Some of these reviews are cracking me up. It’s clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or ANY of the rules/ canon of Mortal Kombat. One reviewer was mad that a guy “had a laser eye!” Why the fuck do we still allow people that don’t have any love…
— Todd Garner (@Todd_Garner) May 6, 2026
Movie Reviews
‘Night Swim’ Review: Wyatt Russell and Kerry Condon Struggle to Keep Low-Rent Horror Flick Afloat
Unless you don’t know how to swim, swimming pools simply aren’t scary. Sure, some of them can be pretty gross, depending on how well their owners maintain them. And if bugs or other creatures die in them, that can be disgusting. But mostly they seem like a nice place to relax on a warm summer day. That’s the main problem with Bryce McGuire’s feature about a haunted swimming pool, adapted from a 2014 short film he made in collaboration with Rod Blackhurst. Despite the filmmaker’s best efforts to drum up suspense via the usual jump scares, Night Swim turns out to be just as silly as it sounds.
The short that provided this film’s inspiration had a running time of under four minutes, which sounds exactly right. Unfortunately, the feature version runs 98 minutes, its simple premise gussied up with a backstory mythology that isn’t likely to make Stephen King green with envy. And when the most chilling line in a movie is “There’s something wrong with that pool!” it’s all too easy to imagine the barbs on a future episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Night Swim
The Bottom Line The shallow end of the horror-film pool.
Release date: Friday, Jan. 5
Cast: Wyatt Russell, Kerry Condon, Amelie Hoeferle, Gavin Warren, Jodi Long
Director-screenwriter: Bryce McGuire
Rated PG-13,
1 hour 38 minutes
The story begins with a prologue set in 1992 when a little girl attempts to retrieve a mysterious toy boat from her backyard swimming pool and meets an unfortunate end. Cut to the present day, when we’re introduced to the Waller family: Ray (Wyatt Russell), a former baseball player whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis; his supportive wife, Eve (Oscar nominee Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Inisherin); teenage daughter Izzy (Amelie Hoeferle, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes); and 12-year old son Elliot (Gavin Warren, Fear the Walking Dead), who hasn’t inherited his father’s athletic ability.
The family, unaware of the house’s fateful history, makes the mistake of buying the home with the pool, with Ray believing that daily water therapy will help him counteract the effects of his pernicious disease. (This, despite the fact that the first time he sees it he falls in and nearly drowns.) It also turns out the pool has water provided by a natural spring thought to have healing properties, which indeed seems to be the case as Ray’s condition miraculously improves.
Cue the inevitable disturbing incidents, as the family members prove weirdly determined to stick their hands in every available opening in the pool with predictably unhappy results. Only their pet cat seems to know something is wrong with the pool — the animals in horror films are always smarter than the humans — but not surprisingly it soon turns up missing, its leash floating in the water.
The film attempts to do for swimming pools what Jaws did for the ocean, with Marco Polo and other pool party games suddenly turning sinister and potentially deadly. Except Jaws had a genuinely terrifying monster in the form of a great white shark, while Night Swim has fleetingly glimpsed supernatural creatures of the kind you might see when you get too much chlorine in your eyes. And when they do become more visible as the story goes on, they look like waterlogged Halloween masks.
Swimming pools don’t get haunted without a reason, of course. The one eventually revealed here turns out to be a doozy, dating back generations, having something to do with a demonic wishing well. By the time one of the main characters becomes possessed by whatever is haunting the pool, the film has thoroughly devolved into campiness.
To their credit, the actors elevate the material. Russell, son of Kurt, has clearly inherited his father’s innate relaxed appeal; Condon, in a film that’s frankly beneath her, invests her portrayal with surprising depth; and Hoeferle and Warren are thoroughly natural as the beleaguered kids. And director McGuire, whose previous feature credit is 2018’s Unfollowed, proves more than adept at adhering to the Blumhouse low-budget horror film playbook. But for all their efforts, Night Swim won’t make you think twice about jumping into a pool on a hot summer night.
Billie Eilish fans prepare yourself, the much talked about secret project has finally arrived on the big screens!
Billie Eilish has always been about intimacy over artifice, but her latest concert film takes that to a visceral new level. Co-directed by Eilish and James Cameron, Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) manages to bridge the gap between a massive stadium show and the quiet grit of life backstage.
The film starts 18 minutes out from the show and builds the tension until audiences are literally folded into a box with her. Being taken under the stage, passing fans who have no idea she’s inches away, sets a tone of total immersion. What makes this film different is the balance between the spectacle and the behind-the-scenes reality. We see the creative shorthand between Billie and James Cameron as they chase what she calls the “best kind of sensory overload”.
The film is very much fan focussed, with the sound mix being so specific that you can hear individual fans singing along in sync with the visuals.
There are so many standout moments, the handheld camera work during “Bad Guy” that gives a dizzying POV of the band, and the chilling minute of silence Billie requests from the crowd to record a vocal loop.
The film captures her unique stage presence. Influenced by rap culture, Billie refuses to have anyone else on stage, unlike many female artists that use back up dancers. Billie can hold the entire stadium in awe by herself which is incredible to witness, until Finneas joins her for a beautiful, emotional piano set.
Between the high-tech visuals and the “Puppy Room” (where she keeps rescue dogs for staff to decompress), the film feels incredibly personal. While the film doesn’t give us any new insights into Billie, Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) is an enjoyable experience that elevates the tradition concert film.
Movie Reviews
Mortal Kombat 2 film producer asks ‘why the f**k’ critics who ‘have never played the game’ were allowed to review it | VGC
The producer of the Mortal Kombat 2 movie has called out critics who gave it a negative review.
At the time of writing, Mortal Kombat 2 has a score of 73% on film review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, and a score of 48 on Metacritic.
While this means reviews have generally been mixed, the film’s producer Todd Garner took to X to criticise those who wrote negative reviews, suggesting that some of them were written by critics who aren’t familiar with the source material.
“Some of these reviews are cracking me up,” Garner wrote. “It’s clear they have never played the game and have no idea what the fans want or any of the rules/canon of Mortal Kombat.
“One reviewer was mad that a guy ‘had a laser eye’! Why the fuck do we still allow people that don’t have any love for the genre review these movies! Baffling.”
When questioned on this viewpoint by some followers, Garner explained that while he doesn’t have an issue with negative reviews in general, his problem is specifically reviewers who don’t appear to be familiar with Mortal Kombat.
“My comment was very squarely directed at a couple of reviewers that did not like the ‘zombies’ and the fact that there was a ‘guy with a laser eye’, etc,” he said. “Those are elements that are baked into the Mortal Kombat IP and therefore we were dead in the water going in.
“There is no way for that person to review how it functioned as a film, because they did not like the foundational elements of the IP. I just wish when something is so obviously fan leaning in its DNA, that critics would take that into consideration.”
One follower then countered Garner’s complaint by arguing that he shouldn’t be criticising people who don’t know the games, when the films themselves take creative license with the IP.
“Bro to be fair, you invented Cole Young, Arcana and couldn’t even get the simple lore of Mileena and Kitana correct,” said user Dudeguy29. “I’d say you shouldn’t be tossing any stones here.”
“Fair,” Garner replied.
Garner previously criticised the cast of the Street Fighter movie when, during The Game Awards last year, comedian Andrew Schulz – who plays Dan in the Street Fighter film – claimed that the Mortal Kombat 2 movie cast were also in attendance, before joking: “I’m just kidding, they didn’t come, they don’t care about you, they only care about money.”
The jibe didn’t go down well with Garner, who stated on X at the time: “I don’t climb over others to get ahead”. When recently asked how he felt about the cast vs cast rivalry, however, Mortal Kombat co-creator Ed Boon laughed and said he had no issue with it at all.
Mortal Kombat 2 is released in cinemas this Friday, May 8, while Street Fighter arrives later in the year on October 16.
Within the family at the center of Blue Heron, the black sheep is a blond. Fair-skinned teenager Jeremy (Edik Beddoes) is an outlier among his siblings, two jostling preteen boys and watchful, 8-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven), who are all darkly featured and take after their Hungarian parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa). Jeremy’s hair color doesn’t really matter, of course, but the contrast makes a useful shorthand for Jeremy’s otherness.
If “other” sounds inexact, that’s the point. To the frustration of his devoted but exhausted parents, there’s been no straightforward diagnosis for what ails Jeremy – for the mood swings, the “acting out.” A move at the beginning of the film to a new home is hopeful but short-lived: The mystery of Jeremy, to himself and to others, persists.
Much of Blue Heron is set over the course of one summer on Vancouver Island in the late Nineties, mirroring filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s own backstory, though the film shouldn’t be confused for straight autobiography. (Her 2020 short film, “Still Processing,” explored her family’s struggles with mental health through first-person documentary.) Still, the remarkable texture of these family scenes and how they favor Sasha’s childlike perspective – her small hands as they handle a potato peeler for the first time, the easy smiles as her mother dabs sunscreen on her face – feels intensely personal. There’s a hushed, dreamy quality to these scenes, mimicking memory itself, that plays into Blue Heron’s remarkable ability to hold two seemingly contradictory things to be true. Sasha can resent her brother and love him. Jeremy can be terrifying and in pain. A film can be whisper-quiet and still trip the wires in your brain that scream “danger.”
With very little dialogue and no cookie-cutter story beats, this fraught family life is vividly, tenderly rendered by Romvari and her naturalistic cast. That makes it all the more disorienting when, at arguably the moment of highest drama, Romvari shifts to a different vantage point. Boldly, she is asking the audience to look anew at what we’ve seen: to acknowledge what we saw was not the whole picture (how could it be, from an 8-year-old’s eye line?). The effect for me – and I suspect for you too, if you’re the kind of person who likes to take a movie apart and understand how it ticks – is exhilarating.
But not entirely effective – and in this reservation I gather I’m the outlier; Blue Heron has been rapturously received at festivals and by critics. This second half (of which I’m loath to spoil the specifics) becomes at once more experimental and more documentary-like, and revolves around a muted performance stranded in the in-between of drama and docudrama. Nothing ruinous, but a hangnail nonetheless on a film that otherwise had me in its thrall.
Blue Heron
2026, NR, 90 min. Directed by Sophy Romvari. Starring Eylul Guven, Edik Beddoes, Amy Zimmer, Iringó Réti, Ádám Tompa, Liam Serg, Preston Drabble.
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This article appears in May 8 • 2026.
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