Entertainment
Kevin Hart leads A-list cast in 'Fight Night,' a fact-stretching series about an infamous heist
On Oct. 26, 1970, the night Muhammad Ali made his comeback fight in Atlanta against Jerry Quarry, a houseful of party guests, including some heavy hitters in the world of organized crime, were robbed at a suburban after-party — a story highly reported at the time and recently the subject of a true-crime podcast, “Fight Night.” Now it’s been translated by Shaye Ogbonna (“The Chi”) into a much-embroidered hodgepodge of a limited series, “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist,” premiering Thursday on Peacock, with a starry cast in the principal, not-exactly-real-life roles.
Kevin Hart plays Gordon Williams, known as Chicken Man (not to be confused with the Chicken Man blown up in Philly in Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City”) from a habit of buying chicken sandwiches for pretty girls. Williams (whom I’ll call Williams because I don’t want to keep writing “Chicken Man”) is a self-described hustler, who primarily makes his living off the numbers, the unofficial lottery of the inner city. He’s an endearing and popular neighborhood figure — it’s comedian Kevin Hart, after all — except to the people to whom he owes money.
When a connected friend, Silky Brown (Atkins Estimond), mentions that New York “Black Godfather” Frank Moten (Samuel L. Jackson) will be in town for the fight, Williams, hoping to become Moten’s man in Atlanta, sells him on throwing Moten and other criminal big shots — notably New Jersey bigwig Cadillac Richie (Terrence Howard) — a casino-style party at his house. That is to say, the house he shares with his girlfriend, Vivian (Taraji P. Henson), rather than the one he shares with his wife, Faye (Artrece Johnson), and their children. Nefarious villains get wind of this and plot to rob the entire party.
“Fight Night” features Terrence Howard as Cadillac Richie, Samuel L. Jackson as Frank Moten and Michael James Shaw as Lamar.
(Parrish Lewis / Peacock)
Although most of what precedes and follows this event is invention, the mechanics of the robbery, as pictured, pretty much accord with the established facts — masked gunmen escorting arriving guests straight into the basement, where they’re stripped of their valuables and clothing. Estimates of the haul — only estimates, because all but a few guests were loath to talk or press charges — inched up to around a million dollars, a conveniently round, impressive number suitable for a miniseries subtitle. As the homeowner, Williams, though a victim himself, was bannered in the press as the prime suspect, painting a target on his back.
Meanwhile, straight-arrow cop J.D. Hudson (Don Cheadle), Atlanta’s first Black detective lieutenant, is assigned to protect the controversial Ali (Dexter Darden, a couple of inches shorter than the champ but fit for the part in all other respects), doubly a target for refusing to be drafted and being Black in a state where the Klan is active. (Segregationist governor Lester Maddox will make a bizarre, unbelievable and certainly historically inaccurate cameo appearance on a lonely country road as Hudson drives Ali to his plane out of town.)
Related business — not quite enough of it to constitute a theme, but peppering the series in a way to remind us of its presence — involves the future of Atlanta, characterized as a hick town set to become a center of Black wealth and power.
In this telling, guarding Ali begins as a distasteful job for Hudson, a veteran who thinks Ali should have served. (“Baby, you served in Missouri,” his wife, Delores, played by Marsha Stephanie Blake, reminds him.) He forgetfully addresses Ali as Mr. Clay, who calls him “Officer Mayberry” in return, and their antagonism provides a platform to make points about race in America. But as they spend time together, before Ali exits the series in the third episode of eight, a mutual appreciation grows. This could make the basis of a sweet little indie film — it’s certainly the most uplifting passage in the series — but in context, it’s a curtain-raiser to the action film waiting in the wings.
With Ali gone, Hudson is assigned to investigate the robbery at Williams’ house; as a Black man, it’s thought he might have better luck with the witnesses. Fellow Black lieutenant J.H. Amos, his partner in the actual investigation, has disappeared from the narrative; in his place, we get a competitive, violent, racist white cop (Ben VanderMey) whom Hudson is determined to take down.
Don Cheadle plays straight-arrow cop J.D. Hudson.
(Eli Joshua Adé / Peacock)
The retro credits, split-screen effects and period R&B songs suggest something lighthearted out of the gate, but much of it is very dark — there are a lot of guns, waved around, held to heads, often fired. Most of the characters here are criminals, ranging from the semicomical, relatively harmless Williams to the deceptively urbane Moten to the merely thuggish — though there is some attempt to delineate the worse and less worse among the robbers, and in some cases even engage one’s sympathy.
But this is not “Ocean’s 11” or “The Thomas Crown Affair,” despite its generous use of late-’60s/early-’70s visual tropes. “Fight Night” flirts with a variety of styles — blaxploitation, police procedural, social drama, the buddy-cop movie — which are successful on their own terms but don’t easily cohere. And as the series gets closer to its conclusion, the plot runs farther and farther from the facts, sacrificing historicity and even plausibility for genre-film excitement and culminating with a sting that catapults matters out of the real and into the ridiculous.
Any project that gathers Cheadle, Jackson, Henson, Howard and Hart in one place is going to be worth a look, however successful or unsuccessful it is on the whole, and everyone gets to do some capital-A acting along the way; indeed, at times it seems that scenes have been designed precisely to that end, with quasi-theatrical monologues that give the actors room to stretch. Anything less would seem … inhospitable, like locking them up in a basement.
Movie Reviews
Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror
I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.
Let’s get into the review.
Synopsis
When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it. The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.
Roll on 18 Wheleer
Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.
I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

In The End
In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.
The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.
Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026
Entertainment
Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater
The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.
Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.
Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.
Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.
The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”
As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)
As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.
Movie Reviews
‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel
It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.”
Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?
I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.
The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic.
FINAL STATEMENT
You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.
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