- HBO Max Spin-Off “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” Wastes Clever Concept (July 22, 2026)
It feels like something that came to creators Chuck Lorre, Zak Penn, and Bill Brady after a couple drinks: What if we took characters from our show named after the beginning of the universe and hurled them into the end of it? The answer to this hypothetical “The Big Bang Theory” spin-off is HBO Max’s “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe,” a ten-part original comedy with a few admittedly clever ideas here and there connected by repetitious joke writing, thin plotting, and just not enough to stay engaged. Spread out over weeks, it’s the kind of thing that’s too forgettable to feel insulting, especially at each episode’s remarkably short runtime, but the binge-viewing necessity of TV criticism reveals its many flaws. Most importantly, the end of the world will probably be funnier.
Stuart Bloom (Kevin Sussman) started as a minor, recurring character on “The Big Bang Theory,” developing into a larger presence on the show in later seasons (he was listed as main cast for seasons 8-12). The owner of Comic Center in Pasadena is joined on “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” by three other “BBT” ensemble members: Brian Posehn as Bert Kibbler, Lauren Lapkus as Denise, and John Ross Bowie as Barry Kripke. In the show’s pilot, the world has already collapsed into “The Last of Us”-esque chaos, complete with dwindling supplies and supernatural enemies. Stuart and Bert are using Comic Center as a base, throwing things into an interdimensional rift that they don’t really understand.
One day, an alternate reality version of Stuart comes to our reluctant hero and tells him that he’s the key to saving mankind in this timeline and beyond. Stuart and his three allies end up traveling across alternate realities, ostensibly to try and save the universe, but they’re basically just jumping from frying pan to fire and back again. The structure is simple: Drop the quartet of multiverse travelers into a new concept and watch as they try to figure out how to escape before the episode ends. It can be as simple as a reality in which everyone has telepathy or as ludicrous as one in which everyone eats grass and chews their cud like cows.
The timeline jumping gives “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” the structure of a comic series: Same characters, different adventures every chapter, recurring guest stars (including some from “BBT” that shan’t be spoiled but become a bit of a crutch early on as we’re more interested in who pops up next than the developing leads). The characters become, at best, secondary to the concepts. Sussman does alright holding the show as Stuart, but Lapkus is given almost nothing to play as his love interest Denise, and Bowie’s schtick gets exhausting in its alternating punchlines of horniness, cruelty, and mocking people with speech impediments. Posehn is great at this kind of “gentle giant” thing, but even he struggles to stand out.
The overall issue with “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” is a simple one: It’s just not funny enough. Standing back and looking at its ambitious concept gives it a few style points, for sure—it’s not just “Big Bang 2,” which I’m sure CBS would have backed up money trucks for the creators to make—but the humor writing is shallow and predictable, almost defiantly so in light of the bigger ideas in the outline of the show. It’s as if they knew they had an “out there” premise, and so the writers’ room intentionally tied it to depressingly predictable sitcom writing. We get it: Kripke is a horny dick with a speech impediment. It’s a joke that grew old on another show, which means it feels stale on this one despite its first season status. And it feels like even the writers know they don’t have enough material here as episodes are consistently under 18 minutes long—the seventh one lands at a depressing 14 minutes without credits.
There are, admittedly, glimpses of ingenuity on “Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.” The opening credits play with the idea of skipping stream introductions with different messages every week, set to a great theme song by Danny Elfman. And there’s one episode that completely shifts the dark tone as the gang land in a utopia that’s never heard of things like ownership or monogamy (and completely destroy it). These blips aren’t enough to recommend “Stuart,” but they do hint at where the show could go in future seasons, leaving behind so much of the “BBT” baggage that it willfully brought on this inaugural trip for a brighter reality.
“Stuart Fails to Save the Universe” premieres on HBO Max on July 23, 2026. Whole season screened for review.
- “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” Keeps Boldly Swinging in Tone in Season 4 (July 22, 2026)
As a “Star Trek” fan, it’s hard not to feel the bittersweet sting of another set of Wilderness Years coming. With Paramount feeling the sweet sting of budget cuts and an impending merger with Warner Bros., it feels like the higher-ups at the Big Blue Mountain are closing up shop on the Final Frontier. Its now-flagship show, “Strange New Worlds,” has a mere two seasons to wrap up its five-year mission, and its last gasp at a hit series, “Starfleet Academy,” is burning off a pre-shot second season and closing its doors, hobbled by its expansiveness and the fact that no one seemed all that interested in it. (I didn’t think it was all that bad, in the final estimation.)
To that end, “Strange New Worlds” has the lonely duty of carrying on the “Trek” torch for a few more episodes yet, even as its luster faded a bit by a fairly uneven season 3. The show’s episodic nature is as much of a blessing as it is a curse; yes, it’s neat to get a modern, feature-quality upgrade of the original series’ model of episodic weekly adventures, but sometimes the swings got a little too ambitious. Showrunner Alex Kurtzman et al. learned all the wrong lessons from that musical episode in season two: If comedy episodes are such a hit, why not make them half of our show?
It’s in that tradition that Season 4 continues mightily, in a crop of episodes as exhilarating as they are frustrating. This season was shot back-to-back with the previous one, so it makes sense that the approach is the same, balancing more earnest explorations of the galaxy and our characters’ interpersonal relationships with goofy romps that make ample use of our ensemble’s comic chops. (We were doomed for this course as soon as the showrunners saw a) how skilled Ethan Peck is at doing farce and b) how big the musical episode from season two hit for fans, for good or ill.)
What’s more, this back half of episodes has an even more constricting mission to fulfill: set the “Enterprise” on course to fit the crew roster of “The Original Series.” The fate of Captain Pike (Anson Mount) has been baked into the show’s premise since its beginning, with the future Captain Kirk (Paul Wesley) popping in for frequent visits on the show in ways that stretch credulity (not to mention Starfleet regulations, considering he doesn’t even go here yet). Season 3 added Montgomery Scott (Martin Quinn) to the cast, leaving only Sulu, Bones, and (maybe) Chekov to add in here before the day is out.
Is “Strange New Worlds” looking to close out with the exact same crew configuration as the original show? Who knows. But the pieces are starting to fall into place, which leaves the whole thing feeling a bit like time is running out. Much like Pike himself, time is running out for this particular crew to enjoy their time as a little space family, and it’ll be bittersweet when it’s finally over.
(L-R): Paul Wesley as James T. Kirk and Ethan Peck as Spock in season 4, episode 2, of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+, 2026. Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+
The first six episodes flit between standard Trek fare and these big-swing comedy premises, same as season 3, in ways that are both delightful and whiplash-inducing. The show’s premiere, “Valles Marineris,” is a stern, somber adventure ostensibly in the classic Trek mold, with time warps and moral dilemmas abound as Pike grapples with the ultimate Prime Directive question: do you interfere in cosmic events if they might lead to the creation of the human race? It’s a bit of Cold War thriller, a bit of that Adam Driver dinosaur movie; its tonal swings are a bit too vast to feel any grounding.
Just as the episodes caterwaul in tone, so too do they modulate in quality. A grim “ghost ship” episode (replete with some of the most stomach-churning gore effects you’ll see in a “Trek” show; think “Alien: Resurrection“) will bounce right into a light-hearted “Hangover” riff on a pleasure planet whose atmosphere intoxicates its inhabitants, in which Ortegas (Melissa Navia) must haul a zooted-out Scotty through the hazy bacchanal of the previous night. It’s a fun hour, admittedly, aided by fleet-footed comic direction from “What We Do in the Shadows” EP Yana Gorskaya and a neat guest turn by “Kids in the Hall” alum Dave Foley. (We also get Rebecca Romijn‘s Number One singing a Klingon cover of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”; Heghlu’meH QaQ jajvam, Bonnie Tyler.)
But the gimmick of throwing our cast into “Trek”-styled riffs on popular movies wears thin, as another episode limply gestures at the black-and-white wartime intrigue of “Casablanca” on a planet whose atmosphere literally removes the color from our perception. Then, sigh, there’s the much-ballyhooed puppet episode, in which a “Level Five Transporter Accident” turns our crew (save Spock, of course) into Muppets. It’s a fine premise that they do a surprising amount with—it’s a hoot to see Carol Kane given the Jim Henson Workshop treatment, and it neatly ties into a running character beat about Spock’s growing anxiety. But the show’s insistence on hour-long runtimes leaves them running out of things to do with the puppets pretty quickly.
(L-R): Rebecca Romijn as Una, Christina Chong as La’an Noonien-Singh, and Melissa Navia as Erica Ortegas in season 4, episode 1, of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streaming on Paramount+, 2026. Photo Credit: Jan Thijs/Paramount+
But it’s the sixth episode, “Off-Hour,” that rights the ship nicely, bringing “Strange New Worlds” out of the realm of pastiche and goofiness into a stirring, straightforward disaster episode that sees the crew working together to bring the ship out of a slipstream wormhole that threatens to tear the Enterprise apart. For a season that has bogged itself down with myriad interpersonal relationship dramas whose endings we already know (Spock’s dalliance with Christina Chong’s La’An, Jess Bush’s Nurse Chapel wondering whether to stay on the Enterprise), this crisis seems to pull together the crew in ways that make them feel, however temporarily, like the true inhabitants of the ship fans have known and loved for sixty years now. And if “Strange New Worlds” can recalibrate its energy to maintain this particular matter/antimatter balance, we should be in for a satisfying bow to one of “Trek”‘s most consistently entertaining chapters.
Six episodes screened for review. Premieres July 23rd on Paramount+.
- Fantasia 2026: Our Effed Up World, Zsazsa Zaturnnah, Dance Freak (July 21, 2026)
The Fantasia International Film Festival is its own tricky beast; every year, more than 125 features, hundreds of shorts, and a whole lot of genre film freaks descend on the University of Concordia in Montréal, Québec, to celebrate the weird, the wild, the queer, and the coarse. For the last three years, I’ve been lucky enough to count myself among their number for this vaunted publication, even as the city and the fest time themselves along some painful personal anniversaries (loss of loved ones to death and tragic rifts) that sometimes make the festival difficult to weather.
Even so, as I sit in my hotel room, plinking away after my first of seven days at the fest (and weeks’ worth of supplemental remote viewing after the fact), I try to give myself a sense of ownership over my experiences at this festival. It’s hard to work while you heal, especially when you feel like it’s been taking you too long to do so. But I’m glad to be here to celebrate the films and fellowship that come with this fest.
On that note, one of the great comforts of Fantasia each year is that, like clockwork, there’s always a new Alice Maio Mackay film to enjoy. At the tender age of 21, the Australian trans filmmaker’s latest, “Our Effed Up World,” is her eighth film, and (even in its short, 68-minute form) feels like a distinct evolution of her style and genre concerns. In her intro, Mackay described it somewhere between “Doctor Who,” the slacker video-store hangout movies of Kevin Smith, and those CW pilots that never made it to series.
Those comparisons feel apt, and not just because of the nearly TV episode-length runtime; “Our Effed Up World” centers on Sheri (Sara Thompson), a young woman grieving the death of her grandmother (who we see in flashbacks played by the luminous Kerry Armstrong of “Neighbors” fame). She’s coasting through life, spending most of it hanging with her friends Finn (“The Audacity”‘s Jess McLeod) and Poppy (“Fucktoys”‘s Annapurna Sriram) at the former’s dying video store. Her relationship with her workaholic father, Nick (Scott Major, also an Aussie soap legend), is strained, which makes it hard to connect when they start tying some mysterious disappearances to the appearance of strange green meteors that have touched down around the city.
Mackay’s films have long thrived under their modest budgets through heaps of character, and it’s that lived-in quality that helps “Effed Up” overcome its chintzy props (the alien creature and its nest, in particular, feel a bit Spirit Halloween in a charming way) and too-short runtime. Sriram and McLeod, in particular, throw themselves into the dry humor and interpersonal chemistry well, offering angels and devils on the shoulder of Thompson’s ambivalent Sheri. The Smith-movie hangout vibes work better than the genre window dressing, but that feels purposeful: Mackay simply wants to introduce us to characters we’ll only see for an hour but feel like they’ve known each other for decades.
It makes sense, of course, that trans filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (whose latest, “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” also played the fest in its opening weekend) has a producer credit here. Both filmmakers play merrily in the liminal spaces of genre and queerness/transness, Mackay in particular channeling the slacker haze of Gen-Z queer social groups through the media she clearly grew up adoring. Where “The Serpent’s Skin” explored toxic queer mentorship through “The Craft,” “Effed Up” uses an alien invasion to highlight the way we lean on our friends and loved ones to process unfathomable grief.
Similarly short, but no less boisterous, is the crazily titled “Zsazsa Zaturrnah vs. the Amazonistas of Planet X,” an animated adaptation of the cult Filipino comic book by Carlo Vergara about a gay hairdresser who, thanks to swallowing a magic stone, turns into a busty superheroine who defends her village from all manner of giant creatures. There have been adaptations of the character before, including a live-action 2006 film; Avid Liongoren’s animated take on the character takes all the vibrance of the comic (itself a camp take on Filipino female superhero Darna) and dumps a metric ton of glitter on it.
Sitting somewhere between “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” and “Steven Universe,” “Zsazsa” channels so many queer anxieties, both universal and culturally specific, into the struggle of Ada (Phi Palmos), a thirtysomething hairdresser who yearns for life in the big city but struggles to keep his hair salon business afloat. His best friend, Didi (a boisterous Io Balanon, easily the film’s highlight), eggs him on to live his best life, including asking out muscly hunk Dodong (Siglo Pecho), who, in Ada’s eyes, turns into a kind of Jojo/Handsome Squidward-esque Adonis. (His nipples, also, are unstoppable, bursting even through his skimpy tank tops.)
But the aforementioned melon-sized purple meteor drops into Ada’s home, she swallows it, and with the magic words, grows tremendous strength, a forest of voluminous ginger locks, and proportions that would make Chun-Li from “Street Fighter” blush. Lucky for the town, she’s there in time to stop the titular Amazonistas, a quintet of vamping TERFs whose misandry, while understandable, leaves the whole Earth in danger from their scaled-up monstrosities, which Ada (as new town here Zsazsa) must dispatch with thick thighs and a roster of Wonder Woman moves.
As a queer text, “Zsazsa” finds some fun nuances amid all the bright bursts of color and surprisingly fluid animation (courtesy of local animators Rocketsheep Studio, whose list of interns in the credits feels nearly as long as the movie); there are hints of “Adventure Time” and even the sensually acrobatic violence of games like “Bayonetta” and “NieR.” But amid all the bubbly character designs and raunchy sex jokes (one monster resembles a decidedly suggestive eggplant), Ada’s journey through her gender and self-confidence is a curious one; Zsazsa’s presentation feels akin to the transformative gender expression of drag (in fact, our Fantasia screening was prefaced by an intro featuring a glamorous queen dressed as Zsazsa; Liongoren appeared on stage throwing glitter while she struck fight poses).
At its worst, “Zsazsa Zaturrnah” occasionally, well, drags, its 80-minute runtime cycling through the same queer anxieties about childhood trauma, adult anxiety, and the politics of gender equity (it’s no coincidence that the Amazonistas fashion weapons out of the female gender symbol). But for a scrappy indie effort that seeks to celebrate community, expression, and acceptance, you could do far worse.
Speaking of scrappy, you could hardly find a more lo-fi effort at the fest than Alan Resnick and Robby Rackleff’s “Dance Freak,” made for a measly $40,000 and shot over three years in a style reminiscent of everything from David Lynch to Guy Maddin to “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” That last comp tracks, too, given that Resnick is a venerated Adult Swim alum, making surreal short films like “This House Has People In It” and “Unedited Footage of a Bear”; his comic sensibilities lie in the uncanny discomfort of old-school film form, mining laughs from eerie menace and the absurdism that lies beneath.
That, and a lot of gyrating, is at the core of “Dance Freak,” a nightmarishly funny black-and-white work set in an apocalyptic city as smoke billows up into the sky and the streets are overrun with crime, poverty, and roving gangs of droogs called the “Salad Boys.” Just trying to survive is thirtysomething hot mess Obie (Rackleff), whose hangdog expression and sweat-soaked clothes make it easy to see why, when he meets his ambitious mayoral-hopeful girlfriend Dorty (Megan Koester) for lunch at a diner, she dumps him. Meanwhile, a mysterious leather-jacketed figure (also Rackleff) is roaming around town, flailing his limbs in a dance macabre that, when the wrong person gets too close, makes their flesh collapse on itself.
Is the titular “dance freak” a manifestation of Obie’s sublimated rage and resentment at the world (and women) who make him feel like a loser? Or is he the product of a bizarre science experiment being chased down by Dr. Dilly Gorgul (Sheila Mears), who tracks him, Dr. Loomis-style, through the city with a blaster that looks like a kitbashed hot glue gun? “Dance Freak” presupposes that he is both, and neither, in a twisty, chaotic script that defies open and easy explanation.
That comic anarchy is “Freak”‘s greatest weapon, though, sitting along that same strain of absurd conspiratorial menace that you can see in any given Conner O’Malley short (fitting, since O’Malley appears here in a one-scene wonder as a fellow “freak” who antagonizes Obie while they sit in a jail cell). The world is crazy and insane; Obie’s boss, Megaman (Stavros Halkias), throws expletives in every other word to a hilariously absurd frequency, and the Salad Boys wander the streets taunting people to eat their giant plastic bags of loose greens. (Considering that nowadays that’ll get you a bad case of cyclospora, that might be “Dance Freak”‘s most timely terror.) Every character in this is insane in their own way, which makes the film feel like a fever dream.
A lot of times, this works, especially considering the grainy, harsh black-and-white aesthetic that conjures the indies of the early ’90s, as if “Clerks” had the vibes of “The Elephant Man” and “Pi” put together. There’s a sense of doom and gloom that permeates, an inky-black void that echoes Obie’s despair at the state of his world. It may not make full sense, and it might stretch your attention span even at a brisk 100 minutes, as the tangents grow ever more chaotic. But it’s not hard to see how you, too, could get lost in its hypnotic sway.
- It’s Just You and Me Now, Sport: On “Manhunter: The Final Cut” (July 21, 2026)
When Michael Mann‘s “Manhunter,” an adaptation of Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon, was released in August 1986, it was not a success by any means—it received largely mediocre reviews that dismissed it as a case of style over substance and those reviews, combined with a title that meant little to potential viewers, a cast of largely unfamiliar faces and a new distribution company that was already floundering, helped to keep audiences away. However, once “The Silence of the Lambs” became a phenomenon in the early ’90s, and word got out that there was a previous film featuring Lecter, viewers found it. As the years went on, it would grow to be a cult favorite and reappraised by many as a masterwork in its own right.
Now, 40 years after that initial theatrical stumble, the film is returning to theaters as “Michael Mann’s Manhunter: The Final Cut,” which gives viewers both a 4K restoration supervised by Mann and a new cut, though the newness may vary depending on how many of the various versions of the film that have emerged over the years that you have seen. Regardless of the changes, to see “Manhunter” on the screen is still a truly overwhelming experience that, save for a couple of moments that betray its age and the era when it was made, is as beautiful, fascinating, and frightening now as it was back in 1986.
The film stars a then-unknown William Petersen as Will Graham, a one-time FBI criminal profiler with the ability to get into the mindset of the monsters that he is pursuing. The problem with this is that, once he does get into those mindsets, it isn’t so easy for him to return to normalcy. An attack by a serial killer named Dr. Hannibal Lecktor (Brian Cox)—yes, the spelling is different—inspired a mental breakdown in Graham that proved much harder to overcome than the physical scars he received from the encounter. Now, he has retired to a seemingly bucolic life on the shores of Captiva, Florida, with his wife, Molly (Kim Griest), and their young son Kevin (David Seaman), that, as the film begins, is interrupted by the arrival of Graham’s former superior at the FBI, Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina). He needs Graham’s skills to help them apprehend a new serial killer, an entity dubbed the Tooth Fairy, who has already butchered two entire families and seems poised to kill more unless he is stopped.
Graham isn’t exactly eager to return to the fold—he isn’t even sure if he can continue to make the connections with his unknown prey in the first place—and assures Molly that all he will be doing is examining evidence and won’t be anywhere near the action. When a hunch pays off in the revelation of a previously overlooked fingerprint, Graham finds himself pulled in further, even agreeing to meet with Lecktor (Brian Cox), ostensibly to get his professional insight but really to help him further get into the killer mindset, a gambit that Lecktor almost immediately recognizes which inspires him to have a little bit of fun at Graham’s expense, though few will quite agree with his particularly brand of funning.
While Graham is pursuing his target in the hopes of finding them before the end of the lunar cycle that they seem to be working off of, the film moves to a second narrative track to introduce us to the Tooth Fairy himself, a St. Louis film lab worker named Francis Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), a man with the kind of large, intimidating presence that, if he got in line behind you at your local coffee shop, you would not only leave but reconsider your devotion to caffeine. One day, he meets co-worker Reba McClane (Joan Allen), who doesn’t shy away from him—the fact that she is blind surely being a contributing factor—and they spend an evening together that veers from strange to creepy to romantic and leaves him with the sense of acceptance for which he has been searching. Inevitably, it doesn’t last as a misinterpretation of events essentially destroys what humanity remains in him and sets the final act into terrifying motion.
You have to remember that at the time that Red Dragon was published, serial killers were not as prevalent in popular culture as they would eventually become; material of this sort was considered to be bleak beyond compare. In fact, one director that infamous producer Dino De Laurentis had contacted about doing the film version rejected it after reportedly finding the material “violent and completely degenerate.” (That filmmaker was none other than David Lynch.)
The project landed with Michael Mann at an odd point in his career. The former TV writer had made two feature films and while the first, the heist drama “Thief” (1981) earned decent reviews and did okay at the box office, his 1983 adaptation of F. Paul Wilson’s WWII-era supernatural thriller “The Keep” was a project beset by post-production issues and fights with the studio that ended up being a critical and commercial disaster (albeit a stylishly made one that is still worth checking out).
However, this misstep was all but forgotten a year later when a new cop series on which he served as an executive producer, a little thing called “Miami Vice,” would instantly become one of the most groundbreaking and influential shows of its era. As it happened, the “Miami Vice” connection would be at least a part of why this film was initially dismissed by critics.
Although the narrative more or less followed the basic parameters of Harris’ novel—though he would drop such elements as the detailed look into Dollarhyde’s background and the book’s original climax (which Dario Argento would more or less pilfer for the ending of his 1987 giallo “Opera”)—he and cinematographer Dante Spinotti would use a number of stylistic gambits to help place viewers into the mindset of the characters as a way of putting them in Graham’s shoes. These range from strong color tints (a cool blue for Graham to represent the peace he has found since leaving the FBI and a grisly green to suggest the chaos within Dollarhyde) to utilizing a different frame rate at one key point to underscore the chaos.
Unfortunately, few at the time recognized what Mann was doing here and instead condemned it as nothing more than an extended “Miami Vice” episode that was all style and no substance, which did little to spark interest in an audience that was already beginning to move away from that show.
It boggles the mind that so much of what Mann does well here was more or less summarily dismissed. Right from the start, Mann locks into a unique mode of suspense and dread, and manages to maintain it for the whole of his running time, one that does not necessarily rely on big action beats to keep things going. In fact, one of the most gripping and engrossing sequences in the entire thing has Graham and Crawford walking a potential piece of evidence found in Lecktor’s cell through a group of FBI analysts (including one played by, of all people, Chris Elliott) in order to glean anything they can before they have to return it—the kind of process sequence that would ordinarily get the short shrift in most procedurals but which turns into a genuine showpiece here.
An equally strong moment, and one equally bereft of traditional thrills, comes near the end in an anonymous hotel room where Graham and Crawford alternately despair and turn on each other over their lack of progress; Graham’s burst of white-hot anger ends up being the impetus for the revelation that finally breaks things open (a revelation that was indeed a blood-chiller back in the day).
There are plenty of more traditionally unnerving moments as well, ones that remain discomfiting to watch no matter how many times you have already seen it. There is the encounter between Dollarhyde and Freddy Lounds (Stephen Lang), the obnoxious tabloid reporter who Graham has utilized in an attempt to flush out his target, a sequence that starts off on a tone of dreadful terror, builds from that without any overt violence, and climaxes with one of the most jarring shock moments you will ever see.
At another point, Graham is on an airplane sifting through one of the case files before going into a reverie about Molly that he is suddenly jarred out of when the little girl sitting next to him notices the gory crime photos on his tray. Then there is the climax, where the combination of the deliberately jarring color scheme, the equally wild production design from Mel Bourne, and a particularly inspired musical choice leads to a sequence that plays like a master class in the art of suspense cinema.
Adding greatly to the power of the film are the performances delivered by a cast of actors who were not particularly well-known but prove to be ideally cast. Before this film, William Petersen was a Chicago stage actor whose only previous film appearances were a bit part in Mann’s “Thief” and the lead in William Friedkin’s 1985 crime thriller “To Live and Die in L.A.” His work here is particularly strong, both for the way that he is able to suggest the internal struggle that he faces with the dark psyche that allows him to do his job so well but at the risk of his own sanity and for the way that he is able to verbalize Graham’s internal monologues while grasping for clues without making it sound contrived. (Petersen would, of course, go on to star on “C.S.I.,” a show that is so obviously inspired by this film that it could easily be mistaken for a legitimate adaptation.)
As his target, Tom Noonan (who passed away earlier this year) is just as strong, primarily because he doesn’t play Dollarhyde as some kind of slavering maniac. He is a monster, but in his encounters with Reba, we get hints of the gentler soul that still exists inside of him to some degree—when the misunderstanding that finally pushes him over the edge occurs (“Francis is gone. Francis is gone forever.”), the moment is not just scary but strangely heartbreaking as well.
Although Lecktor is only a supporting character in the story, Brian Cox dominates every scene he appears in with a turn that is more subtle than Hopkins’ cheerfully scenery-chewing turn in the role—even while engaging in his lightly ironic banter with Graham, you always get a sense of the immense damage that his Lecktor could unleash. All of the supporting players are equally strong, but special note goes out to Joan Allen, another Chicago stage performer whose only previous film work up to this point was a role in “Compromising Positions.” It’s the kind of role that should be almost unplayable (the blind woman who briefly brings humanity to the monster without knowing who he really is), she manages to make her into such a believable and compelling character that it takes viewers unfamiliar with the story a couple of minutes to realize that she is supposed to be blind.
In many ways, “Manhunter” is a product of its era—the visual style and the clothing choices pretty much scream ’80s throughout—but the film as a whole has aged so well that it is easy to accept the occasional excesses. The only aspect that feels dated these days is the music, an area that Mann has always made prominent in his works, from the scores composed by Tangerine Dream for “Thief” and “The Keep” to the contemporary pop hits backing the action every week on “Miami Vice.” In this film, he tries for a hybrid of the two approaches that doesn’t quite land.
The score by the Philadelphia band The Reds and composer Michel Rubini is perfectly fine, if perhaps a bit too overwhelming at a couple of points where less might have been more. However, there are a few songs dropped in here and there that prove to be a distraction (particularly during the love scene between Francis and Reba). The film makes up for these excesses by providing one of the all-time great needle drops by scoring the extended climax to Iron Butterfly’s “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” a merging of sound and vision that fits together so perfectly in bringing Graham and Dollarhyde together at last while signifying their shared mental disintegrations that you would swear that it was written specifically for the film.
Over the years, as he has done with a number of his films, Mann would fiddle with “Manhunter,” resulting in a number of different versions leading up to what he promises is its final iteration. This Final Cut is pretty much a cleaned-up version of the Director’s Cut that he prepared for home video back in 2003. It drops a couple of moments, slightly extends a couple of scenes, and adds a scene towards the end where, after the final takedown, an emotionally battered Graham visits the home of the family who were going to be Dollarhyde’s next victims in an attempt to help recalibrate his mindset before going back home to his loved ones.
In terms of recuts, Mann is kind of hit-and-miss as a whole—while his rejiggering of “Blackhat” was an improvement, his tweaks to things like “The Last of the Mohicans” and “Miami Vice” were much less effective. Here, the film remains fundamentally the same; the changes don’t really bring anything new to the party other than the remastered visuals and sound. Personally, I still prefer the original theatrical release—it is the one that I first saw back in the day and which struck me so strongly—and when this new variation eventually arrives on home video, I hope that this initial version is included as well.
Whether it is that original version or this new Final Cut, “Manhunter” is a flat-out masterpiece that is both Mann’s greatest work as a filmmaker as well as one of the greatest cinematic thrillers ever made. Balancing an alternately gorgeous and haunting visual style with a gripping, twisty narrative, compelling characters, and convincing emotional stakes, it is a film that grabs you right from its creepy opening moments and holds you spellbound until the end credits roll, and most likely long after that.
For those who have never seen it before, Mann’s striking combination of art and pulp will stand out in stark contrast to the comparative mediocrities of contemporary thrillers. For those who have seen and adored it, you will be relieved to know that it is still as tense and watchable as ever.
“Michael Mann’s Manhunter: The Final Cut” is playing in limited theatrical release starting July 24, and traveling throughout August.
- Closer to Trees: Hirokazu Kore-eda on “Sheep in the Box” (July 20, 2026)
Across his films, one of director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s core thematic interests has been that of found family, the way people whose shared histories should normally divide them instead find kinship with one another. His films, from the wayward children of “Nobody Knows” to the eclectic outsiders who populate “Broker,” find ways to foster a sense of safety among each other. With his latest, “Sheep in the Box,” Kore-eda explores these questions in the context of science fiction, complicating his questions around belonging and family by introducing artificial humanoids and generative AI.
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda.
The artificial humanoid in question is named Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki), who lives with his parents, Kensuke (Daigo Yamamoto) and Otone (Haruka Ayase). Kensuke and Otone are still actively mourning the death of their son Kakeru and, through a company called ReBirth, order an android replica of their child. While the robot Kakeru may physically resemble their son, there’s dissonance between how he acts and how Kensuke’s and Otone’s son originally was.
It’s in that gap between expectation and reality that Kore-eda adds new wrinkles to the questions that have long captivated him: Can families be healed through technology or is it an unworthy salve? What can an intentional community look like with beings who have no soul? Does an algorithm gain any sort of humanity the moment it takes on corporeal form?
Not too long after “Sheep in the Box” premiered in Competition at Cannes, RogerEbert.com sat down with the master filmmaker about the influence of The Little Prince, how he approached his sympathetic depiction of AI while being fully aware of its detriment to the environment, and the embodied practices that continue to help him stay rooted in a world that’s going increasingly more digital.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Until watching your film, I had honestly forgotten that the title, “Sheep in the Box,” was in reference to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book, The Little Prince. What significance does that book hold for you, and why did you choose to anchor the text around it?
Hirokazu Kore-eda: Well, I read the book as a child, and to be honest, I didn’t really understand it. There were certain scenes that I remembered as is often the case, and I knew that imagination was key to this story. When I knew I was making this film about humans and generative AI, I knew that I wanted the mother to read a bedtime story to this humanoid that had come into her home, but I also thought it’d be interesting if the humanoid didn’t understand the story, and the scene of the sheep inside the box came back to me. I thought, “He wouldn’t have the imagination to know that there’s a sheep inside the box,” which I thought could be really interesting.
So I wrote that scene featuring the book, then came up with the idea of the snow globe, and ultimately of him rescuing the prince from inside it. Ultimately, I thought it would make a good title that connects back to this theme of imagination that I wanted to ground this film.
One of the famous lines in this book is “It is only in the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” That line feels like it can apply to your whole filmography, particularly works like “After Life” or “Monster.” Looking at your work, you’ve been very heart-forward, very human-centered, and I’m wondering if you find that line a succinct way to summarize your philosophy of art-making.
You would be right. I came across that in a book I was reading by the architect Ryue Nishizawa, who is mentioned in the film. I was reading some of his writings, and he said that in architecture, the most important things are the things you can’t see. It came back again in the film, and the idea that what’s most important for the parents is not when they can actually see what looks like their son in a physical form, but rather when he leaves them, and they are able once again to imagine their son in the trees in the garden. For humans, it is more important and beautiful to imagine new possibilities rather than keep their love in the realm of memory. This is the story of them coming to realize that.
Sheep in the Box (NEON)
As much as the film is about generative AI and humanity’s relationship to it, you’re also offered musings about nature as a whole and how that complicates that dynamic. I think of the opening sequence where we see the drones flying through Kamakura: it is an intersection of humanity, technology, and nature. You’ve talked about how the way humans communicate is very similar to trees, so I’m wondering if you can flesh out that parallel.
Well, I read a lot of books about trees and how they communicate, and they communicate with each other through their roots and their leaves and in ways that human beings can’t see, and that’s how they protect the forest from invaders, including insects, and they keep their environment healthy. They have this system that connects them all, which is astonishing. Then I started researching generative AI and saw in the news that AIs have already begun communicating with each other without human interference.
I spoke to some scientists, specifically AI researchers, who said that this is a possibility in the near future, that AIs will be able to interact without any contribution from human beings, and that they might start connecting and working out how to survive. In that case, I thought the way the AI communicates might be more similar to how trees communicate than to how human beings communicate. Maybe, as in the story, the way generative AI is working is closer to trees.
I think in the past, human beings were also connected in this way. Even if it was not a 1:1 ratio with trees, human beings connected through their imaginations. With this film, I wanted to set out whether that way of connecting–through our imaginations–is something that we’re still able to do or whether we’ve lost that ability, and how we might relearn that muscle.
You hold a sympathetic view of AI in this film, which I found to be in tension with as a viewer, if only because I think about the environmental devastation caused by the proliferation of data centers. Were you thinking through this tension when working on this film, of whether you might have been too sympathetic in your portrayal?
Do you think AI is more damaging to the environment than humans? It’s true that technological progress has damaged the environment in various ways, but I don’t think we can place the responsibility for that at the door of AI. It’s human responsibility. It’s human beings who have chosen to live this way, but I’m not trying to absolve AI of any responsibility.
In the film, I wanted to show that these human beings who started out living in nature have now moved into cities and can’t live in the forests anymore; that’s what civilization is to them. Whereas the humanoids representing the dead children and those who reject the children who’ve been rejected by society can now live in the forest, and maybe it’s a bit cynical, but it’s as though the human beings have been left behind by this new society that they’re making.
I suppose if I’d had the parents living happily ever after in the forest with the machines and the children, then that would have been a fairytale ending, but that’s, I think, impossible. So I’ve tried to give them a difference.
Sheep in the Box (NEON)
You ground so much of the film’s action in the house occupied by Otone and Kensuke. It feels very much like a living character, warm and inviting during the day because of the way it holds natural light, but for that very reason, it feels more terrifying in the evening, when it holds more shadow. How did you and Production designer Okada Takuya ultimately decide on that house?
That’s a real house in Kamakura that was built by a couple. The wife is an architect, and the husband works with wood exactly like a film. I came across this house with that walkway without any railings, and I imagined a child living there, running carefree, unafraid of the night and rejuvenated by the day. 70% of the shots you see are us using the real house. There was about 30% of the house that we couldn’t use, such as the bathroom, bedroom, and part of the kids’ room, so I had Okada-san recreate that based on the designs of the house.
At the film’s press conference, you talked about how technological progress, while great, also makes things more uniform. Each of your films feels and looks distinct; what practices are you holding to that help retain your sense of identity?
I’m writing this new screenplay, and as you can see [shows script book], I don’t move things around on the computer screen. I have to have it on the paper and then add my notes. I can better organize my thoughts when I use my hands; it helps with creativity to have those ideas physically embodied, and the same goes for writing. It’s a bit like the analogy of the AI having a physical body, because that helps give it an identity, and in this way, my ideas sort of take shape physically as I use my hand to make these marks on the paper. It all starts from there [gestures to script book]. It’s an important element of my creativity, and it’s my philosophy.
I almost feel bad having my computer here now in front of you with my questions.
(Laughs) Don’t worry, I use one too.
Sheep in the Box (NEON)
As much as the film comments on technology, nature, and humanity, this is ultimately a film about parenting. Even though Kensuke and Otone shouldn’t punish themselves for what happened to Kakeru, as parents, they can’t help but turn the blame inward. Has working on the project made you think about technology as a form of absolution?
I’m not sure how well I managed to achieve this, but I thought if the role of that humanoid was to show up, assuage their guilt, and then disappear again, that would be very convenient. But at the same time, if he shows up, gets them to face up to their guilt, and then disappears again, that would be quite cruel.
So I wanted him to show up and get them to somehow face up to their guilt, but then I started thinking about what it is about his presence that allows them to be healed. I think it’s because this boy grows up to become an architect in a sense, but influencing both of those parents, he becomes a new kind of architect, and in that sense, he’s turning the guilt of the past into something positive for the future. The humanoid has the idea of building his own house, and his parents have both contributed to his being able to do so.
It’s a new step, a new possibility that goes beyond the guilt, and that’s what the scene where the three of them are standing with their backs to us looking at the tree is- that’s the way that I hope the audience will take that scene.
I’ve spoken with Neo Sora, and he’s spoken about a desire for filmmaking as a way to push back against the historical amnesia that, in his mind, is gripping Japan. Your works feel similar in that they’re earnest calls to remember.
What a great thing to say. He’s so young, and it’s very encouraging to have such young people articulating these ideas. But I think the fact that people can stand up in public and say Look at the crimes they’ve done and say, “That had nothing to do with us; we’re not responsible. ‘ ” It’s a lack of awareness but also a lack of imagination.” In that sense, it’s tied in the way memory intersects in this film, but I wouldn’t say that’s something I directly explored with this film.
“Sheep in the Box” is in select theaters now via NEON.
