different Japanese citizens who are equally worried by the toxicity (both political and physical) around them.
Vaz further scrambles the material via an aesthetic approach that’s as resistant as the wider society that refuses to accept that they’re living through the remaining consequences of the meltdown. It’s explained that many have instead called for “unity” and nationalism rather than allowing individuals to question the safety of their environment. Consequently, in the aforementioned interviews with her subjects, images of them speaking are matched with asynchronous sound, aurally demonstrating the disconnect between their truth and the accepted “reality.”
Like a journal, the narrative is further separated by dates doubling as chapters. Many of the early chapters draw out like a blade. At one point, Vaz evocatively films a sunset for a solid six minutes, allowing the reddish orange rays to envelope the screen. She wants us to sit with these images in a way that many of her countrymen will not sit with the possibility of the presence of radioactivity in Japan. As the film progresses, the chapters get shorter, almost mirroring the kind of erosion of memory often related to the aftermath of a disaster.
Finally, Vaz also wants to remind us that we’re watching a movie. She includes emails between herself and a source named K.A. (who provides videos and photos that could act as evidence) and between herself and Hayasuke. All of these components come together for a challenging watch because it cinematically actualizes fear and vulnerability of memory and awareness, particularly when it comes to the health of one’s body and mind. The film reaches for a knowing symbolism a tad too much in the summation of its many themes, sometimes even repeating itself beyond recognition. But Vaz’s single-mindedness to explore this subject in all its complexity brings one into her spell. We become subdued and lulled into a dream that more often than not lives as a nightmare.
- “Tires” Has Developed into One of Netflix’s Best Comedies in Season 3 (August 13, 2026)
In 2024, I wrote about Netflix’s surefire hit “Tires”: “I suspect the second season will be stronger as the writers hone the voice of this show and characters.” Because of content timing, we didn’t cover the sophomore outing, but it undeniably was, pushing the characters into more believable territory and adding the welcome comedic presence of Thomas Haden Church.
The third season, now on Netflix, takes the evolution of this incredibly watchable show to the next level, revealing that star Shane Gillis could be an interesting character actor in film someday by giving him relatable, funny arcs on a show built around his personality. In some of his better moments this season, I started to picture him in Alexander Payne or even Coen Brothers projects, and the thought made me smile. “Tires” still too often resorts to the easy (and arguably veers into offensive) joke, but it has gotten undeniably smarter and more nuanced with each season, reminding one why the workplace comedy remains such a tried-and-true format, especially when it’s populated by people who feel real.
The first season of “Tires” introduced viewers to the workers at an average Pennsylvania auto-repair shop: Manager Will (Steve Gerben), his cousin Shane (Shane Gillis), and mechanics Cal (Chris O’Connor) and Kilah (Kilah Fox). The show felt like little more than an extension of Gillis’ observational stand-up, complete with supporting characters and guest appearances from the same comedy sphere that he currently almost dominates (the only one from this world that’s arguably bigger is Nate Bargatze, who apparently has the cultural cache to open a theme park; I’d rather drink my way around Gillisland, for the record.)
Tires S3. (L to R) Stavros Halkias as Dave in Episode #302 of Tires S3. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Moving from what felt like a loose proof-of-concept six episodes in the first outing to 12 in the second, “Tires” developed its characters into something that felt significantly more three-dimensional, assisted by the new presence of Church as Shane’s dad, the owner of Valley Forge Automotive Center. Family, relationship, and business issues became a foundation for “Tires,” but it still often felt like a show that ran from anything that could be perceived as emotional or, God forbid, sentimental.
The third season still often has a habit of inserting a dick joke into a scene just as it’s starting to get serious, but Gillis is also willing to embrace relatable mid-life emotion more than he ever has before. His arc this season is that of a man who’s starting to worry that life has passed him by (Gillis himself is approaching 40), especially after he learns that an old flame is single again, leading him to wonder if he can have the love of which he always dreamed.
At the same time, Shane falls into bed with a younger character who calls him on his shit, someone saved in his phone as “Lucy the Lib,” a play on the political line that Gillis straddles as someone who’s clearly most popular in the largely Conservative sector of the comedy world but has always felt to me like someone most likely to poke fun at both sides of the aisle. Just the character of “Lucy the Lib” puts to bed the idea that this show can only embrace one political ideology as she’s never once portrayed as an object of mockery; if anything, Shane’s arc is one of a character who refuses to embrace what’s in front of him in favor of something that used to be, which could even be read as a criticism of people who want to turn back the clock to a time that wasn’t exactly great.
Tires S3. (L to R) Billy Magnussen as Taylor in Episode #305 of Tires S3. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Gillis is the highlight of season three, but the season is greatly enhanced by a supporting cast that’s also improved across the board. Gerben’s acting has improved every season, and it was smart to give the on-the-rise Stavros Halkias more to do this season as the co-star of “Bugonia” and “Tony” has become a quiet MVP for auteurs already. Add in some of the best comedy podcast stars like Dan Soder and Bobby Kelly in extended arcs, and you have a season that’s also the show’s strongest in terms of casting.
It’s been remarkable to watch the creators of “Tires” feel like they learned a lesson from each season, tightening what works and discarding what doesn’t from the year before. It’s already gone from an amusing experiment to a solid comedy in its own right, one that could appeal to fans of more than just its star’s stand-up. At this rate, before it ends, it could be one of the best shows on TV.
Whole season screened for review. Now on Netflix.
- Prophecy is Ragged and Dirty: David Cronenberg’s “Crash” Turns 30 (August 13, 2026)
On the rain-slicked streets of Toronto one evening, a trio makes their way through a 24/7 car wash. The woman in the backseat reveals her breast to the man sitting next to her. As the convertible car they have taken over to get cleaned closes up around them in anticipation of the wash, the driver, her husband, adjusts the rearview mirror to get a better view. The other man grabs the woman’s face, eventually thrusting his fingers into her vagina. The thrum of the soapy ribbons of the car wash and the pair’s strained noises are the only sounds. She pushes him away once, twice, but eventually stops. Once the man is done, the woman’s hand grabs the driver’s headrest—her fingers are covered in semen. The car exits the wash. The next day, her body is covered in bruises.
This is “Crash,” David Cronenberg’s chronicle of car crash fetishists. When it premiered at Cannes in 1996, the impact was immediate. One audience booed after a showing. The same daring that earned the contempt of that audience also earned the film a Special Jury Prize for its audacity. Because the protagonists can’t connect in any other way, it takes a grotesque offering to conjure it: metal, blood, and sweat.
Thirty years out, “Crash,” while still shocking, has earned a dedicated fanbase. It makes sense that people would resonate with a film where human connection feels dangerous in a world where we are increasingly losing our ability to connect. “Crash” isn’t the only film of Cronenberg’s that has felt somewhat prophetic in its assessment of human relationships. Across his career, the director has depicted the complexities of being human in visceral detail. In films like “Crash,” “The Fly,” “Videodrome,” and “Dead Ringers,” the Canadian director does not shy away from depicting the reality of relationships with other human beings as necessary, messy, and sometimes catastrophic.
“Crash,” in particular, approaches its main characters and their sexual exploits with an almost removed sense of non-judgment. At this point in Cronenberg’s filmography, bodily concerns have turned inward, examining the psychological warp that can make people’s minds as unfamiliar as any goopy mess of viscera throbbing onscreen. J.G. Ballard, the British author of the novel the film is based on, shares many of the same preoccupations with Cronenberg, and a name with the film’s protagonist. Ballard’s novels and short stories dive into anxieties about emergent technologies, psychosexual impulses, and dystopias with a removed, almost clinical voice.
James (James Spader) gets roped into the larger world of car crash fetishists after being in an accident that kills Helen Remington’s (Holly Hunter) husband, and he inevitably delves deeper into the group’s distinct dynamics. On its face, it’s an absurd and masochistic fetish. And yet, there is something distinctly human in the actions of the band of deviants, played with outstanding commitment by Spader, Deborah Kara Unger, Elias Koteas, Hunter, and Patricia Arquette. It’s been proven that in the face of trauma, the human brain tries to heal through repetition, allowing ourselves a kind of control over what nearly destroyed us. We can see the group trying to reclaim control every time skin brushes up against steel.
The performances emphasize the group’s hunger for control, camaraderie, and release at any cost. Vaughn (Koteas) is the unofficial leader of this group, and at first maintains that their connection goes beyond each other. “It’s something we’re all intimately involved in: the reshaping of the human body by modern technology,” he explains to James at one point in the film. While Vaughn is a menacing force at times, Koteas gives him a soft-spoken voice and demeanor that masks something urgent and intense underneath. Similarly, Spader’s performance matches Koteas’ well as he follows along, with a curious kind of hunger that comes through in the smallest gesture, like a hungry glance.
The pair share a sex scene later on in the film that showcases their connection, and reverses how the film has established them as foils to each other: James is the dominant force here, while Vaughn takes a more submissive role. There is no dialogue, and the physicality of both Spader and Koteas communicates the vulnerability and bond they’ve developed over the course of the film. In a film like “Crash,” though, there is no room for sentimentality. Vaughn and James meet, have sex, and help each other learn about themselves—until Vaughn decides to take his own life by plunging into a passenger bus from a highway overpass. (Years before “Brokeback Mountain”; it’s hard to overstate how rare it was for the time period to see explicit gay sex on screen, especially with a star like Spader as a participant). The way their relationship plays out is emblematic of the necessary, brief, and often painful nature of any relationship—it all has to end, with a whimper or a high-speed collision. It’s only a matter of time.
That is not to say that there can’t be real romance or feeling behind the connections in Cronenberg’s films, even if it can feed our best and worst impulses. Indeed, one of his most outwardly brutal films (physically and emotionally) is also his most romantic. “The Fly” is a remake of the 1958 film of the same name that follows scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) and journalist Veronica “Ronnie” Quaife (Geena Davis) as they discover that the physical teleportation of living beings might be possible. Along the way, despite Brundle accidentally merging himself with a stray fly that flew into the wrong teleportation chamber, what starts as an infatuation at the beginning of the film turns into messy, real love. Brundle gets merged with the insect because he gives in to his worst impulses—he is jealous and drunk, and puts himself in a teleport pod to impress Ronnie after she leaves his apartment to settle things with her sleazy ex. As Brundle becomes more arrogant in his transformation, their relationship becomes strained—and, after some time apart, he calls her to come over.
Decomposing, gooey flesh sits on the face that once covered Ronnie in kisses. Ronnie doesn’t care, and Davis’ performance, embracing and listening to Brundle as he explains his plight, is moving. Every messy bit that happened before is gone, and she sees him and his humanity fully despite its rapid disappearance. A new kind of vulnerability emerges as Brundle explains his deterioration. With a beseeching look, he explains how his humanity is fading away: “I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake.” Goldblum’s performance breaks through the pounds of makeup and prosthetics to communicate his pain and fear. “The Fly” posits connection as a powerful force that can make us lean into our most human instincts, for better or worse. Elsewhere in Cronenberg’s filmography, when connection is substituted or merged with technology, or created without boundaries, the results become truly catastrophic.
The connective tissue of technology can haunt the living as well as the dead. In “The Shrouds,” Vincent Cassel plays a sort of stand-in for the director, physically styled the same way and with a different connection to tech and the human body. Karsh (Cassel) is a man who, as one character puts it, “has made his career in bodies.” The creator of GraveTech, Karsh owns multiple cemeteries where people can keep watch over the decomposing remains of their loved ones thanks to the titular “shrouds” that stream the progress of decay 24/7. Screens on tombstones serve as windows into the afterlife (but of course, there’s an app for remote check-ins, too). For Karsh, it’s one of the ways he grieves for his late wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). He also stays in touch with his wife’s identical sister Terry, and uses a personal “AI” assistant made up to look like her (Kruger plays all three). One day, his Canadian location is vandalized, and he soon gets wrapped up in a number of potential conspiracies that involve foreign entities and espionage. Ultimately though, “The Shrouds” is more concerned with the personal consequences of grief; how trying to maintain connections to the dead via technology (much like how folks use AI bots to resurrect their loved ones for comfort) can make it nearly impossible to move forward in a healthy way.
Even in early films that are less technology-forward, connection is a key preoccupation. In “The Brood,” rage over divorce manifests as growth and a throbbing, external womb that gives birth to a destructive brood. “Scanners” treads a bit more into technology and the body, specifically how the repression of the body or mind can lead to violent radicalization. Among the plots about telepathy and repressive drugs, heads explode, and viscera fills the screen as the titular Scanners walk a tight line between rebellion and assimilation. Later period works, like “Crimes of the Future,” continue to be preoccupied with the repression and regulation of unusual bodies. The emergence of those who can grow extraneous organs leads to the development of a “National Organ Registry,” but also a subculture where sexuality takes on new tones and practices, like tonguing the wound of a lover and stimulating their internal organs.
Technology today offers us artificial connections with no real boundaries or friction, but in a film like “Dead Ringers,” it’s clear that codependent relationships that mirror the same dynamic can be equally destructive. Twin doctors Elliot and Beverly Mantle (Jeremy Irons) are essentially (emotionally) conjoined, to the point that Beverly’s romantic relationship with actor Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold) threatens to tear them apart. The brothers have shared everything throughout their lives. When they can’t share Claire, their relationship begins to fragment until they reach the point of mutual destruction. In “Dead Ringers,” relationships without boundaries can be just as harmful as the absence of meaningful connection.
The inability to connect and anxieties about media and what it’s doing to us emerge fully in “Videodrome.” The filmmaker’s most prescient film, and the one that fully articulates his ideas about sex, technology, and society, it suggests that the artificial connections and voyeurism technology provides us can seduce us into something much more terrifying. In the world that slimy TV producer Max Renn (James Woods) inhabits, stimulation for stimulation’s sake is the name of the game, as Debbie Harry’s Nikki states early on in the film. Watching Renn in the film’s final scene, ready to embrace the new flesh through suicide, it’s hard not to think about the people who have sought connections with AI chatbots in recent years and instead found oblivion. Nikki beckons Max through the CRT screen to join her in death, the one way they can be together and take down Videodrome, and he obliges.
Watching Cronenberg’s work feels like standing at the edge of a precipice. He shows us our realities, our futures, and our desires, even when they feel monstrous and impossible. Of course, the craftsmanship behind the bloody on-screen messes is its own, worthy spectacle, but it’s not the only focal point of his movies. The humanity, grotesque and vulnerable and sometimes all-too-familiar, is what really makes his films indispensable works of art. His characters and their inability to connect, or ability to connect too much, give us a mirror into our own feelings and anxieties, even when the reflection can be hard to stomach.
“Crash” understands the necessity and the messiness of human connections. In a world where governments are actively policing trans people and their bodies, where sex on screen is seen as something vulgar and unnecessary, where people with uteruses are robbed of their choice to be pregnant or not, his work feels not only relevant but necessary. The new trends towards a puritanical, near-sterile society in which differences are a blemish are more startling than anything the director has put onscreen. When milquetoast depictions of life that avoid its important messiness are dominant, it’s more important than ever to champion the visceral, the vile, and the grotesque.
- Memories of Helen: The Heroic Despair of “John Wick” (August 11, 2026)
I can’t get enough of John Wick. As soon as one of the films in the series showed up on a streaming platform (typically HBO Max), it became a default choice for me and my partner Judith, who adores them as much as I do. But it wasn’t until we were both crushed by the flu and decided to go to bed early and stay there till the next day that I figured out why this particular set of movies was so enchanting. All four were available, so Judith suggested we watch them all in order—a nine-hour commitment, not including breaks.
Seeing all four back-to-back showed me that star Keanu Reeves, director Chad Stahelski and the writers (mainly Derek Kolstad, who named the character after his maternal grandfather) deftly avoided many of the traps that befall sequels to hit action movies. One thing that helped is the compact time frame. The entire story takes place in about two weeks. The films feel continuous and maintain their momentum.
Only one other element is more important.
It’s not the “gun fu” fight scenes, which had the shock of the new in the original movie, and grew so elaborate as the franchise progressed that it felt like a lethal cousin of modern dance. It’s not the chases, although there are plenty, and they’re superb (my favorite is the chase around the Arc de Triomphe in the fourth film). It isn’t the neo-noir samurai gunslinger aesthetic. It’s not the world-building, which vividly catalogs the society of criminals Wick inhabits while leaving crucial information to the imagination (such as the task that John performed to earn his freedom).
No, what makes the John Wick series special is its heart. The movies add up to an epic modern gothic love story in which one of the lovers is dead.
The main characters are the retired hitman John and his late wife Helen, the woman he retired for. Helen is past-tense to the rest of the world but eternally present-tense for John. He regularly reinforces his feelings for her—freshens them up, you could say—through video, memories, fantasies, and dreams.
Some would describe this behavior as compulsive, perhaps a manifestation of “complicated grief” or “persistent complex bereavement disorder.” But that’s only because nine years separate the first and final installments. Moviegoers who saw each film independent of the others might understandably think, upon cueing up the final chapter, “This guy sure is hung up on his wife—it’s been nine years!” But in actuality, as noted earlier, it’s a short window. Part 2 starts right after the conclusion of Part 1 and ends with Wick killing an adversary on the hallowed ground of The Continental, being declared “excommunicado,” and having a bounty placed on his head. Part 3 starts one hour later, after the end of the “grace period” John was given, and follows him around the world until he’s finally “killed off” in a staged event; and Part 4 is set roughly six months after that.
But no matter how you experience the movies, the energy released by John’s inconsolable suffering flows through them all. It even flows through scenes he isn’t in, because John’s thresher-like movement through the ranks of professional assassins is always a central topic of conversation, and everyone knows what drives it: loss, mourning, and chivalrous impulse once directed at his beloved wife that now has no object, and must instead be focused on needful souls he encounters as he travels.
Reeves’ beautiful, haunted face bypasses contemporary, therapy-based notions of grief management. It connects instead to traditions of certain 18th and 19th-century English and American poems which depict grief not as a force that one must overcome, move past, or accept and incorporate into daily life, but as a rock that true romantics dash themselves against, again and again, until the rock breaks or they do.
Call it heroic despair, after the phrase defined by the 17th-century philosopher Julius Bahnsen. You know heroic despair when you see it. It powers the feats of heroes whose own dreams have been crushed but risk their own lives for others or complete a mission out of a sense of duty, often perishing in the process. (This is exactly what John does, in hopes of putting the broken pieces of the underworld back together.) Edgar Allan Poe’s elegies to his wife Virginia, who died at 24, exhibit a type of heroic despair that’s at risk of mutating into self-annihilation. These include “The Raven,” which we all know well; and Annabel Lee, whose narrator concludes that no force is strong enough to separate their souls and lies down beside his beloved in her tomb by the sea. (John’s reward is burial beside his wife, though in a regular graveyard rather than a tomb by the sea.)
The series also bears imprints of death- and loss-focused poems by John Keats (whose narrator in “Ode to a Nightingale” admits that “for many a time / I have been half in love with easeful Death”); John Donne, who reminded us for whom the bell tolls; Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who wrote 44 sonnets to her poet husband Robert, and whose short poem “Grief” might as well have been directed at John, who speaks 380 words across four films:: “Deep-hearted man, express / Grief for thy dead in silence like to death.”
The series is filled with mythological allusions, some purposeful, others incidental. The main character is a human monster who once killed other human monsters, turns good for love’s sake, loses his mate, and keeps having to travel back into a figurative Hell (the small-u underworld of criminals, run by the High Table) that he fought so hard to escape.
One of the strongest affinities is with the myth of Orpheus. A musician who was once a crewman on Jason’s boat The Argonaut, Orpheus descends to hell to rescue his beloved wife Eurydice, who fell into a viper pit while trying to escape a satyr. John doesn’t go to those extremes—if he had, the result might have echoed 2005’s “Constantine,” in which Reeves’ title character goes to Hell to save a psychic (Rachel Weisz) whose death is initially described as a suicide, but is revealed to be a sacrifice she made to prevent Lucifer’s son Mammon from ruling the world. John is trying to rescue not Helen herself, but the memory of Helen, from the oblivion of a world that moves constantly forward, forgetting all that came before. He does this by acting as archivist, caretaker, and storage unit for the memory of Helen. This resonates with another Reeves film, the 1995 dystopian sci-fi thriller “Johnny Mnemonic,” in which he plays a courier who stores confidential data in the part of his brain that once held his childhood memories.
The quest to preserve the memory of Helen, even as a meager set of disconnected moments, is not selfless. John gets something important out of it: fleeting moments of bliss. The only thing keeping him from turning one of his many fearsome weapons on himself is the fact that his years with Helen were so nourishing that even fragmented memories of their relationship make a violent life on the run a more attractive prospect than death, by his own hands or those of his would-be killers.
The saga begins with a story about a former hitman who found a love so great that it inspired him to start a new life, only to lose his beloved to cancer, and then seeks revenge against gangsters who stole his car and killed the puppy that was his wife’s parting gift. It’s understandable that it sometimes is summed up as a revenge saga, like “Kill Bill” or Sergio Leone’s Westerns. But the series is ultimately not about revenge at all—at least, not after the first one. And even there, you could make a case that revenge is merely the springboard that jumps us into the heart of the matter.
The heart of the matter is love. Sad, beautiful, never-ending love. The kind you rarely see depicted in English-language cinema (though it’s alive throughout Asia) but that fueled old poets who, despite different styles and goals, shared the belief that the agony of lost love was not a state to go into gently, but to rage against.
- Season 4 of Prime Video’s “Reacher” Might Be the Best Yet (August 11, 2026)
Over the last year or more, it’s been hilarious seeing headlines pondering which new action thriller will be the “Reacher” replacement. I didn’t realize we needed one. After watching Season 4, apparently Jack Reacher doesn’t either. From “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” to “The Night Agent” to “The Day of the Jackal” to “Hijack,” these are all solid franchises, depending on your tastes. Still, a replacement seems premature. There’s nothing like “Reacher.” With Season 4 almost here and 5 on the way (along with a spin-off in next month’s “Neagley”), this big brawling, heroic-antihero detective thriller isn’t done yet.
The wandering Jack Reacher (Alan Ritchson) makes his latest stop this season in Philly. Without a doubt, he needs a 2 AM cheesesteak. That’s a mistake. There’s a nervous woman on the train. Reacher tries to help, things go terribly wrong, and he ends up in the custody of Philly PD.
It’s a mess, but unfortunately it seems like a too-common tragedy until a few government agencies and politicians get involved. Very quickly, Reacher meets three pivotal people: Detective Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel), Lila (AGNEZ MO), and Officer Jacob (Chris Rodriguez-Marquette). Each has a part to play in piecing together the deadly mystery behind the woman on the train. And because things might’ve gone differently if he hadn’t said too much, Reacher can’t let this one go.
Created by Nick Santora and based on Gone Tomorrow, the 13th book in Lee Child’s best-selling series, Season 4 might be the best one yet. It has everything that launched “Reacher” into a monster hit: compelling cases, brutal high-octane action, three-dimensional characters with stakes, killer quips, and a lead who straddles the four quadrants like a deadpan yet sexy and highly skilled blend of Batman and the Punisher. (Someone call James Gunn and tell him his Bruce Wayne/Dark Knight is over on Prime Video.) Ritchson is not only an action hero, but he allows us to see past Reacher’s hardened shell to the traumas and compulsion to do good that rule him.
In season 4, “Reacher” enhances all the elements that action-thriller fans love about the series, using its tropes and style to peak effect. The tension keeps building, the character dynamics keep flipping, and the storyline will leave you holding your breath. It’s emotionally thrilling too, with personal and public tragedies that hit hard, brought to us by creatives and a cast with the chops to deliver on every shifting perspective and motivation.
Alan Ritchson (Jack Reacher)
While Prime Video has employed a weekly cadence with this show (after a three-episode premiere), this is the kind of season the binge model was made for. As the story gets deadlier, the past and present collide in both frustrating and heartbreaking ways. There’s even a touch of romance beyond the expected Bond Girl-styled entanglements. The heart on this show balances the crime and violence.
If your enthusiasm waned with S2 and S3, this might be the return to form you’re waiting for. If this show has held you rapt the entire time, you’re about to be bouncing on your seat cushions. There’s a rumor that I might’ve finished the 8-episode run in two sittings. Those rumors are true. I’m watching it again now.
It all comes down to whether you like twisty action-thrillers that are cold-blooded with warm hearts, and high on charm. If so, pop the corn, pour the beverages, and dodge the blood splatter; “Reacher” is back. No replacements necessary.
Whole season screened for review. Season 4 premieres on August 12.
