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The Ringer

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Rating Title | Year Author Quote
Mercy (2026) Adam Nayman A high concept brought low by middling execution; an allegory about our tendency to rush to judgment made without conviction. But not without its pleasures, guilty or otherwise.
Posted Jan 24, 2026  Edit critic review
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) Adam Nayman It might seem silly to invoke The Lord of the Rings as a point of comparison, but Garland and Boyle -- and now DaCosta -- are working in a similarly mythic, epic register.
Posted Jan 15, 2026  Edit critic review
3/4
The Plague (2025) Adam Nayman The story is set in 2003, a period expertly evoked via strategic scattering of vintage track suits and portable CD players. But its grim vision of masculinity toxifying in real time gives it the feeling of a movie of the moment.
Posted Jan 02, 2026  Edit critic review
Anaconda (1997) Adam Nayman The challenge with poking fun at the original Anaconda -- even in the form of an affectionate, scare-quoted homage -- is that it’s already in on its own joke.
Posted Jan 02, 2026  Edit critic review
Marty Supreme (2025) Adam Nayman If one measure of a successful period piece is that it’s hard to imagine the people on-screen scrolling through TikTok, Marty Supreme feels genuinely transporting.
Posted Dec 23, 2025  Edit critic review
The Terminator (1984) Adam Nayman The Terminator is defined by a piercingly universal sense of mortality, one that manifests at the edges of the story but pushes its way to the center until every scene is pressurized by the proximity of death.
Posted Dec 08, 2025  Edit critic review
Jay Kelly (2025) Adam Nayman It’s a fine line between humanizing a difficult character and letting him off the hook entirely, and while Baumbach has it in him to be an unsparing dramatist, he doesn’t do enough to make Jay (or us) squirm.
Posted Nov 14, 2025  Edit critic review
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (2025) Adam Nayman The issue isn’t so much that the story being told isn’t authentic but that the presentation confers an uncanny sense of artificiality, like a four-track home recording fed through Pro Tools.
Posted Oct 30, 2025  Edit critic review
A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE (2025) Adam Nayman It turns out that trying to remake Fail-Safe in a Dr. Strangelove world yields more cognitive dissonance than suspense.
Posted Oct 22, 2025  Edit critic review
TRON: Ares (2025) Miles Surrey With the exception of its Nine Inch Nails score, Ares doesn’t possess any qualities that will stand the test of time: Like the programs that infiltrate our planet, the film will disintegrate from memory as soon as it leaves theaters.
Posted Oct 15, 2025  Edit critic review
One Battle After Another (2025) Adam Nayman There are sequences here so fluid and lucid that remaining skeptics may feel obliged to bend the knee. The messaging is basically: Start polishing that overdue Best Director Oscar now or don’t give it out at all.
Posted Sep 25, 2025  Edit critic review
Maddie's Secret (2025) Adam Nayman If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, Early aces his own high-degree-of-difficulty assignment by leveraging his alt-comic instincts against a reverent (and revelatory) cinephilia.
Posted Sep 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Sirāt (2025) Adam Nayman There’s a stretch in the middle of the movie that constitutes some of the most authentically white-knuckle filmmaking in recent memory. When it comes to working the audience over, Laxe is ruthless.
Posted Sep 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025) Adam Nayman The movie's plot points may be manufactured, but O'Connor's soulfulness is organic. He carries the movie as far as he can and speaks something fresh into Craig's acting.
Posted Sep 16, 2025  Edit critic review
The Smashing Machine (2025) Adam Nayman On the one hand, casting a brand-name pro wrestler as a well-known mixed martial artist is completely on the (prosthetic) nose. What’s remarkable about his work in The Smashing Machine, though, is how little of the Rock comes out.
Posted Sep 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Frankenstein (2025) Adam Nayman Frankenstein is elaborate and expensive but also weirdly muted beneath its color-coded production design; like Nightmare Alley, it’s immaculate and bland.
Posted Sep 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025) Adam Nayman The shrewd visual trickery and sleight-of-hand editing that collapse the distance between the original series’ zero-budget aesthetic and this more comfortably subsidized version can’t actually erase the passage of time. If anything, they deepen it.
Posted Sep 16, 2025  Edit critic review
Weapons (2025) Adam Nayman A supersized showcase that, sadly, spreads its maker’s gifts thin. It’s a curious and frustrating example of how, sometimes, more is actually less.
Posted Aug 12, 2025  Edit critic review
The Naked Gun (2025) Adam Nayman There’s something refreshing -- and invigorating -- about a comedy that just keeps throwing punches, and if, in the end, The Naked Gun lands more jabs than haymakers, the points add up.
Posted Aug 01, 2025  Edit critic review
Eddington (2025) Adam Nayman Ultimately, Eddington is not as much a cautionary tale about American psychosis as an immersion in it, and, as such, it gradually takes on the form of a stress dream, gaining in resonance the further it plunges into a fugue state.
Posted Jul 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Superman (2025) Adam Nayman Basically, Gunn is trying to tear something down and build it up at the same time, and all of that lavishly subsidized indecision becomes hard to take after a while.
Posted Jul 11, 2025  Edit critic review
F1 The Movie (2025) Adam Nayman Nobody is expecting a studio tentpole production that cost $300 million (or whatever) to be a subversive critique of late capitalism, but the movie is ultimately so deferential toward the sport and its ruling class that it comes off as kowtowing.
Posted Jun 26, 2025  Edit critic review
28 Years Later (2025) Adam Nayman The tension between the film’s outsized presentation and its intimate dramaturgy is real and bracing; it’s an epic that grows increasingly overwhelming as it shrinks its field of view.
Posted Jun 21, 2025  Edit critic review
2/4
Venom: The Last Dance (2024) Adam Nayman The Last Dance is, finally, a bit too squishy for its own good. It’s so determined to be endearing that it gradually becomes exhausting.
Posted Jun 17, 2025  Edit critic review
Materialists (2025) Andrew Gruttadaro Song’s interest in love is careful and deep; her ideas about romance, and how she smuggles them into a romantic movie, more than makes the argument for Materialists’ existence.
Posted Jun 13, 2025  Edit critic review
Ballerina (2025) Miles Surrey Ballerina isn’t quite at the level of the mainline John Wick films, but it’s a worthy extension of the universe. The plot is threadbare, but you’re here for the action, and it delivers more of what we’ve come to expect.
Posted Jun 06, 2025  Edit critic review
The Phoenician Scheme (2025) Lex Pryor The Phoenician Scheme is not his best creation, but here, too, it is the sincerity of his devotion that keeps the work leaping off the screen.
Posted Jun 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Pavements (2024) Julianna Ress While Pavements’ ambition could come across as overindulgence in the wrong hands, it’s self-aware and funny enough to balance its many absurd elements.
Posted Jun 05, 2025  Edit critic review
Dangerous Animals (2025) Adam Nayman Generally, movies that deal with the triumph of the human spirit are just so much multiplex chum. But Dangerous Animals is the rare survival thriller in which it feels like something is at stake beyond the mechanics of the story line.
Posted Jun 03, 2025  Edit critic review
Mountainhead (2025) Katie Baker Mountainhead’s importance lies in its immediacy. It’s a map, not a journey.
Posted Jun 03, 2025  Edit critic review
The Accountant 2 (2025) Adam Nayman Even allowing for a certain level of baseline tastelessness in a contemporary Hollywood action movie, The Accountant 2 is nasty stuff.
Posted May 01, 2025  Edit critic review
Sinners (2025) Lex Pryor It’s not a movie that’s trying to prove or convince you of anything, but rather one wholly devoted to building on what inspired it, paying homage, keeping it funky and freaky, entertaining as hell.
Posted May 01, 2025  Edit critic review
Sinners (2025) Adam Nayman With Sinners, the director is playing a different game. He’s forcing the broad mainstream audience he’s cultivated to meet him fully on his own eccentric terms. That the results are imperfect doesn’t matter because they’re so often exhilarating.
Posted Apr 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Sinners (2025) Miles Surrey It’s the coolest thing I’ve seen all year.
Posted Apr 18, 2025  Edit critic review
The Electric State (2025) Adam Nayman Recycled, self-cannibalizing slop, a dystopian action movie for dystopian times, the cinematic equivalent of Soylent Green.
Posted Mar 15, 2025  Edit critic review
Mickey 17 (2025) Adam Nayman For the first time in his career, Bong seems to have conflated pushiness with momentum.
Posted Mar 07, 2025  Edit critic review
The Monkey (2025) Adam Nayman It’s one thing to try to create a goofy, gory crowd-pleaser; it’s another to steadily bleed the enjoyment out of the equation by making the movie in question as smug and unpleasant as possible.
Posted Feb 22, 2025  Edit critic review
Captain America: Brave New World (2025) Adam Nayman If Brave New World isn’t the worst movie ever released under the Marvel banner, it might just be the dullest -- a humorless, grayed-out vision of contractual obligation featuring actors who look like they’d rather be anywhere else.
Posted Feb 19, 2025  Edit critic review
SNL50: The Anniversary Special (2025) Chris DeVille The special was at its best when it focused less on shtick and more on the kind of pure magnetism that can’t be taught.
Posted Feb 18, 2025  Edit critic review
Better Man (2024) Adam Nayman Regardless of how much Better Man actually works, it’s one of the only recent movies made at its budget level with a genuinely interesting relationship between its form and content.
Posted Jan 23, 2025  Edit critic review
Nosferatu (2024) Adam Nayman Nosferatu is gorgeous yet inert, the cinematic equivalent of an exquisite corpse: There’s no point in driving a stake through a heart that isn’t beating in the first place.
Posted Dec 31, 2024  Edit critic review
The Brutalist (2024) Adam Nayman Because so much of The Brutalist is impressive it’s hard to completely write it off for its flaws. At the same time, the general quality of its craftsmanship can’t quite obviate the hollowness of the entire enterprise.
Posted Dec 19, 2024  Edit critic review
Blitz (2024) Adam Nayman Blitz knows what it's doing and why, but its compromises may be more self-deceiving than subversive. Cloaking himself more heavily than ever in populist hand-me-downs, McQueen gets swallowed up by his own brilliant disguise.
Posted Dec 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Gladiator (2000) Adam Nayman The same sturdy conventionality that made Gladiator a hit means that it’s built to last without standing particularly tall. With apologies to Ridley Scott, it holds up fine without echoing into eternity.
Posted Nov 21, 2024  Edit critic review
Juror #2 (2024) Adam Nayman That Juror No. 2 manages to work so well as a movie of ideas without ever really breaking its stride (or a sweat) as a piece of entertainment is testament to Eastwood’s formidable populist instincts.
Posted Nov 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) Adam Nayman The decision to turn the sequel into a musical-slash-courtroom-drama is as perplexing as it sounds—and the results are so bad, they’re actually fascinating...
Posted Oct 04, 2024  Edit critic review
Rebel Ridge (2024) Adam Nayman With a whip-smart plot, a strong lead in Aaron Pierre, and a standout villain in Don Johnson, director Jeremy Saulnier has done it again.
Posted Sep 18, 2024  Edit critic review
The Shrouds (2024) Adam Nayman Like 2022’s superb Crimes of the Future, The Shrouds serves as a reminder that, at 81 years old, Cronenberg is still one of the world’s great filmmakers: bold, uncompromising, clever, and fearless.
Posted Sep 18, 2024  Edit critic review
Cloud (2024) Adam Nayman Cloud is a sophisticated send-up of social commerce culture...
Posted Sep 18, 2024  Edit critic review
Presence (2024) Adam Nayman Presence feels like a limber but limited exercise in cinematic problem-solving rather than a genuine experiment in terror.
Posted Sep 18, 2024  Edit critic review
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