Review: 'The Social Reckoning' digs into Facebook's dark secrets, and recasts Mark Zuckerberg as the scheming bad guy

It’s a bit of a disservice, while watching writer-director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” to think too hard about the 2010 movie “The Social Network,” which Sorkin also wrote (and David Fincher directed) — which is an odd thing to realize about a sequel.

Where that Fincher/Sorkin joint (for which Sorkin won an adapted-screenplay Oscar) unfolded as a bubbly character study of the young Mark Zuckerberg morphing from an arrogant know-it-all into a rich arrogant know-it-all, the new movie is something different. Sure, Zuckerberg is still a pivotal character — played this time by Jeremy Strong rather than Jesse Eisenberg — but the main action of this modern thriller is centered on two people trying to unravel what Facebook’s founder has wrought.

One of these people is Frances Haugen, played by “Anora” Oscar winner Mikey Madison. Haugen works in Facebook’s civil integrity unit, the group of coders tasked with reducing Facebook’s hate speech posts and political misinformation. Haugen is a true believer, and often declares how much she loves her job because of how Facebook allows people to connect with each other.

In 2019, when the movie begins, Haugen’s team gets a warning from Facebook’s top PR guy (Billy Magnussen) about a new arrival to the Bay Area: Jeff Horwitz (played by Jeremy Allen White), a reporter with the Wall Street Journal. Horwitz has been assigned to the Journal’s San Francisco office to cover Facebook. He’s not a tech guy — his editor (Betty Gilpin) mocks him for his inability to use GPS on his rental car — but he’s an investigative reporter, and Facebook isn’t just a tech firm but a force in politics and culture.

Horwitz’ approach of Haugen is tentative. They meet in a park, a neutral spot away from her Facebook colleagues (some of whom live in her apartment building). She wants to be anonymous and off the record, which makes it hard for Horwitz to pin down anything she’s telling him about how Facebook changed its mission, away from just connecting and toward getting people to watch and react — and how the most rage-inducing posts prompted the most reactions.

While Horwitz continues to work on Haugen — the pas de deus of a reporter and a source has seldom been depicted so smartly — through 2019 and the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic, the movie also jumps forward to 2021 and an important day for Zuckerberg. 

On this day, Facebook’s founder is suffering through a practice session for an upcoming Congressional hearing. He impatiently listens to his image consultant (Wunmi Mosaku) tell him how to speak and nod and appear human, while a former confidante (Bill Burr) sits in the back and peppers the boss with criticism — particularly about the election misinformation spewing out of the social network. Zuckerberg, here and elsewhere, insists that Facebook is blameless, comparing the site to a “cork board” that can’t control who posts whatever on it. But everything Horwitz is uncovering, and everything Haugen is feeding him, tells a more sinister version of the story.

Sorkin has a long history — “A Few Good Men,” “Moneyball,” “Steve Jobs” and on every episode of “The West Wing” he ever touched — of writing words to be spoken by the smartest people in the room, and having actors good enough and lucky enough to deliver them with conviction.

Madison chews through the tech talk about how Facebook works, and gets through that to show the sharp yet idealistic young woman who thought people would do the right thing even when the the wrong thing was more profitable. White depicts Horwitz as a smart guy realizing how much he has to learn about the tech industry. And Strong, wedging himself into the uncanny valley between Zuckerberg’s responses and human expression, captures the petty small-mindedness of a man often mistaken for one of the world’s deepest thinkers.

If “The Social Network” made a sympathetic outlaw anti-hero out of Zuckerberg, “The Social Reckoning” is an important corrective — a reminder that it’s the people breaking free of Facebook’s outsized influence who deserve our attention and praise.

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‘The Social Reckoning’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language. Running time: 112 minutes.

Review: 'The Lake' gives the Great Salt Lake its closeup, and highlights the people trying to save a fragile natural wonder

I may not be the right audience for “The Lake,” director Abby Ellis’ quietly compelling documentary about the environmental plight of the Great Salt Lake — because, as a journalist in Utah whose colleagues have reported on the lake for decades, I already know a lot of the information and some of the players in this film.

If you’re from outside Utah, or are in Utah but haven’t paid attention, Ellis’ movie is a bracing introduction to the problems of what The New York Times once called an “environmental nuclear bomb.”

Ellis starts in 2023, as several scientists warn about the dangers posed by the lake losing its water supply. Exposing the lake bed, they warned, would allow toxic dust — with chemicals like arsenic and cadmium — into the air, spreading up and down the Wasatch Front, threatening the health of some 3 million people downwind. (Those people include me, my family, my friends, every person I encounter in an average day, and a massive chunk of the population of Utah.)

Two of those scientists — ecologist Ben Abbott at Brigham Young University and biologist Bonnie Baxter at Westminster University — take the lead on a study that issues a dire warning: Within five years, the lake will shrink to the point where the dust will overwhelm hundreds of square miles in Utah and beyond.

Ellis’ documentary follows the aftermath of that report, which was roundly rejected by Utah political leaders, particularly after two years of good rain reset the timetable. Ellis shows Abbott wrestling with the urgency of the lake’s plight, and whether his passion to spread the word veers into activism. Baxter, on the other hand, deals with the possibility that lake bed exposure might be affecting her own health.

The third person highlighted in Ellis’ film is Brian Steed, a longtime player in Utah government, who’s tabbed to be the state’s first Great Salt Lake commissioner. Steed works to navigate the political landscape, seeking common ground between the two groups— farmers and cities — that use much of the water that isn’t getting to the lake. (Note: In May, four months after the movie’s premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, Steed resigned as Great Salt Lake commissioner for a job at Utah State University.)

Ellis lays out complicated concepts, like how terminal lakes are created and how so many of them have ceased to exist, with lucid explanations — illustrated with gorgeous images of the lake’s eerie beauty. She also gives all sides a chance to tell their stories, as they seek to build bridges and work together to find a solution. It’s a rare documentary about the environment that doesn’t cast anyone as the bad guy, and doesn’t leave the audience without hope.

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‘The Lake’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 9, in theaters. Not rated, but probably PG for thematic elements. Running time: 88 minutes. 

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This review initially appeared on this site on January 22, 2026, after the movie premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Digger' tries to make satire out of the climate crisis, with Tom Cruise pushing hard but not bringing any comedy to the project.

Well into the cosmic misfire that is “Digger,” there’s a moment where a character, played by Sophia Wilde, is yelling at the character played by star Tom Cruise that what they’re doing is satire — and that satire is supposed to be funny.

This moment suggests that director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu has crossed over into that Netflix parody of moviemaking, where characters have to shout the movie’s most basic points to the audience, who may be folding the laundry or looking at their phones. 

One could say the same of a scene earlier in this humorless attempt at satire, where the President (John Goodman) tells Cruise’s character, oilman Digger Rockwell, that he’s dying of “cancer of the asshole.” Certainly something has ventured up someone’s sphincter in this movie, though I firmly believe it was Cruise and his director.

When the movie starts, we see Cruise as Digger, arguably the richest and most powerful man on Earth, indulging in typical rich-person behaviors — like tending to his cat, who’s infirm to the point of immobility and would be heading for that big scratching post in the sky if Digger would listen to his veterinarian’s diagnosis.

Digger clearly thinks he’s smarter than all of his experts, whether it’s the vet or the researcher at the Rockwell company’s drilling station off the coast of Greenland. Digger’s main expert, Ganesh (Riz Ahmed), learns that seconds after Digger finished that call, an explosion of methane from underground destroyed the drilling station and caused a massive ice shelf to break off and start floating toward Europe.

Digger meets the President and the cabinet to explore options, including hoping the ice shelf will steer clear of Europe, worrying that it will cause a tsunami that will kill hundreds of thousands, or nuking the thing into smaller icebergs. Digger decides he has to take charge, so he can stop the climate catastrophe that he knows he started.

The movie soon takes a sharp left turn, which I will not describe in case everything I’ve said so far about this misbegotten movie didn’t impress you and you still want to watch it for yourself. 

What you’ll see is a self-important attempt at satirizing the climate crisis and the indifference of powerful men. (The only woman approaching a level of power is Digger’s sister, a renewable-energy CEO played by Sandra Hüller.) The script — credited to Gonzalez Iñárritu and three other writers — is too literal to be funny and too outlandish to be anything else. It makes the 2021 climate comedy “Don’t Look Up” look like the laugh riot only its producers thought it was.

It’s tempting to credit Cruise with trying something different, for being willing to stretch beyond his action-movie stardom. The problem is that Cruise acts like all this humor-free ridiculousness is imparting a deeper message, when the chaos he and Gonzalez Iñárritu are stirring up destroy all attempts to give the movie a serious edge.

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‘Digger’ 

★1/2

Opens Friday, October 2, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for pervasive language. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: 'Verity' is a psychological thriller that's lacking in brains, but loaded with sex appeal of stars Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson

At one point in the thriller “Verity,” famous author Verity Crawford (played by Anne Hathaway) is giving enigmatic answers to questions posed by Sean Evans between bites of chicken wings doused in pepper sauces on “Hot Ones” — something Evans has never done with a novelist in 30 seasons of the show.

And yet that’s not the dumbest or funniest thing that happens in “Verity,” a slick but empty psychological drama about the different ways writers lie for a living.

Hathaway’s Verity is the fictional writer in this story, but the real-life writer who got the ball rolling is Colleen Hoover, whose trauma-heavy novels have inspired four movies in the last two years. (The others are “It Ends With Us,” “Regretting You” and “Reminders of HIm.”) Hoover envisions Verity as the elegant nasty writer she always dreamed of being, and then proceeds to run her through an emotional horror show.

The script, adapted by Nick Antosca (who wrote this year’s “Cape Fear” miniseries), starts with the most horrifying meet-cute ever. Unknown Manhattan author Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) is on her way to a big meeting at a major publisher — when she’s suddenly covered in blood from a bike messenger flattened by a motorist. A nice guy (Josh Hartnett) takes her to a nearby coffee shop to clean up, and even offers his shirt to replace her blood-drenched blouse. 

At the publisher, she sees Hartnett’s character, Jeremy, in the meeting, and learns that he’s Verity’s husband. The publishing house wants Verity’s next blockbuster novel, but Verity is unable to finish, so Jeremy has suggested Lowen can be Verity’s ghost writer and finish the work.

Lowen is invited to the Crawfords’ ultra-modern home in Vermont, where Verity and Jeremy live with their son, Crew (Brady Wagner), and where covers the frozen lake just beyond the backyard. Lowen learns some of Verity’s recent tragedies, including the boating death of Crew’s twin sister, Harper (Sienna Kolovitz), and the car crash that has left Verity catatonic.

As Lowen insinuates herself in the Crawford home, she goes through Verity’s notes and uncovers a hidden thumb drive with an unsettling manuscript, an autobiography in which Verity reveals some horrible secrets. Lowen also starts having sexual fantasies about Jeremy, and once about Verity herself. (The “another chance to see Dakota Johnson’s boobs” scene involves Lowen pleasuring herself in the bath.)

Director Michael Showalter is known for offbeat comedies and romances, such as “The Big Sick,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and the Hathaway-starring romance “The Idea of You.” I don’t doubt Showalter’s talent could extend to the psychological thriller, but he needs stronger material than what Hoover gives him. Any movie where the major plot driver is Johnson stumbling over writings Hathaway left behind needs some serious plot restructuring. It’s also a stretch of credulity to suggest Johnson as a younger, hotter substitute for Hathaway, who’s hot enough in her own right. 

Speaking of Hathaway, it’s notable that this is the fifth movie she’s starred in this year — and, among other things, it’s been fun watching her baby bump swell with every red carpet line. “Verity” is the weakest entry of the five, and one wishes she had said “no” to something in the last two years.

The most unforgivable sin of “Verity,” out of several contenders, is how Showalter and Antosca — and likely Hoover — sends the plot one way and then another, and finally declare (via Verity’s “Hot Ones” appearance, no less) that there is no “true” conclusion, and we in the audience are rubes for expecting one.

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‘Verity’

★★

Opens Friday, October 2, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual content, some nudity, language, violence and bloody images. Running time: 114 minutes.

Review: 'The Incomer' is an eccentric Scottish comedy that gets its best humor from its three strange main characters

Writer-director Louis Paxton’s “The Incomer” joins that particular genre of small, strange comedies from the British Isles, where eccentric characters come up against the system in all its impersonal bureaucracy.

The eccentrics here are Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), siblings who have lived 30-plus years, since early childhood, on Auke Isle, a forbidding hunk of rock in far northern Scotland. They never come to the mainland, and Isla bears a particular fear of the water, because of the Fin Man (John Hannah) who lives there and wants to drag her down and eat her — or, at least that’s what she thinks would happen.

The siblings frequently train to defend themselves and their home from outsiders, or “incomers.” One day, such a person lands at the dock at the water’s edge. He’s Daniel (played by Domhnall Gleeson), and he represents the local Scottish council, with orders to evacuate the people living there.

Isla and Sandy, of course, don’t want to go, and dangle Daniel on the edge of a cliff to make their point. Over time, Daniel starts to understand the siblings’ odd ways, while Sandy and Isla start to see Daniel as something they haven’t had in decades: A friend.

Paxton gets the best out of these three actors, who make the most out of their characters: O’Rourke playing Sandy as the overgrown child; Gleeson finding the inner nerd within the dull civil servant; and especially Rankin as Isla, whose protective armor against outsiders masks a sense of wonder at what they can do.

“The Incomer” doesn’t completely come together, particularly in an island climax that delivers too much slapstick in a movie that got along fine without it. When the movie is at its best, it burrows deep into these three lonely people finding connection at the outer reaches of Great Britain.

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‘The Incomer’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 2, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for brief graphic nudity. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Primetime' aims to explore good and evil in TV news but can't find the answers so easily, even with Robert Pattinson's fascinating performance

In the video-age journalism thriller “Primetime,” director Lance Oppenheim uses the former NBC News series “To Catch a Predator” to serve as a vessel carrying the emotional weight of people trying to convince themselves they’re working together to stop evil — but the vessel is a leaky one, and doesn’t deal with the uncomfortable answers to the questions it’s raising.

Oppenheim starts the story in 2007, when the formula for “To Catch a Predator” is well established. A suspect — like the ex-Marine (played by Tony Revolori) we meet on the first “sting” — gets into an online chat with someone he’s told is underage, but in reality is Xavier von Erck (played by Michael Maher), who runs an online anti-trafficking group called Perverted-Justice. Von Erck is working with the show’s producers, and giving the chatroom transcripts to host Chris Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson.

The “sting” invariably ends with the suspect being asked to come to a house in the suburbs. There, a decoy — like Dee, played by the musician Phoebe Bridgers — asks the man inside and then tells him to wait while she changes in the next room. That’s when Hansen comes in, delivers his trademark, “Why don’t you take a seat?,” and asks the guy what he’s doing there. Then the TV crew is revealed, and the law enforcement outside waiting to arrest him.

Hansen, first-time writer Ajon Singh’s script notes, won journalism awards for his past work, particularly about child trafficking in India. But the “To Catch a Predator” busts give him something else: Fame, and a thirst to boost NBC’s ratings. When the studio chief (former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Zucker, essentially playing himself) tells Hansen and his producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever), that he’s going to move “To Catch a Predator” to the time slot held by TV’s most popular show, ABC’s “Lost,” Hansen sees an opening to the big time, in prime time.

The pressure mounts on Hansen from several directions. In addition to the network rivalry with anchor Stone Philips, Hansen is juggling a faltering marriage (his wife is played by Anna Faris) and an affair with a 30-year-old woman that’s gotten the attention of the National Enquirer. Hansen is convinced all he needs is to land “a whale” on the show, and a tip from von Erck about a prosecutor (Alex Winter) in Texas might be the big score the show needs.

Hansen’s battles with fame and journalistic ethics is one of three moral battles in Singh’s script. Another is Bender’s, as she contemplates leaving NBC for an offer to produce a “Predator”-lite news show on ABC, one that’s more about feel-good stories than busting pathetic men. (Bender, it should be noted, is a composite character.)

The third person wrestling with his conscience is Dan Plum (played by “Superman” sidekick Skyler Gisondo), an idealistic young actor who auditions for “To Catch a Predator” and is quickly hired to be the show’s newest decoy. At first, Dan thinks of it as an improv exercise, and a chance to get a Screen Actors Guild card. Once he encounters Hansen’s magnetic charm, though, Dan’s moral compass takes a few spins. 

Oppenheim is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker — his collaboration with Nathan Fielder about fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, “You Can See Everything,” wowed critics at the fall festivals and hits theaters in October — so it’s unsettling, from a journalism standpoint, to see how he and Singh condense and truncate events for dramatic effect. (For example, the National Enquirer story landed in 2011, not in 2007.) The most authentic thing in the movie is cinematographer David Bolen’s grainy, mid-aughts video resolution, which looks like it was copied off of a VHS tape.

Oppenheim doesn’t contend with one of the failings of Hansen and “To Catch a Predator,” which is that some prosecutors never pursued charges against the men Hansen exposed on TV. (Watch David Osit’s 2025 documentary “Predators” for a more nuanced exploration of that and other issues around the show.) Instead, with a flinty and fascinating performance by Pattinson, “Primetime” aims to portray Hansen as a man claiming he’s battling evil through his TV show — but in the end showing him saying whatever he needs to say in the moment to keep his crusader image alive. 

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‘Primetime’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for disturbing sexual material, graphic nudity, some violent content, and language. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'Forgotten Island' is a fast-paced animated story that celebrates two girls' friendship and their Filipino culture

Heaven protect the animators who bring their personal stories, rooted in their family’s heritage from far-flung spots on the globe, to become a multi-million-dollar animated movie — whether it’s Domee Shi’s “Turning Red” for Pixar, Charise Castro Smith’s screenwriting in “Encanto,” or now Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado’s collaboration on the energetic, funny and surprisingly moving “Forgotten Island.”

This movie centers on two girls growing up in a town in the Philippines, and is steeped in Filipino culture and folklore. The girls — rebellious artist Jo (voiced as a young adult by the singer H.E.R.) and studious science nerd Raissa (voiced as an adult by Liza Soberano) — meet as grade-schoolers, outside the principal’s office. Jo disrupted class by reciting tales, learned from her grandmother Lola (voiced by Dolly De Leon), about the legendary monster Manananggal, while Raissa got in trouble for defending Jo from their teacher’s taunting.

For the first 20 minutes or so, the movie shows the arc of their friendship, in a quick-cut montage of their adventures and misadventures — each one immortalized by new items on their twin charm bracelets. Lola is their protector during these escapades, up until Lola gets sick and passes away, right around the time Raissa is preparing to leave the Philippines for college at Caltech.

Jo, afraid that she’s losing her best friend, insists on one last adventure together before Raissa flies off to California. On the beach, they recall Lola’s stories of a magical portal to Nakali, a land of magical sights — and home to Manananggal. On this night, the girls find the key to the portal (a sand dollar with the same sunburst pattern that adorns the flag of the Philippines), and they are suddenly in Nakali.

They also wake up with no memory of the last 12 hours and, like the guys in “The Hangover,” have to piece together what happened — including Jo’s tattoo, Raissa’s missing hair, and the unexpected appearance of a dog-boy, Raww (voiced by Dave Franco), who insists that he is now the girls’ best friend. 

Raww leads the girls to Batiba (voiced by Jenny Slate), a “dream demon” who collects memory-imbued objects in exchange for wishes. Batiba offers to help Jo and Raissa get home, if they will give up their charm bracelets — and, with them, the memories the girls have of their friendship.

The writer-directors, Crawford and Mercado, last collaborated on “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” and they bring back their fast-moving and soulful visual style for this movie. They employ imagery from Japanese anime and, in the depiction of Manananggal, evocations of Laika’s off-kilter stop-motion look. And it all moves at a blistering pace, with the wonders and the jokes flying at the audience.

The filmmakers have collected a voice cast filled with actors of Filipino heritage — notably H.E.R., Soberano and De Leon, as well as Lea Salonga (as Manananggal), Manny Jacinto and Jo Koy. That attention to casting is matched by the thousand little signifiers of Filipino culture and mythology, which give “Forgotten Island” a depth and warmth that make it a movie worth remembering for a long time.

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‘Forgotten Island’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for animated sequences of scary action, language, rude humor, thematic elements, some violence and brief tobacco imagery. Running time: 109 minutes.

Review: "The History of Concrete" lets filmmaker John Wilson apply his elliptical storytelling to a broad topic — our quick-setting culture

In a recent list of the 100 greatest TV shows of the 21st century, The New York Times ranked the documentary series “How To With John Wilson” at No. 80, saying that “Wilson’s free-associative journeys are by turns comedic and melancholic” — which is a good description of Wilson’s movie-length documentary “The History of Concrete.”

Wilson takes a minute to get to his movie’s titular subject. First he talks about his beloved New York, the end of his HBO series, and his brushes with being a semi-recognized celebrity. (This last bit is demonstrated when he’s the topic of a clue on “Jeopardy!”, and no one guesses his name.) During the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023, Wilson takes part in a seminar about one of the most lucrative types of screenwriting out there today: Writing holiday romances for the Hallmark Channel.

Eventually, the idea of constructing a formulaic romantic plot, along with the work he does on the small apartment building he owns, gets Wilson thinking about another formula: The mixture of cement, water and small rocks that makes up concrete.

Wilson figures, and tries to sell “the suits” on the idea, that because concrete is the second-most used material in the world — only water is used more — it should be easy to make a movie about concrete that will be watched and appreciated by millions. So Wilson, with a small budget, heads to Italy, where much of the ancient buildings were made from concrete.

The trip to Italy raises an important question: Why have Italian concrete buildings remained standing for centuries, while current American concrete tends to fall apart within 40 years or so. He can’t get the Italians to give up their concrete secrets, and his investigation across America takes some odd turns.

For example, Wilson visits an Ohio town that boasts the oldest concrete street in the country, and it only dates back to 1891. This leads him to meet a driving instructor in the town, which gets him interested in the highway safety films the driving school shows, and then the people who come into the school to tell their personal stories of horrific traffic accidents. 

One such person, whose husband died in a motorcycle crash, invites Wilson into her home to see a unique souvenir: A patch of her husband’s tattooed leg skin. Wilson then meets the mortician whose business is preserving tattooed skin for their loved ones. The mortician says that his family has been in the funeral business for three generations, and his grandfather oversaw the interment of Ettore Boiardi, the real figure behind the Chef Boyardee brand.

The entire movie works like this, dropping bits of information and observation about concrete, but also taking viewers on side quests that are just as interesting. In the end, these detours relate back to Wilson’s bigger subject: The way humans accept second-rate creations, whether it’s bargain concrete or formulaic Hallmark movies, because it’s more comfortable than holding out for something great that’s more difficult to attain.

This becomes true of “The History of Concrete” itself. Wilson has made a truly thoughtful documentary, but it challenges the viewer to follow a circuitous path to knowledge and insight. It’s not an easy watch, but ultimately a rewarding one.

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‘The History of Concrete’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 25, in area theaters. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and thematic elements. Running time: 101 minutes.