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.

Review: 'Heart of the Beast' is sturdy wilderness survival drama that gives Brad Pitt a gorgeous scene partner - a good dog named Odin

Director David Ayer’s “Heart of the Beast” is a wilderness survival drama where the journey matters far more than the destination — because through it we see the enduring friendship between a man and his canine companion.

It takes time for us to learn about James Belmont (played by Brad Pitt) and his dog, Odin (played by four dogs, mostly one named Uber) — we don’t even learn his last name until the final scene, but that doesn’t matter a lot. In the spare, tough script by music-video director Cameron Alexander, James and Odin have flown James’ seaplane to a remote spot in Alaska to do some hunting and fishing. The only conversation comes when an aged kayaker (J.K. Simmons) comes along and shares James’ and Odin’s camp, and a couple of Belgian brown ales from James’ cooler, for a night.

Through that conversation, Alexander and Ayer give us just enough exposition to deliver the basics. James is a former Green Beret, an Army Special Forces sergeant major, who went through some hellacious combat with Odin, a combat dog who now has a prosthetic front limb and titanium teeth as a result of his war injuries. Odin and James also both have bouts of PTSD at night, but they get through them together.

Flying back from their adventure, James suffers a heart attack and the small Cessna crashes through trees and into a lake. James manages to swim to safety and find Odin, who was thrown from the plane before it hit water. James battles through his cardiac issues, thanks to a bottle of aspirin he recovered from the sunken plane, and eventually he and Odin start hiking the approximately 60 miles through some beautiful Alaskan wilderness (filmed in New Zealand) to get to the nearest road.

Ayer, who directed Pitt in the 2014 World War II tank drama “Fury,” stages some tough, muscular scenes of James and Odin crossing raging rivers, skidding down mossy hillsides and enduring more hardships than a healthy body probably could outside of a movie. The plausibility of Alexander’s script isn’t the highest, but the cinematic vision of the journey certainly is. 

Ayer’s main mission in “Heart of the Beast” is to celebrate the bond between Pitt’s wounded ex-warfighter and his hard-nosed, traumatized dog. Pitt holds up his end with a gritty performance that prizes action and gesture above words. Pitt’s best acting choice is to let the dogs playing Odin take the attention, which they do beautifully. Whatever the movie’s faults, there’s no argument that Odin is a good dog.

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‘Heart of the Beast’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 25, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violence, peril, bloody/injury images and some language. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!' is a refreshingly alive tale of grief and recovery, sent soaring by Rinko Kikuchi's heartbreaking performance

For a story about grief and loss, director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s “Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!” Is remarkably exuberant and, literally, light on its feet as it follows a woman’s dance-filled journey through widowhood.

The great Japanese actor Rinko Kikuchi (“Babel,” “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter”) stars as Haru, who lives in Tokyo with her Mexican-born husband, Luis (Alejandro Edda), where they live a blissful life of cooking meals for each other and sharing an impressive collection of vintage vinyl. Their shared passion, besides each other, is ballroom dancing, and they’re in the midst of a competition when Luis suffers a fatal heart attack.

After dealing with the funeral arrangements, and disagreeing with Luis’s father (Damián Alcázar) about how to tend to Luis’ remains, Haru is at a loss for how to carry on. Her sisters, Yuki (You Yoshida) and Hiromi (played by the Japanese presenter/actor YOU), suggest she go back to the dance studio where she and Luis used to practice, so they do.

At the studio, Haru becomes quite smitten with the new instructor, Fedir (Alberto Guerra), a Cuban dancer who was a pro on Japan’s version of “Dancing With the Stars.” Hiromi reads a rumor online that Fedir and his dancer wife, Mila (Keren Louis), have an “open” marriage, and that he got caught in bed with a gymnast from “Dancing With the Stars.” Would this be an opening for Haru, aka Ha-Chan, to see how far flirting with the new dance instructor will go? Yes, yes it would.

The other complication to Haru’s small obsession with Fedir is that she keeps seeing Luis in their house. Sometimes he appears in a giant black bird costume, like a mascot for a very depressed football team. 

Wladyka, co-writing with Nicholas Huynh, neatly maneuvers from Haru’s daily life to her waking dream state, which sometimes manifests in musical numbers — including an extended riff on “Dirty Dancing” that’s a delight to watch unfold. The lightness is deceptive, though, as the film looks through it to find Haru’s deep grieving for Luis.

Kikuchi’s performance is enchanting, which should not be a surprise to anyone who saw “Kumiko” at Sundance a dozen years earlier. Often, she deploys a deadpan that makes Buster Keaton look expressive — but when she smiles, which she does often with Eddo’s Luis, it melts your heart.

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‘Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 25, at area theaters. Rated R for sexual content and language. Running time: 122 minutes; in English and in Japanese and Spanish, with subtitles.

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This review ran previously on this site on January 29, 2026, after it premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom' delivers Aardman's clay-animated wackiness in an efficiently hilarious package

If you’re familiar with the clay-animated works of Aardman Animation — the folks behind Wallace & Gromit — you know that the studio’s latest, “Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” is going to pack more laughs in 80 dialogue-free minutes than you otherwise might have thought possible.

Shaun, you may recall, was introduced in 1995, in the Wallace & Gromit short “A Close Shave,” the most rambunctious of the sheep that W&G had to free from rustlers. Shaun has gone on to a popular TV series and now three movies, all hilarious and lacking any recognizable language, 

As the new movie begins, it’s nearly Halloween, and the sheep are about to celebrate the fruits of their long labor, tending to a secret pumpkin patch. Meanwhile, their farmer is hoping to ask the local veterinarian out to the town’s annual Halloween Hoedown. Before he can, though, he stumbles into the pumpkin patch, destroying the entire crop.

The ever-inventive Shaun borrows one of the farmer’s science books, and develops a formula that will grow one seed into a full-sized pumpkin in a matter of days. Eventually Shaun and the other sheep realize the formula is unstable — but not before the farmer gets some mixed in with his anti-baldness lotion, and glops it all over his scalp. Soon the farmer has grown great amounts hair all over his body, until the nervous townspeople think they’re being attacked by a giant hairy monster. And it’s up to Shaun, his flock and their sheepdog, Bitzer, to put things right again.

The directors, Aardman veterans Steve Cox and Matthew Walker, keep the action and the gags moving so briskly that you may need a repeat viewing or two to get all the jokes. Writers Mark Burton and Giles Pilbrow, along with a small army of animators, make sure those jokes are worth the second view — sometimes looking back to classic silent movies and just as often throwing in a modern reference to see who’s paying attention. (There’s a “Game of Thrones” gag that nearly put me on the floor.)

The movie manages to be quite universal — with the absence of discernible dialogue, just hums and grunts — and also specifically British. Another of my favorite jokes involves Bitzer borrowing the farmer’s truck, but carefully placing the “L” sticker, the British indicator of a student driver, on the tailgate.

“Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom” is also that rare beast, a Halloween movie that viewers of any age can enjoy. Something this delightfully wicked this way comes not often enough.

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‘Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for mild scary action. Running time: 80 minutes.

Review: 'The Weight' is a riveting heist thriller propelled by Ethan Hawke's performance as a dad at the end of his rope

Ethan Hawke has been a working actor so long, over more than 100 roles in movies and TV, that we almost take him for granted — until he breaks out a performance, like he does in director Padraic McKinley’s heist drama “The Weight,” that reminds you how devastatingly good he can be.

Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, who in 1933, in the middle of the Great Depression, is struggling to keep a roof over his head and that of his little girl, Penny (Ava Berry). One day, after Murphy and Penny are evicted from their apartment, Murphy has an unfortunate encounter with some unsympathetic Portland police, and he ends up being sent away to prison.

At a labor camp in Deschutes County, the warden, J.J. Clancy (Russell Crowe), lays down the law: Work two days, get one day taken off your sentence. Murphy does the math, and sees there’s no way to get enough time deducted to get out before the state puts Penny up for adoption. 

Clancy offers Murphy an alternative, one that’s as dangerous as it is illegal. Clancy knows someone at a nearby gold mine, Taggert (Alec Newman), who wants to move several gold bars over 100 miles of Oregon forest and hills, to keep the FDR administration from confiscating it. Clancy tells Murphy to pick three inmates he trusts — and if they finish the job, Clancy will sign the paperwork to release them. Murphy may not believe Clancy and Taggert will live up to their end of the bargain, but he’s got little choice but to agree.

Murphy picks his three accomplices: Rankin (Austin Amelio), who’s on the most recent of many prison stays; Singh (Avi Nash), a socialist intellectual; and Olson (Lucas Lynggard Tønnesen), a Scandinavian immigrant. They’re joined on the journey by two of Taggert’s men, Amis (Sam Hazeldine) and Letender (George Burgess), and by Anna (Julia Jones), an Indigenous woman at the mining camp, who may be the best person to get them through the woods alive.

McKinley, a TV director making his feature debut, evokes some of the classics in the canon of desperate men moving contraband (think Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” or William Friedkin’s remake, “Sorcerer”), as the men have to confront natural obstacles and what’s more treacherous: other men.

At the center is Hawke, grim and grave, the determination to complete this task and get back to his daughter etched in every crevice of his face. Hawke doesn’t talk a lot here — a contrast to his Oscar-nominated performance in “Blue Moon,” as the overly verbose Lorenz Hart — and he makes every motion and syllable speak volumes.

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‘The Weight’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, in several theaters. Rated R for language and some violence/bloody images. Running time: 113 minutes.

Review: 'American Doctor' shows viewers the horrors of Gaza, with three doctors trying to save lives during wartime

“Harrowing” doesn’t begin to describe the war violence shown in director Poh Si Teng’s documentary “American Doctor,” which shows the efforts of three U.S.-based surgeons trying to save lives in Gaza — and how they try to process the horrors of what they’ve experienced.

The three doctors have all worked at Nasser Medical Center, in Khan Younis in Gaza, often at the center of the response to shelling and bombings by Israeli military forces. And their reactions, as we find out, are shaped in part by their different backgrounds:

• Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, an abdominal surgeon from California, arrived last March during a ceasefire — and stayed when the bombing started. He’s of Pakistani heritage, and he talks about how his parents faith (they’re Zoroastrians) have led him to advocate for peace wherever possible. He also expresses frustration that the United States, the government of his country, supplies so many armaments to the Israeli government.

• Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic surgeon from North Carolina, works at Nasser to save the limbs of children wounded in Gaza. He’s Jewish, but is also ferociously angry at the Israeli Defense Forces and the Netanyahu government, which he blames for perpetuating the deadly violence in Gaza.

• And Dr. Thaer Ahmad, an emergency-room doctor from Chicago, is Palestinian American. He’s worked before at Nasser, but as the movie unfolds is frustrated that the Israeli government regularly blocks him from returning to treat the wounded in Gaza. Instead, he tries to raise awareness in the U.S. of what he’s seen firsthand.

Poh Si Teng, who’s also one of the movie’s five cinematographers, captures the daily grind and panic of the doctors and nurses trying to keep people alive. 

The film also labors to keep the doctors’ political leanings at arm’s length — there’s a conversation at one point about whether Perlmutter’s militancy helps or hurts the hospital’s efforts — but in this hot-button atmosphere, how one views “American Doctor” may be preordained by where one stands to begin with.

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‘American Doctor’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 18, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably R for graphic scenes of war violence, and for language. Running time: 93 minutes; in English, and in Arabic with subtitles.

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This review previously appeared on this site on January 23, 2026, when the movie premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.