LOS ANGELES, May 28 (UPI) — Power Ballad, in select theaters Friday, introduces several provocative themes about creativity and the music industry. Unfortunately, it only pays them lip service and leaves many important ones on the table.

Rick Power (Paul Rudd) is the lead singer of an Irish wedding band who loses the party crowd when he plays his own originals from his U.S. touring days. At one wedding, the bride invites her childhood friend, former boy band singer Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas).

After singing a duet at the wedding, Danny and Rick spend the night together jamming in Danny’s room. Danny even leaves Rick a generous parting gift, though his promise that Rick can get in touch with him through his managers seems empty.

When Danny’s manager, Mac (Jack Reynor) rejects his new solo submissions, Danny records “How to Write a Song (Without You)” which Rick played for him during their night in Ireland. Rick finds out when he hears it in the mall six months later.

This raises poignant questions about authorship. Rick wrote the song but never recorded it. Danny recorded it and made it a hit, but claimed authorship.

The script by John Carney and Peter McDonald goes into thorough detail about how Rick cannot establish a record of writing the song prior to meeting Danny. He has no demos, never shared it with his wedding band, and even his wife (Marcella Plunkett) and daughter (Beth Fallon) can’t remember it out of all the music he’s played in the house.

It’s less surprising that Mac shuts down Rick’s claim and threatens legal retaliation, which a humble Irish wedding singer could never afford to battle. What’s more surprising is which obvious questions Carney and McDonald never think to ask.

Danny got a hit out of “How to Write a Song (Without You).” He can ride that for a bit but what is he going to do when he has to write another and all he’s got are the same trite songs the label rejected before?

Mac and Danny allude to an EP he released that included “How to Write a Song” but we don’t hear any of the other tracks. What B-sides did Mac accept to justify a tour off one hit single?

Danny tells his girlfriend (Havana Rose Liu) that he wrote the song for her. Not only does she never find out, question or appear again in the film, she also doesn’t find out when he later takes two groupies to the hot tub.

Instead, Power Ballad seems more invested in mocking Rick for claiming he had a hand in a hit. It must be hard to live with the song ubiquitous everywhere he goes, and especially when a married couple requests he perform it for them. It seems particularly heartless when Rick’s wife and daughter mock him for it. That they don’t believe he wrote it suggests far deeper conflict in that family, but the film never gets into that either.

Rick also lashes out too hard when he’s defensive. It becomes uncharacteristically bitter for a John Carney movie.

The ultimate confrontation between Rick and Danny is unsatisfying. Their jam session was genuine, two musicians bonding over the art when Rick does not care about Danny’s celebrity.

By the time they meet again, Danny’s arc is reductively “hurt people hurt people.” He’s insecure, and boy, would it have been interesting to see him put to the test to follow up “How to Write a Song” by… writing another song.

It also strains credulity that “How to Write a Song (Without You)” is the comeback hit for Danny. It’s fine but not notably better than his other demos.

Begin Again and Sing Street had original music that sounded like it could sell albums on its own. Once literally became a Broadway musical. By Power Ballad, we’ve got a song less catchy than fictional movie songs like “That Thing You Do” or “Way Back Into Love” from Music & Lyrics.

The film does contrast Rick’s heartfelt performance with Danny’s poser version. A sold out Madison Square Garden doesn’t know the difference, but the viewer of Power Ballad does.

Other bright spots are sporadic and disjointed. Jonas takes some gentle jabs at boy band music. They’d land harder if his character ultimately did man up.

They do portray diverse weddings. Fortunately, LGBTQ unions get screen time along with more heteronormative ones.

A nightmare visualizes Rick’s real insecurities comically. Rick and bandmate Sandy (McDonald) perpetuate a cute scheme to get past security, and their actual “in” with Danny was legitimately established previously. Sandy choosing music over a party girl hitting on him is endearing.

Carney’s earlier movies were genuinely uplifting and inspiring even with their share of heartbreaks. His film about struggling to regain earlier inspiration ultimately faces the same very dilemma and blows it like the movie’s antagonist does.

Lionsgate will release Power Ballad nationwide June 5.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

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

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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.