Movie Reviews
Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Under Paris’ on Netflix, a shark-in-the-Seine thriller that delivers the ludicrousness you crave
Thanks to Shark Week and Sharknado, it doesn’t take much to get a goofy-ass shark movie greenlit these days – hence Under Paris (now on Netflix), whose pitch line was likely, “What if a giant shark cruised up the Seine – days before a triathlon?” If you’re worried that this is just another purposely-bad-CG Syfy original, allay those concerns, because veteran director Xavier Gens (you should see his deranged debut, Frontier(s)) is on the job, with Berenice Bejo (an Oscar nominee for The Artist) in the lead. But having some recognizable names involved doesn’t mean the movie can’t be at least a little bit ridiculous, as I found out. (Note: The film is the subject of a copyright lawsuit that may see it get pulled from Netflix, so if you’re all in on seeing it, you might want to get to it soon.)
UNDER PARIS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: We open with one of those hilarious overly detailed subtitles: NORTH PACIFIC. MISSION OCEAN ORIGINS. PROJECT “EVOLUTIONS.” A BUNCH OF LONGITUDE AND LATITUDE GIBBERISH. This is very important detail! Why? Because knowing the longitude and latitude to 25 digits is crucial to understanding that this scene is playing out in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, duh! We’re on a boat with some shark people who tag sharks and track sharks and study sharks and aren’t at all afraid of sharks – BUT THEY SHOULD BE. I’d name them but, as you’re no doubt delighted to learn, some of them don’t last very long, because what is a shark movie without someone’s chomped-off arm floating through the water? Sophia (Bejo) barely survives an encounter with a toothy sweetie named Lilith that she’s been following for a while – a toothy sweetie who’s tripled in size in an astonishingly short amount of time, and has become terribly aggressive. So it goes.
THREE YEARS LATER, BUT WE DON’T NEED LONGITUDE AND LATITUDE BECAUSE WE’RE IN PARIS NOW. Sophia works at the aquarium, conducting informational tours for nasty little school shits who tease her about how her former research team became chum. She meets a couple of young women, Mika (Lea Leviant) and Caro (Sandra Parfait), who have a super badass underground lair full of computers and a big projector and screen that they use to track sharks because they love sharks and want to protect sharks. Don’t ask how they afford all this. They’ve spotted a shark in the Seine River, and it’s not just any shark, it’s Lilith, her tracker still intact, and all of Sophia’s trauma comes flooding back. Now, we shouldn’t ask why the very same shark that nearly ate Sophia is now essentially ringing her doorbell pretending to be delivering a candygram, but I’m going to ask it anyway, and make the very reasonable assumption that it’s not a coincidence, but rather a Jaws: The Revenge development where the shark knows where she lives and wants to finish the job. Who says sharks don’t deserve a little closure too?
Sophia gets the river cops involved, led by Adil (Nassim Lyes), who doesn’t believe her assertion that there’s a giant shark in his river, because that has to be a big raging pile of bull roar, right? It takes some cheesy jump scares and some chomping on his fellow cops to convince him that it’s not, though. They go to the mayor (Anne Marivin), a very aggressive eater of lunch who just doesn’t want to hear any of this because she just spent like a billion dollars on PR and logistics for a triathlon that’s a trial run for the Olympics, so get the hell out of her office with this shark nonsense, please, prompting all of us to put her at the top of the list of people who need to get chomped. Wait, did I just type “triathlon”? As in “hundreds of swimmers splashing around like bait”? I did. Oh hell. Will Sophie and Adil save them or WILL THE SEINE FLOW WITH BLOOD? God, I hope it’s the latter.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: With zero apologies whatsoever to The Meg, Under Paris is the best shark movie since please-don’t-eat-Blake-Lively thriller The Shallows. And yes, I know that’s not saying much.
Performance Worth Watching: With all due respect to a vet like Bejo, who very ably sells some of this silliness, we’re not here to see her. No, we’re here to see how fake the CGI shark looks.
Memorable Dialogue: Sophia explains away all the plot holes about little sharky-poo’s unusual behavior: “Lilith is the first of a new species.”
Sex and Skin: No time for love when you’re trying not to get apex-predatored.
Our Take: But, I can hear you asking, does all this pay off? Yeah, sort of. The action and drama ramps up for a third act that hits ludicrous speed – it really goes plaid – in a pair of sequences that are a bit hacked-up in the editing room, but deliver some reasonably satisfying carnage, and can be pretty merciless when it comes to the fates of key characters. The film courts ingenuity by setting scenes in the flooded underground catacombs of Paris, which is a way of setting shark-slaughter in an ancient crypt without contorting reality too egregiously. You won’t be surprised to learn that our heroes concoct a Plan So Crazy It Might Just Work, even though it’s kind of confusing and murkily executed when it comes down to showing us what exactly is going on.
But this also means we don’t get any real laughs out of Under Paris for more than an hour – which may lead you to believe that the movie might be “about” something, like evolution or climate change or (sigh) trauma. Don’t bite on those red herrings though. Gens clamps down on the tone and keeps things fairly serious — he sidesteps campiness for the most part, which is no easy feat — until the jackass mayor turns up as the villain who consciously doesn’t give a rip about human life, unlike the shark, who’s just doing as her instincts dictate: Being entertaining in a dumbass movie. Isn’t that what sharks were put on this planet to do?
Our Call: We don’t go into a shark thriller with high expectations, so Under Paris being merely good enough is plenty to warrant a recommendation. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — In this episode of 8News Reel Talk, digital producer Julia Broberg is joined by anchor Deanna Allbrittin and reporter Allison Williams to talk about “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
The hosts gave their reviews and assigned the following star ratings:
Deanna: ★★★★.5
Allison: ★★★.25
Julia: ★★
To watch more livestreams and digital video content, head to the WRIC+ Originals page. You can also watch full on-demand videos on your smart TV using the WRIC+ app.
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