Quick Hits - September 2026

The trend of the year continues apace.

Despite liking a fair number of new releases, I've only loved a few, and been disappointed by even more. Even some of the best failed to live up to my lofty expectations. After the highs of the past few years, it's a notable come down. At least few have been truly awful (although see below for one more), more often eliciting a sigh rather than frustration.

But as is always the case, autumn is when the heavy hitters come out. Releases timed to persist in Academy voters' minds come January and February finally land in theaters after playing the festivals. Even more promising, they tend to be arthouse films and foreign films, the sort I'm more predisposed to enjoy.

And it's when I head to a couple local festivals. As in March, anything that doesn't get mentioned in the festival wrap-ups will get a mention here. Although this may end up a day or two late, as I'll be busiest on Halloween.

• The Sun Never Sets
•
• Don't Move
•
• By Any Means
•
• The Weight
•
• The Musical
•
• Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom
•
• Charlie Harper

The Sun Never Sets

Despite being pitched as a grounded exploration of the complications of relationships in your thirties, The Sun Never Sets fails to construct any human characters. Most of their actions are contrived to cause maximum whiplash, seeming to arise out of no inner life whatsoever. This is made more frustrating by its central concerns actually being interesting and less common territory, even for indie flicks. Chiefly, director Joe Swanberg asks "What does it really mean to settle?", and "What does it look like if you're attempts to wrestle with that blow up the life you thought you wanted?"

What's worse is that it's a waste of Dakota Fanning's talents, right in the middle of her resurgence. She's had a few straight years of finally leading somewhat notable features again, and this is by far her best performance, a great one without any qualifiers. But unfortunately, it's in service of this flailing dud of a film.

Don't Move

With so many horror movies released in recent years, many of them super low-budget, they can't all be good. But that doesn't excuse Don't Move, which may have surpassed Corporate Retreat as the year's worst movie.

Early on, it's clear we're in trouble. We see Ricky (Russ) driving in a few head-on shots, the road slightly visible, and in one, the entire background is clearly stationary. The kind of inexcusable mistake only possible when the budget requires production speed to take priority.

The premise would be a solid satire: misfits on a Youth Group camping trip with Pastor Tom Cavanagh and chaperone Rob Riggle. Instead, it feels like an Angel Studios release. It's got two of the most cardboard cutout, racist stereotypes I've seen recently. Megan (Lyndsy Fonseca) is hyper-competent, constantly undermining the tension. Every other character is hopelessly dumb, the plot and editing are nonsense, and the title is irrelevant until the last shot, wholly disconnected from the rest of the film. And of course, it's shoehorned in to the end of a sentence: "Whatever you do...", then the title flashes on the screen. Just abysmal.

By Any Means

I had low expectations going in, and they were handily surpassed. A lot of the credit goes to Yahya Abdul-Mateen and Mark Wahlberg. Abdul-Mateen is FBI agent Wayne Strider, doing his damndest to make a difference in 1960s Mississippi, despite his racist boss hiding him away and the Klan continuing to thrive. Wahlberg is Greg Scarpa, a ruthless, crass, NYC mobster who's been called in to hunt down and "solve" the murder of a prominent black businessman and voting rights advocate by the KKK.

Two issues undercut the power of Elegance Bratton's second narrative feature. The hardest to swallow is how skittish Strider is from jump, barely put together enough to do his job. The setting means he must be careful when wielding his authority, but that doesn't account for some of the ways he's made a buffoon. As his edges harden, we get to the other, bigger problem. It takes this white gangster from the big city, whose experience of racism is vastly different than Strider's, to teach this country black man that nonviolence is a laughable approach to bigotry. It's a borderline white savior narrative, and its deployment is clunky.

The Weight

The Weight is the Platonic ideal of dadcore, and all the positives and negatives that come with that.

The story is solid, despite its contrived, convoluted setup. During the Great Depression, Sam (Ethan Hawk) is thrown into Clancy's (Russell Crowe) prison camp for no good reason. Clancy takes a liking to him, and offers to release him if he does a favor for a friend. So he and three fellow prisoners are tasked with hauling a bunch of gold bars 100 miles through the wilderness in 5 days, where they must survive the elements, curious travelers, and each other.

That it doesn't become an action film until late is a good instinct, forcing the main cast to figure out how to overcome obstacles instead. However, Sam always has the right answer for everything, lessening the stakes, despite his comrades being pretty dull (save for Anna, played by Julia Jones). His one consequential failing stems from having faith in people, which is to say it's portrayed as a strength. Which makes it too hard to get invested in what's going on, since you know it'll all work out somehow.

The Musical

For her debut feature, director Giselle Bonilla worked with first-time screenwriter Alexander Heller and very game star Will Brill to disprove the idea that "you could never make The Producers today".

Granted, instead of a get-rich-quick scheme, it's revenge against Doug's (Brill) ex-girlfriend and fellow middle school teacher Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), who quickly moved on to the school principal, Brady (Rob Lowe). Also, the difficulty is increased, since he must both convince eleven- and twelve-year-olds to keep a secret, and teach them a second play simultaneously to show Brady when he sits in for rehearsals. And instead of celebrating the Nazis, it's - well, I'll leave that for you to find out.

It's quite funny, although a lot of that is either shock value, or the surprise at realizing it's aping classic noirs for structure and tone. It often leans too hard into the character drama for how simply sketched they are, and misses some easy layups regarding the humor. But it's an enjoyable enough time, if only to witness the bold follow through on an insane idea.

Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom

It's remarkable that Aardman Animation has built a successful stop-motion series aimed at older kids without dialog in the 21st century. While Britain's longest running animated show hasn't fully translated across the pond, the movie spin-offs have done reasonably well. Their multi-genre comedy is hugely beneficial, unafraid to lean into slapstick or absurdity or meta-gags or even some (slightly) risqué ones. By staying grounded in characters with distinct personalities and voices despite being limited to bleats, you cannot help but feel connected to them, allowing them to tell meaningful stories.

This one is less emotional, but no less entertaining. Aardman's spin on a children's Halloween film is the second such homage of the year. But unlike Minions & Monsters, it never feels the need to go full action plot, sticking with its starting conceit the whole time: Shaun (Justin Fletcher) as a mad scientist, The Farmer (John Sparkes) as an accidental Bigfoot, and The Vet (Nina Sosanya) as a charming and competent love interest. It's lovely throughout, as all is set in motion by Shaun trying to give little Timmy (Fletcher) the Halloween jack-o'-lantern of his dreams.

Charlie Harper

Charlie Harper quickly announces itself as concerned with the delta between how we view ourselves and how we come across to others. We see Charlie (Nick Robinson) and Harper (Emilia Jones) meet multiple times in ways that echo each other, before each one's rug pull to reveal they already knew each other. But why twice? And why do we later get three versions of another short scene, accompanied by voice over about how the reality always lies somewhere between your best- and worst-case memory?

It's a fascinating offer, one that the film has little interest in exploring. Instead, Tom Dean & Mac Eldridge cover the breadth of the relationship in non-linear fashion, giving us a window into how such a seemingly perfect couple could fall apart so spectacularly. This is fine enough, but inevitably harmed by insisting it pulled off some big trick as we approach the end, despite telegraphing it a mile away, and playing out as a standard (if mature) relationship drama. It's still good, it's just nothing particularly special.