BY WYATT ALLISON

In 1976, Dustin Hoffman was the star of a film called Marathon Man, that followed a hotshot Columbia grad embroiled in a plot through his brother, with an evil Nazi war dentist played by the stage/screen legend Laurence Olivier. The film is regarded as one of the best examples of a 1970s paranoia-thriller. Now, 50 years removed from 1976, comes Tuner – a film directed by Oscar award winning documentarian Daniel Roher — also with Dustin Hoffman — that plays like something a little bit mysterious but intriguing, as you see its title on a summer night theater marquee.

Tuner follows Niki White (Leo Woodall), a talented piano tuner with a unique and meticulous auditory condition. As he trails New York City’s streets, hallowed concert halls, and brownstone neighborhoods with his blunt and charismatic mentor Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), Niki encounters a rotating cast of clients, including Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a keen piano student who challenges his moral complexity.

When security contractor Uri (Lior Raz) learns Niki’s hypersensitive hearing is worth more for cracking safes than for opening Yamahas, he offers Niki a dangerous opportunity that could help Harry and his devoted wife Marla (Tony Award–winner Tovah Feldshuh) manage their suffocating medical debt.

As Niki is drawn deeper into the criminal underworld with Uri and his crew, his relationship with Ruthie is threatened, entangling him in a dangerous side hustle that gives his life some unfortunate obstacles.

I caught Tuner back in September of last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, and it really brought the house down. The slick, watchable cadence of this old-fashioned thriller is read like the box of an elevated frozen pizza — perhaps Rao’s? You know exactly what you’re getting into, and chances are you’ll be fairly satisfied and full by the time for dessert.

Director Roher won the Best Documentary Oscar for Navalny, a 2022 film about the poisoning of Russian journalist Alexei Navalny — who was critical about the government and leadership of Vladimir Putin. In Roher’s first narrative film, his guerilla-esque foundation is seen plenty as Tuner unfolds a lot like a documentary. The camera feels invisible, and each character plays off one another to a natural degree.

For Leo Woodall, the performance as Niki is carefully crafted and another entry into the “sad boy” with a talent gauntlet. His hearing gift is utterly believable, and coupled with the exceptional sound design, it’s hard not to find yourself right with Niki as he cracks safes and tries to get the girl. It’s a performance that any young actor should be bidding for, since genre thrillers like this tend to have a longer lifespan in the zeitgeist.

Black Bear Pictures, the independent film distributor behind Christy, could really use a hit. Much like Tuner, the studio is a great example of why more risks should be taken on smaller budget films with some recognizable faces in it. In a theatrical setting that can be clouded out by blockbuster, IP-driven filmmaking, Tuner is something worth seeing on a Friday night at the movies.

Tuner
Directed by Daniel Roher
Regal Downtown West
Released on Friday, May 29, 2026

Related

Appropriately for a surreal realm comprised of inexplicable angles that stretch across impossible dimensions and seem, as one explorer puts it, cobbled together by “construction workers on acid,” the Backrooms, as a premise, have no precise parameters. You might think of it less as a story than a shared alternate reality, originating as a creepypasta (internet-based urban legend) and then taking on a life of its own as fans added bits of lore and started to spin it into works of their own.

Now that concept seems poised to break containment into the mainstream with Backrooms, a slickly produced feature boasting a buzzy studio (A24), bona fide arthouse stars (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve) and established genre leaders (James Wan, Osgood Perkins) among the producers.

But if the film captures something of the concept’s intriguing unease — with 20-year-old director Kane Parsons drawing from his own Backrooms-set short films, created when he was just a teenager — its underbaked storytelling made me wonder if some spooky ideas might be better left as whispers in the dark.

Though the Backrooms are ineffably strange (“Imagine describing a dog to someone who’s never seen one and then asking them to draw it,” characters reply when asked to explain them), the world we cut through to get there is almost suspiciously normal. In a quiet California suburb circa 1990, Clark (Ejiofor) is a failed architect who makes his living as the proprietor of Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire — or rather tries to, since the discount furniture store’s total lack of customers suggests a business on the verge of collapse. His life has gotten miserable enough that he’s seeing a therapist, Mary (Reinsve), to deal with the implosion of his marriage.

Up late watching TV at the store one night (because he’s been sleeping there ever since his wife kicked him out after a bitter, booze-fueled fight), he ventures downstairs to fiddle with the breaker, whereupon he discovers he can just kind of slip through one of the walls, as easily as stepping into a beam of light. On the other side lies a room not unlike the windowless carpeted basement he’s emerged from. But this one is lit in a sickly institutional yellow, with all its furniture haphazardly piled in the middle. Also, it seems to go on forever. No matter how deep Clark wanders into it, all he finds are more rooms, corridors, staircases, doorways, crawlspaces.

It’s a deliciously creepy concept, tickling the same elemental unease provoked by other liminal horror stories like 2022’s unsettling Skinamarink or Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 novel House of Leaves: If structures like homes and offices and stores are meant to contain and protect, there’s something disturbing about one that refuses to conform to those boundaries — that shifts beyond the known laws of the universe so that what should have been a safe space becomes a trap.

The horrors that lie within this particular trap take some time to reveal themselves. At first, our disquiet and Clark’s mostly stem from sights that, while not overtly threatening, simply feel wrong: a stop sign printed backwards and erected in a dark room, a cardboard cutout fitted with a tape recording of messages in foreign languages, shoes embedded in the floor at an angle that suggests said floor materialized suddenly out of nowhere to slice right through them.

But eeriness for its own sake has its limits. The longer we spend exploring the Backrooms, the less frightening and more random these oddities start to feel. They seem designed not according to some internal logic of this universe or psychology of these characters but simply as an attempt to keep us guessing; it works only until it becomes apparent that there are no meaningful answers forthcoming.

Meanwhile, Clark and Mary (to say nothing of other minor characters played by Mark Duplass, Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell) are painted in extremely broad strokes. Even allowing that one of the movie’s central concerns is the way we create mental loops that keep us fixed in our miseries, the choice to define each of them through a single formative trauma and nothing else renders them too flat to care about.

I suppose the advantage of Clark’s lack of any other traits, including a self-preservation instinct, is that it makes him an ideal conduit for us into this universe: Since he never stops to consider whether wandering freely around what amounts to a haunted maze might be a bad idea, we never have to stop poking around it either. The further he goes, the more harrowing things get. The roar of a monster that had seemed distant at first seems to grow louder and more frequent, evidence of its violence clearer and harder to ignore (though never very graphic; Backrooms traffics more in dread than gore).

In its best moments, Backrooms brushes up against something bittersweet about the way our memories warp a little every time we access them, until they’ve been stripped of real details and we’re left only with the emotional imprint they’ve left behind. In one striking sequence, the camera glides down a succession of living room floors, each one growing more abstracted until all that remains is a pitch-black hole radiating menace from a corner. In another, grotesque humanoid figures are frozen in a dinner table scene, so lacking in feeling or agency that they do not protest even when they’re stabbed.

At its worst, Backrooms tries to raise the stakes by trading subliminal chills for more explicit but also more generic thrills, culminating in an action-y climax that seems to exist solely to fulfill audience expectations of how a mainstream horror movie is supposed to end. The film wants to invite you in, but the more the Backrooms try to explain themselves, the more quotidian they feel. This is a realm better left to the shadows, where unsuspecting souls can fall down its rabbit holes before they even know what’s hit them.

After his Netflix roast inspired tit-for-tat feuding among comedians and backlash from viewers over a joke about George Floyd, Kevin Hart’s stance is clear: All is fair in love, war and comedy.

During a Tuesday appearance on “The Breakfast Club,” Hart addressed the controversy stemming from Netflix’s “Roast of Kevin Hart,” which aired earlier this month and included material that shocked viewers. Tony Hinchcliffe, who helms the No. 1 live podcast in the world, “Kill Tony,” applied his politically incorrect approach to comedy that similarly outraged audiences at a 2024 campaign rally for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

“The Black community is so proud of you right now,” he quipped at Hart. “George Floyd is looking up at us all, laughing so hard that he can’t breathe.”

In 2020, Floyd was murdered by police Officer Derek Chauvin, who pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, until he died. His last words were “I can’t breathe,” which he said more than 20 times. The killing sparked global unrest and the largest civil rights protest since the 1960s. Hart attended Floyd’s memorial and private service in Minneapolis.

“The George Floyd joke, it wasn’t a tasteful joke to our culture,” Hart told the podcast. “But our audience that’s watching the roast … you get why they’re doing it, you get why the racial humor is on the table.”

Hart continued that the approach to comedy is nothing new and said, “Tony Hinchcliffe arguably had the best set, or one of the best sets.”

“Would I tell those jokes? No, but do I get why they’re being told? Yes,” Hart said.

Floyd’s brother, Terrence Floyd, spoke with “Breakfast Club” host Loren LoRosa after the roast aired and said that he expected Hart to step in and tell Hinchcliffe he’d gone too far.

“What do you want me to do? Drag him off?” Hart asked during his appearance on the podcast. “That’s not what I agreed to do. That’s not the job at hand. The job at hand was to produce a successful roast, which I did.”

Not only has the Netflix roast caused a stir among viewers, but the comedians who participated also have been trading slights in recent weeks. Chelsea Handler didn’t mince words when she offered her take on Hinchcliffe, as well as Shane Gillis, who also performed a set during the roast. According to Handler, ex-girlfriends of the controversial comedians slid into her DMs and told her what she said she already knew about them.

“They’re racist,” she said during an appearance on Deon Cole’s “Funny Knowing You” podcast. “That they’re bigots, that they’re sexist, that they think they’re like invincible.”

Handler said that one of Gillis’ jokes about lynching Hart was “worse than rape.” In response, Gillis told the Hollywood Reporter in a statement that Handler was capitalizing on the moment.

On Monday’s episode of “Kill Tony,” Hinchcliffe responded to Handler’s remarks by calling her “a bit of a c—. “