He-Man lands in theaters Friday, and reviews for Masters of the Universe are now in.

The film, a live-action adaptation of the Mattel franchise from director Travis Knight, follows Prince Adam of Eternia, who crash-lands on Earth as a child and is separated from his Sword of Power. Raised as an ordinary man named Adam Glenn, he eventually recovers the sword and returns to save his homeland, where he faces off against Skeletor.

Nicholas Galitzine stars as He-Man/Prince Adam/Adam Glenn, while Jared Leto plays the villain Skeletor. The cast also includes Idris Elba as Man-at-Arms, Camila Mendes as Teela, Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn, Morena Baccarin as Sorceress and Kristen Wiig as Roboto.

Masters of the Universe celebrated its Los Angeles premiere last month, where the original He-Man from the 1987 film, Dolph Lundgren, praised Galitzine’s performance while speaking with The Hollywood Reporter: “You need a guy who is a leading-man type, and the muscles and the strength are secondary. You can always create that, and I think Nicholas did that. He built himself up. When I did it, it was a little more like I had the physique and had to access my boyish side to find the character.”

As of Tuesday, the movie holds a 74 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. To find out what critics are saying, read on.

THR’s Frank Scheck wrote, “The film winds up feeling so much like one of those fringe festival musical theater parodies that you find yourself waiting for the characters to burst into song … Masters of the Universe touches all the fan-serving bases, with a fun cameo by a certain star of a previous film incarnation and enough post-credit sequences to guarantee several sequels. But it all comes off as terribly forced, as if everyone involved was already trying to figure out exactly how much they’ll earn signing autographs at future Comic-Cons.”

IGN’s Clint Gage wrote, “Masters of the Universe is so much funnier than I expected, and the fight scenes are choreographed and photographed in a way that gives the sequences just enough flair to make them stand out (even if they’re not revolutionizing superhero style fisticuffs on screen). While Nicholas Galitzine and Idris Elba provide the thematic structure to the film, Jared Leto’s Skeletor gives a delightfully weird and cartoonish energy to every scene he’s in.”

YouTube critic Jeremy Jahns also highlighted Leto’s performance in his review, “Standout performance and character in Masters of the Universe: Jared Leto’s Skeletor,” Jahns said. “He was the most fun happening on screen at any given time.” He also added, “It does feel like a few different movies crushed into one. A few different ideas of what a Masters of the Universe movie should or would be. And most importantly, it had these moments of heart and life lessons that I actually liked that didn’t always land because sometimes the comedy is just there to eclipse it.” 

Inverse’s Ryan Britt wrote, “The idea of navigating your childhood hopes and fears, and incorporating those things into your adult life, is — somewhat appropriately for a movie based on an old cartoon — at the heart of the film. Not everyone who goes to see Masters of the Universe will have grown up with He-Man, but this film will make you wish that you did. And, at the same time, it’ll make you feel grateful that he’s back and quite literally, better than ever.”

The Guardian’s Benjamin Lee had a less favorable take on the film, writing in his review, “Amazon’s head-scratching $200m-budgeted misfire fails to explain why so much time, money and effort has been wasted on a movie based on a toy that kids just don’t play with any more … There’s just too much distracting confusion here — from Galitzine’s unsure performance to the script’s swirl of competing tones to the very question of why this needed to exist — for it to transport us as we both hope and expect.”

Carolina Caroline, 2025.

Directed by Adam Rehmeier.
Starring Samara Weaving, Kyle Gallner, Kyra Sedgwick, Jon Gries, Tommy G. Kendrick, P.J. Sosko, Gregg Gilmore, Jamald Gardner, Matthew Smitley, Ed Formica, and Robert Stevens Wayne.

SYNOPSIS:

A young woman joins a charming con man on the run, leaving a trail of crime and passion as they hustle through the Southeast in search of her estranged mother.

The eponymous Caroline of director Adam Rehmeier’s Carolina Caroline has never properly met her mother. That woman abandoned her and her father (Jon Gries) before she was one year old. Moving to South Carolina and growing up there, it’s also safe to say that the unfulfilled Caroline, working at a local convenience store and coming home to a father with no ambitions to leave his comfortable home chair let alone get out and see the world (actively dismissing soccer in the process, suggesting that there also might be some unsurprising internalized racism given his age and having only known the South), hasn’t properly lived. 

A chance encounter with scuzzy but charming con man Oliver (Kyle Gallner, playing in the type of role he regularly excels in), which mostly consists of Caroline observing a mental-manipulation hustle at the cash register, swapping dollar bills with confused clerks to come away with more money than he entered with, lures her to him. Impressed with her ability to pick up on the small-time psychological heist, Oliver decides to take Caroline on as his protege and partner in crime. Naturally, his fascination is also romantic, considering Caroline is an attractive woman played by Samara Weaving.

While going out to dinner together, Oliver also demonstrates a wealth of knowledge about human behavior that helps him predict how people will react in certain situations, opening the door for him to steal something of value or play successful mind games. This also greatly intrigues Caroline, as part of the reason she has never expanded her horizons beyond her small South Carolina town is that, deep down, she fears there are similarities to her mother and that she will end up hurting someone. Meanwhile, as we are watching this, we justifiably wonder if trusting Oliver at all will come back to haunt her.

Nevertheless, as the duo embarks on a string of crimes across the Southeast that gradually escalates in seriousness (at first, it is teaching Caroline how to perfect the cash register con, but not long before moving into identity theft and actual bank robberies resembling Bonnie and Clyde), it is called into question which one here might be more dangerous in the grand scheme of their characterizations. The eventual destination is South Carolina, where Caroline will hopefully meet her mother and get answers to her burning questions, including why she and her father were abandoned in the first place.

And while there is no denying that Carolina Caroline is an effectively performed film with layers and nuances that fortunately saved the film from one-dimensionality, often drawing immersion from lived-in locales (whether it be towns themselves or the bars and banks characters end up in), with the occasional person who comes across more as someone pulled off the street rather than a traditional actor, some of the screenwriting here from Tom Dean borders on hokey and unconvincing.

This also leaves the film feeling as if it is sometimes nervously afraid to commit to the story’s grimy grittiness, more concerned with keeping the characters likable than with pushing them a step too far into moral ambiguity. It’s all a bit too clean and safe for a movie about a woman slowly becoming a career criminal whilst smitten with her mentor/friend, either testing herself to see if she can be destructive like her mother, or as a means to find a semblance of freedom in justified thieving and separate herself from a boring life. Samara Weaving is terrific throughout, but especially in the later stages, determined to push back against a terrible hand of cards dealt to her in life, ready to make her own future at any cost.

To put it bluntly, though, too much is accomplished by depicting robberies and intimacy through montages, typically filled with country songs, that don’t necessarily allow one to invest in the characters and their actions. There is a hollowness underneath the otherwise entertaining surface. Even the title and nickname Carolina Caroline feels like a misguided eccentricity, and something that belongs in that straight-up romance. Thankfully, the direction and performances capture the humanity of the characters and the story, making the inevitable third-act tragedy engaging and heartbreaking.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

I watched Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia before I watched the original. I was in my early twenties. I thought the film was fine and I moved on. It took me until Second Sight dropped this 4K edition to find out what fine had been covering up for twenty four years. I feel pretty bad about that. Not bad enough to not tell you to skip Nolan and start here, but bad.

Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 original is a Norwegian thriller about a Swedish detective named Jonas Engström who goes to Tromsø to investigate a teenage girl’s murder and instead dismantles himself in daylight. Stellan Skarsgård plays Jonas. He is not a good man doing a bad thing. He is a man who was already doing bad things who then does a worse one, and the film is about watching him hold that together under a sun that will not go down.

The Sun Is the Monster Here

Skjoldbjærg called it “a reversed film noir with light instead of darkness as its dramatic force,” and that is exactly right, and also a polite way of saying the Arctic summer is doing something genuinely horrible to this movie. Tromsø in June means no night. No dark corner. No 3am where you can tell yourself it was a dream.

Cinematographer Erling Thurmann-Andersen shoots the whole thing overexposed and grey, and in the new 4K restoration that greyness lands like a fist. Every interior feels too bright. Every window is a problem. Jonas cannot sleep, cannot hide, cannot find a single hour that looks different from the one before it. That is the film’s horror, and it is more effective than it has any right to be.

What Skarsgård Actually Does

The performance does not announce itself. That is the whole thing. Skarsgård plays Jonas going still when he should flinch, pausing a half-beat too long before answering simple questions, watching every room he enters with the focus of a man who needs to know who in it already knows. He is calculating. He is also dissolving.

Roger Ebert compared the film to Dostoevsky when it opened stateside in 1998. The Crime and Punishment parallel is real, with one difference, Raskolnikov is tormented almost immediately. Jonas keeps choosing not to be. That is the colder read and the better film.

What Nolan Did With It

The 2002 remake moved everything to Alaska, added about 20 minutes, and made the detective a fundamentally decent man destroyed by circumstance. Al Pacino does the thing Pacino does. Robin Williams is genuinely unsettling in a way the film earns. Hilary Swank does more with her role than the script deserves. It is a competent Hollywood thriller and I have not thought about it since I watched it.

The key structural difference, in Nolan’s version, the detective dies. Some weight lifted. In the original, Jonas lives. Goes home. Carries it. That is the correct ending and the more disturbing one, and I will not call it a spoiler because you needed to know.

About This Release

Second Sight did not cut corners. The 4K restoration carries a director-approved HDR grade with Dolby Vision, and Thurmann-Andersen’s washed-out oppressive whites have never looked this punishing. The dual format edition puts the feature and bonus material on both the UHD and Blu-ray, which is a small detail that collectors notice and appreciate.

The physical package is a rigid slipcase with new art by Peter Strain, a 120-page book with essays from Jenn Adams, Mitchell Beaupre, Barry Forshaw, Francesco Massaccesi, Priscilla Page, and Travis Woods, and six collector art cards. The book reads like it was commissioned from people who actually watched the film. That sounds like a low bar. It is not.

What Is on the Discs

The audio commentary with Skjoldbjærg and co-writer Nikolaj Frobenius is the feature you will come back to. A director revisiting his debut nearly thirty years out has usually dropped the defensiveness and kept the honesty, and this one has that quality. Two new interviews accompany it: “Running on Instinct” with Skjoldbjærg, and “Falling Into It” with producer Petter J. Borgli. The producer interview fills in context the film itself never bothers to explain.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas contributes a piece called “Private Prisons” that treats the film analytically without treating it as a sacred object. Three of Skjoldbjærg’s short films are included: Spor, Close to Home, and Near Winter. Watch those first if you want to know where Insomnia came from.

Buy It or Don’t

If you have never seen this film, the answer is yes. Full stop.

If you own the Criterion edition and you are doing upgrade math. The restoration is the definitive visual presentation and the commentary is new material unavailable anywhere else. Whether that moves the needle depends on you.

Insomnia is a Norwegian film about guilt dressed as a detective story. Jonas Engström did not need the midnight sun to lose his mind. He was already most of the way there.