Movie Reviews
Critic’s Appreciation: Few Actors Could Go as Terrifyingly Big, and as Hauntingly Small, as Robert Duvall
When people talk about an actor with range, they usually mean the wide variety of roles they can play. De Niro going from Travis Bickle to Jake LaMotta. Brando going from On the Waterfront to Guys and Dolls. Pacino playing both Michael Corleone and Tony Montana, two gangsters with diametrically opposed approaches to criminality.
The same holds true for Robert Duvall, a tremendous screen actor who died on Monday at the age of 95, and whose credits — over 150 in a career spanning six decades — include everything from a Texas Ranger (Lonesome Dove) to a Texas outlaw (True Grit); a sinister TV boss (Network) to an enlightened L.A. cop (Colors); an ex-con pulling off one last job (The Outfit) to an aging rancher protecting his land (Open Range); a conniving sports journalist (The Natural) to an editor-in-chief seeking redemption (The Paper) to a Soviet dictator (Stalin).
There are a hundred other examples in Duvall’s vast filmography, which lasted all the way till he was over 90, when he held his final roles as a seasoned practitioner of black magic (The Pale Blue Eye) and the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers (Hustle). Like many actors who hailed from a generation trained under the Method — in Duvall’s case, with the legendary Sanford Meisner — and who cut their chops in the burgeoning years of television, Duvall was extremely prolific and willing to try out any part at least once.
But he had a gift few performers have ever showcased to such an extent: a range that not only spread horizontally, shifting through characters across the board, but vertically, allowing him to be a big, bellowing, destructive man in one movie, and then a small, discreet, vulnerable one in the next. This extreme pendulum of human temperament meant Duvall could go from boiling hot to ice cold within a single film or even a single scene. It helped him to fully embody people at either end of the spectrum, in a series of iconic roles that made him one of the greatest.
Let’s start with the famous ones: For The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola always wanted Duvall to play the soft-spoken Corleone consigliere Tom Hagen. In the director’s previous feature, The Rain People, the actor was terrifying as a nutso highway patrolman who tries to rape the film’s heroine. It was the polar opposite of Hagen, but Coppola knew Duvall had the range for both parts.
What makes the actor so formidable in The Godfather is how Hagen always sits in the shadows, serving as both strategic advisor and silent moral compass to a corrupt family. An adopted son to Don Corleone, and therefore not a blood brother, Tom Hagen is a perpetual outsider who at one point becomes the Don himself. This happens during a memorable scene between Duvall and Pacino in The Godfather: Part II, after the Corleone’s Lake Tahoe compound gets ambushed. Duvall plays a man of few words, so when he looks at Pacino and says, “I always wanted to be thought of as a brother by you, Mike. A real brother,” it carries the weight of the world, and tons of contained emotion.
In another Coppola classic, Apocalypse Now, Duvall portrayed a man of many words that have turned into some of the most famous lines in film history. To embody the surf-obsessed and fearless Colonel Kilgore, the actor delved into his own past in the military, first as the son of a Rear Admiral in the navy and later as a private first class in the army, which he ditched to study acting in New York.
Duvall did plenty of research to build the Kilgore character, basing his performance on officers he served under at Fort Bragg and choosing a cowboy hat to mimic how members of the air calvary in Vietnam sometimes wore mementos from the American West. But it’s the actor’s delivery that everyone remembers, brilliantly going from hot to cold as he lambasts his troops during a bombing campaign, then kneels beside them to calmly state: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” — a sinister line considering the mass death happening all around them, but also perfectly true to character.
The same year Apocalypse Now was released, Duvall played another bigger-than-life military man in The Great Santini, which was shot after the Coppola film and feels at times like a spinoff story for Colonel Kilgore. As the titular antihero and contender for worst screen father of 1979, Duvall embodied a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Marines who settles with his family near a base in South Carolina, where he conducts training sessions and rules over his four children like he’s about to send them off to battle.
There are some classic Duvallian moments in The Great Santini, a movie I recall well because it was one of my dad’s favorites (don’t ask). In the opening scene, Santini — whose real name is “Bull” Meechum — gets wasted at an officer’s dance and fake vomits Campbell’s Soup all over the floor, then has his platoon lick it up in front of all the horrified guests. In what’s probably the film’s highlight, the Colonel plays a long one-on-one basketball game against his oldest son (Michael O’Keefe) that turns so violently competitive, he nearly takes his kid’s head off.
Like Kilgore, Meechum is a professional soldier and all-around tyrant with a voice that resounds like a bullhorn. But Duvall also reveals his weaknesses at key moments, showing how he actually tries hard as a father yet can’t help confusing training soldiers with rearing his own children.
Weakness also characterizes the role that earned Duvall his only Oscar for best actor. As the broken country singer Mac Sledge in Bruce Beresford’s Tender Mercies, he became so small on screen that his character almost disappeared amid the Texas flatlands where he washes up after another catastrophic drinking binge. Ditching alcohol and a successful music career to stay on as a handyman at a roadside motel run by a beautiful widow (Tess Harper), Sledge hardly utters a word for the first half of the movie. When he finally speaks, and eventually sings again, it’s with utter grace and sincerity. Duvall was perhaps never better than as a severely wounded man who finds enough inner strength to restart his life, letting go of the two things he loves — music and whiskey — to last another day.
Fans of the star surely have other characters to add to the list, whether big or small or some of both. (I have to confess that I’ve never seen his famous performance in Lonesome Dove, which aired on CBS when I was 12 and earned the actor a Golden Globe.) In his later years, Duvall seemed to say yes to anything, from solid A-list dramas like The Road and Crazy Heart to blockbusters like Gone in 60 Seconds, Deep Impact, The 6th Day and Jack Reacher.
He played it big again one last time in The Apostle, a role he was born to inhabit — and ingeniously did so at the ripe age of 66, in a movie he also wrote and directed. As a Pentecostal preacher with major anger issues, causing him to kill his wife’s lover with a baseball bat at…a Little League game, Duvall portrayed a character who was like an aggregate of all the men he’d played before — flawed and crazy men with good hearts, men who meant well but had a terrible way of demonstrating it. Using his roaring baritone as both a weapon and a healing device, he ultimately gets under our skin in a series of fiery sermons he delivers like monologues accumulated throughout his long career.
Duvall’s brilliance was not only in his versatility, but in the way he could make larger-than-life men like the preacher or Kilgore suddenly seem tiny, undercutting their belligerence with vulnerability or tenderness. And he could make tiny men like Mac Sledge or Tom Hagen stand tall through what they held back, finding strength and stature in their restraint. One memorable late role in which he did the latter was as NYPD Captain Burt Grusinky in James Gray’s crime thriller We Own the Night, in which he played a thoughtful Hagen-like patriarch who gradually loses a handle on his two sons, then dies in spectacular fashion during an ambush on a rain-soaked expressway.
He only had a few lines in that movie, but it was enough to make him an anchor for the drama. The thing about great screen performers like Duvall is that, whether they played it big or small, the scene was often centered on them. It’s the secret that a select few have managed to grasp — especially those who came up alongside him, including the actor’s former roommates, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman. Each had his own alchemy for drawing our attention. In Duvall’s case, it was about reining in the beast or unleashing it, rip-roaring through scenes or vanishing within them. Barking orders as bombs dropped or receding unforgettably into the dark.
NEW YORK (OSV News) – As its title suggests, “Scream 7” (Paramount) is the latest extension of a long-lived horror franchise, one that’s currently approaching its 30th anniversary on screen. Since each chapter of this slasher saga has been a bloodsoaked mess, the series’ longevity will strike moviegoers of sense as inexplicable.
Yet the slog continues. While the previous film in the sequence shifted the action from California to New York, this second installment, following a 2022 quasi-reboot, settles on a Midwestern locale and reintroduces us to the series’ original protagonist, Sidney Evans, nee Prescott (Neve Campbell).
Having aged out of the adolescent demographic on whom the various murderers who have donned the Ghostface mask that serves as these films’ dubious trademark over the years seem to prefer to prey, Sidney comes equipped with a teen daughter, Tatum (Isabel May). Will Tatum prove as resourceful in evading the unwanted attentions of Ghostface as Mom has?
On the way to answering that question, a clutch of colorless minor characters fall victim to the killer, who sometimes gets — according to his or her lights — creative. Thus one is quite literally made to spill her guts, while another ends up skewered on a barroom’s pointy beer tap.
Through it all, director Kevin Williamson and his co-writer Guy Busick try to peddle a theme of female empowerment in the face of mortal danger. They also take a stab, as it were, at constructing a plotline about intergenerational family tensions. When not jarring viewers with grisly images, however, they’re only likely to lull them into a stupor.
The film contains excessive gory violence, including disembowelment and impaling, underage drinking, mature topics, a couple of profanities, several milder oaths, pervasive rough and considerable crude language and occasional crass expressions. The OSV News classification is O — morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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Copyright © 2026 OSV News
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: March 8th, 2026 / 08:00 PM
THE BRIDE movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros.
Rating: R
Stars: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz, Jeannie Berlin, Zlatko Burić
Writer: Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on characters created by Mary Shelley and William Hurlbut and John Balderston
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release Date: March 6, 2026
“THE BRIDE!” (as with the recent “WUTHERING HEIGHTS,” the quotation marks are part of the title) is awash in homages, and not just the ones we might reasonably expect in a movie that takes its most obvious inspiration from 1935’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
There’s that, of course, plus its source, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel FRANKENSTEIN; OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, and its sober 1931 film adaptation FRANKENSTEIN. But there are also big nods to wilder takes on the legend, including YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and even movies that have nothing to do with FRANKENSTEIN, like BONNIE AND CLYDE.
Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal casts a wide net in metaphors and ideas and looks. Sometimes “THE BRIDE!” is a comedy, sometimes it’s a crime drama, sometimes it’s a love story, occasionally, it’s even a musical.
Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) narrates the tale to us from beyond the grave. She is haughty and naughty, intoxicated by verbiage and her own literary genius. She is going to tell us a story, she says, that she didn’t even dare imagine while alive.
We’re in 1930s Chicago, where a young escort (also Buckley) is having a really awful evening out at a fancy restaurant with some of her peers and a bunch of crass gangsters. Shelley dubs the woman “Ida” and takes possession of her, causing her to speak and act in ways that get her escorted outside. There she stumbles and takes a fatal fall.
The two goons who were with Ida are happy to describe her tumble as the result of their intentional actions to their horrible gangster boss (Zlatko Burić). Ida was suspected of talking to the cops.
Around the same time, Frankenstein’s creation (Christian Bale) – let’s just call him “Frank,” like everybody else does – comes to Chicago to seek out the groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), whose published works he has read.
Frank wants the doctor to create a companion for him. His appearance is unusual, but the most alarming injuries are covered by clothing, so he’s not as extreme-looking as, say, Boris Karloff in the role. This isn’t about sex, Frank explains when Euphronious asks why he doesn’t just hire a prostitute. After over a century of loneliness, he seeks a soulmate, and he is sure this can only be achieved by reviving a corpse.
So, Euphronious and Frank dig up the grave that turns out to belong to Ida (we never do learn how they know it belongs to a soulmate candidate as opposed to a shot-and-dumped male gangster). Euphronius revives her. Ida remembers how to walk and talk, but not who she is or what happened, so Frank and the doc tell her she’s been in an accident.
Even without Ida’s beauty, Frank is already devoted to the very notion of her. A more accommodating suitor would be hard to find. Frank has another passion, the musical films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker’s brother), a Fred Astaire-like star. Frank imagines himself in the midst of those dance routines, and we get some more within “THE BRIDE!”’s “real” action.
One thing leads to another, Frank and Ida go on the run, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. They are pursued all over the country. Among those seeking them are sad-eyed police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his secretary Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), who’s better at this whole crime-solving business than he is.
It’s all very kaleidoscopic and energetic, occasionally impressive and sometimes very funny. Bening as the frazzled, worldly Euphronious has some great moments. Buckley, currently and justifiably Oscar-nominated leading performance in HAMNET, juggles the very unalike personas of Mary and Ida with impact.
Oddly, Bale underplays Frank. We get that he is trying his hardest not to spook Ida (or anyone else), but it seems like he should have a bit more spark. Cruz, going for a snappy ‘30s working woman, has her own style that works.
But in addition to being entertaining and eye-catching, Gyllenhaal has a message that gets very muddled. This is less because it’s so familiar by now that it feels a little redundant, and more because a crucial part of the set-up collides head-on with the feminist slant.
Ida seeks to be her own person, but she is literally bodily controlled by Mary Shelley, who puts her creation in danger with her outbursts. This may help get Ida out of the clutches of the mob, but it is possession, the aftereffects of which the character understandably finds confusing and upsetting.
If Gyllenhaal wanted to discuss or dramatize the clash between what Mary, as a woman, is doing to this other woman, that would make sense, but it seems we’re just meant to somehow overlook this while being immersed in how men control women. The resulting cognitive dissonance adds another layer to a movie that already has more than it can comfortably service.
Additionally, when Mary has one of her outbursts while inhabiting Ida, the plot comes to a screeching halt until she’s finished. Many viewers will wish Mary would stop declaiming and just let Ida be herself.
“THE BRIDE!” succeeds in being trippy and some of it is memorable. By the end, though, it is more disjointed than even a movie about experiments and a character made up of multiple people’s body parts ought to be.
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‘Heel’ Review: Why Did Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough Sign on for This Contrived Debacle?
The original title of “Heel” was “Good Boy.” The new title is probably more accurate, though an even more accurate title might be “Painfully Annoying Punk Idiot.” I jest (a bit), since the title of “Heel” is actually a verb. The film wants to tell the story of a budding hooligan who needs to be brought to heel. That said, does anyone seriously want to see a movie about a 19-year-old British sociopath who gets chained up in a basement so that the weird upper-middle-class couple who’ve kidnapped him can modify his behavior? “Heel” is like “A Clockwork Orange” remade as the year’s worst Sundance movie.
The opening sequence is actually promising. It depicts, in rapidly edited documentary-like montage, a reckless night out on the town by Tommy (Anson Boon) and his friends. They’re hopped-up club kids, and Tommy is their snarling, curly-haired, sexually coercive wastrel ringleader, living in the moment, pouring drinks down his throat, snorting coke and popping pills, dancing and carousing and puking and rutting in the bathroom, pushing himself to a higher and higher high, until he winds up collapsed on the sidewalk — a ritual, we gather, that has happened many times before. Only this time his crumpled body is gathered up by a mysterious stranger.
When Tommy wakes up, he’s in the basement of a stately stone house somewhere in the British countryside. He’s got a metal collar around his neck, and it’s chained to the ceiling. The film has barely gotten started, and already it’s cut to the second half of “A Clockwork Orange”: Can this monster delinquent be rehabilitated? Theoretically, that’s an interesting question, except that the way this happens is so garishly contrived that we can only go with the movie by putting any plea for reality on permanent hold.
Who are the people who have kidnapped Tommy? Chris (Stephen Graham) is a mild chap in a toupee who goes about his mission with a puckish vengeance disguised as gentility. His wife, Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), is so neurasthenic she’s like a ghost. (She has suffered some trauma that isn’t colored in.) The two have a cherubic preteen son they call Sunshine (Kit Rakusen). And why, exactly, are they doing what they’re doing? We have no idea. Trying to make a bad person into a good person is not, in itself, a terrible notion, but the conceit of “Heel” — that Tommy is locked in a dungeon, being treated like a dog, because that’s what it will take to change him — is like a toxic right-wing fantasy that the film somehow reconfigures into an implausible liberal “family” allegory.
Ah, plausibility! How unhip to gripe about the absence of it. Yet watching “Heel,” I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief for two seconds. The entire movie, directed by the Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa (“Corpus Christie”) from a script by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, is just a grimy monotonous conceit. It’s been thought out thematically but not in terms of recognizable human behavior. It’s like a film-student short stretched out to an agonizing 110 minutes.
Anson Boon, a charismatic actor who did an okay job of playing Johnny Rotten in Danny Boyle’s TV miniseries “Pistol” (though he never conjured Rotten’s homicidal gleam), infuses Tommy with a loutish energy that in the early scenes, at least, makes him a convincing candidate for either prison or the contemporary equivalent of shock therapy. And yet the character is exhaustingly obnoxious. As a filmmaker, Komasa doesn’t dramatize — he uses one-note traits to clobber the audience. Stephen Graham’s Chris is as quiet and circumspect as Tommy is abrasive. He tries to train Tommy by showing him motivational tapes, and by subjecting him to Tommy’s own depraved TikToks. He then rigs up an elaborate system of gutters on the ceiling so that Tommy, in his metal leash, can wander around the house, a sign that he’s been housebroken.
Tommy has to grow and change, since there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. In the process, he gets less annoying but also less interesting, because “Heel” sentimentalizes his transformation. Komasa seems to have missed the key irony of “A Clockwork Orange”: that the behavior modification of Alex is as brutalizing as his original state of punk anarchy. In “Heel,” Tommy’s evolution is singularly unconvincing — by the end, he’s practically ready to be the suitor in a Jane Austen drama. But that’s all of a piece with a movie so false it puts the audience in the doghouse.
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