Movie Reviews

‘Rebuilding’ Review: Josh O’Connor Is Heart-Wrenching in a Tender Portrait of Post-Wildfire Loss and Resilience

Published

1 year ago

January 26, 2025

‘Rebuilding’ Review: Josh O’Connor Is Heart-Wrenching in a Tender Portrait of Post-Wildfire Loss and Resilience

Working in his native Colorado, as he did in his memorable debut feature, A Love Song, Max Walker-Silverman again conjures a potent visual language from the landscape in Rebuilding. And, again, the writer-director places a halting love story at the center of his film. This time, though, the rural vista is scarred by a devastating wildfire, and it isn’t sweethearts separated by time who become reacquainted but a father and his young daughter, separated by divorce.

That father is an unmoored cowboy named Dusty, trying to figure out what comes next after the flames have destroyed his ranch, the place that defines him. The wrenching heart of this quiet drama, he’s played with eloquent understatement by Josh O’Connor, delivering the latest in a remarkable string of performances, and one that’s matched beat for poignant beat by the other members of the central cast.

Rebuilding

The Bottom Line

Understated and radiant.

Venue: Sundance Film Festival (Premieres)
Cast: Josh O’Connor, Lily LaTorre, Meghann Fahy, Amy Madigan, Kali Reis
Director-screenwriter: Max Walker-Silverman

1 hour 35 minutes

Notwithstanding the eerie timeliness of the movie, arriving as Los Angeles is reeling from disastrous conflagrations, this is a work whose riches transcend topicality. With his understanding of and affection for the hardy inhabitants of the mountainous American West, Walker-Silverman brings a new and tender radiance to the idea of regional filmmaking, along with an awareness of outworn stereotypes. Upending clichés about rugged individualism, Rebuilding looks toward a communal vision of courageousness and reinvention, a way to move forward without negating the past — especially when the remnants of that past have been reduced to ash.

Reteaming with cinematographer Alfonso Herrera Salcedo, Walker-Silverman wields an elegant shorthand, beginning with the ominous beauty of embers against a night sky. Cutting from that opening image to a ghostly scorched forest of leafless trees, Rebuilding delves straight into Dusty’s limbo, beginning with the auction of the cattle his charred land can no longer sustain. The editing, by Jane Rizzo and Ramzi Bashour, is finely attuned to the straightforward, crystalline lensing and the story’s often wordless poignancy. And the acoustic score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington is in sync with the interplay of dialogue and loaded silences, and well abetted by the occasional strains of country on the radio of Dusty’s truck. (A John Prine tune caps things off in the perfect key.)

Having kicked around here and there for a couple of months after the fire, Dusty is the last arrival at a mini-village of FEMA trailers arranged on a remote scrap of land. Alone in the narrow interior of his new home with the few boxes that hold his remaining earthly possessions, he jumps in his truck to escape the aching silence, arriving at a cheery clapboard house in town. Its kid-friendly yard clutter and warm interior (outstanding work by production designer Juliana Barreto Barreto) are an antidote to the sudden, awful emptiness of Dusty’s days. This is the home of his former mother-in-law, Bess (Any Madigan), and it’s where his ex, Ruby (Meghann Fahy), is raising their 9-year-old daughter, Callie-Rose (Lily LaTorre).

Ruby is surprised to see him, but doesn’t waste the opportunity to enlist him in some parenting. Without spelling it out in conversation, this narrative sequence makes clear, in Ruby’s almost angry decisiveness, Callie-Rose’s shyness bordering on detachment, and Dusty’s awkward hesitation, that he hasn’t been a steady part of his little girl’s life for a while. LaTorre, who starred opposite Sarah Snook in Run Rabbit Run, is captivating, conveying her character’s perceptiveness as well as the observational knack she’s inherited from her mother. “Mom says you didn’t apply yourself,” she informs her dad, who takes the judgment good-naturedly even as he feels the sting. Sometimes, clearly, his daughter’s intelligence intimidates him.

For Callie-Rose, whose guardedness soon gives way to infatuation, there’s an unmistakable gift in her father’s calamity: He’s released from the chores that claimed all his waking hours. The cowboy stuff that once put him at a distance is now a source of fascination and a way of connecting. In an especially lovely scene, he teaches her to saddle his horse, being housed for now by a fellow rancher (Dwight Mondragon). Dusty’s trailer-park life is no less an adventure for his daughter. She makes a new friend (Zeilyanna Martinez), a tween girl whose father died in the wildfire, and together they plant a firmament of glow-in-the-dark stars on the drab walls of Dusty’s trailer, interrupting his despair with magic.

Callie-Rose helps to draw her father into this new community, a place he initially regards as a mere way station, a blip on the road back to the life he’s always known. But that road is not as direct as he envisions it. A man of few words, Dusty is most animated when talking about rebuilding the ranch that has been in his family for four generations. You can see his dream of that yearned-for return shatter, and his soul sink, as he takes in the crushing advice of a loan officer (Jefferson Mays) at the local bank.

The people Dusty at first views as “not real neighbors anyway” quickly become a family of sorts, sharing meals and memories of the things they lost in the fire. With the exception of Mali, a heroically even-keeled widow played by Kali Reis, of True Detective, the roles of Dusty’s fellow survivors are handled by first-time screen actors, including the accomplished musician Binky Griptite. Most of them have a few moments of character-sketch screen time, but, more to Walker-Silverman’s point, they stand collectively in calm, sturdy rebuke to the notion, long endorsed by Hollywood, of a homogenous rural America. (Another Sundance selection this year, the South Dakota-set East of Wall, offers its own cliché-busting picture of the West.)

Dusty’s new neighbors include a lesbian couple (Nancy Morlan and Kathy Rose), a biracial couple (Biptite and Jeanine London), an affable plumber (David Bright) and a man of the woods (Christopher Young) who maintains a friendly distance. Mainly they’re emblems, here not to complicate the story but to provide a composite portrait of kindness and resilience. (The most glaringly underdeveloped role in the drama belongs to Ruby’s partner, Robbie, an amenable guitar-strumming fellow played by Sam Engbring.)

In the presence of his fellow FEMA tenants, Dusty is at first like a forlorn big kid, slouching slightly as if to minimize his towering frame, thrusting his normally hardworking, newly idle hands into his jeans pockets, and, yes, occasionally helping himself to one of his daughter’s juice boxes. But beneath the lost, juvenile aura are questions of legacy and a keen awareness of the life he’s inherited — not an easy one, as the dates on his parents’ headstones in the family plot attest.

The matter of rootedness is addressed head-on when Callie-Rose goes to work on a family tree, presumably for school. As the girl, her parents and grandmother sit around a table filled with names and photographs, what might have been merely literal in lesser hands unfurls with a powerful current of love beneath its minimal dialogue.

Fahy, infusing her atypical role with an earthy grace, delivers a couple of the movie’s most affecting passages, the language’s simplicity matched by the emotions’ enormity. And Madigan’s modest directness lays a foundation for the drama in a way that’s so masterful in its subtlety, you’d be tempted to call it sleight of hand.

On the face of it, Dusty is a role that might seem a stretch even for shapeshifter O’Connor, who in a few short years has traveled a path of electrifying versatility, beginning with God’s Own Country and his star-making turn on The Crown, and on through such diverse terrain as Mothering Sunday, La Chimera and Challengers. But the British actor is compelling from first moment to last, fully inhabiting the character’s pain and confusion as well as his essential optimism.

Everyone in Rebuilding is sincere, honest and caring, and nothing is overplayed — including the bashful love that blossoms between Dusty and Callie-Rose and is the engine of the story. As this exceptionally quiet movie unfolds, there are moments when you might wish for more friction, more heat, like the healthy dashes of hot sauce with which Madigan’s character doses the scrambled eggs she serves her granddaughter. But Walker-Silverman is a filmmaker who doesn’t hew to formulaic arcs, and it would be a mistake to interpret quietness as tranquility or ease. Something more complex and rewarding than surface tension is at play here, and it builds to a conclusion of breathtaking openheartedness. Sometimes a blip on the road is magic in disguise, the root of a dazzling new constellation.

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Movie Reviews

Mortal Kombat 2 Movie Review: Simon McQuoid’s Latest Is A Breezy, Bloody, Sometimes Baffling Time

Published

7 hours ago

May 10, 2026

Press Room

Mortal Kombat 2 Movie Review: Simon McQuoid’s Latest Is A Breezy, Bloody, Sometimes Baffling Time

Warner Bros. has a new movie to put in the ring. Mortal Kombat II, the sequel to the action-filled 2021 video game adaptation that at the very least got the gore right, is here. It’s a breezy, bloody entry that leans heavily on video game characters and logic, a move that should satisfy franchise fans, even if the actual narrative is too weak to win over new converts.

We’re in an era of regular, variably solid video game adaptations. Series like The Last of Us and Fallout, and films such as Sonic the Hedgehog and Werewolves Within, are exemplary, with stories that capture much of what works about the games. On the other hand, adaptations like Borderlands show that it’s still possible to get one wrong. The stakes remain high.

When director Simon McQuoid’s Mortal Kombat graced the screens and HBO Max, it was received with a sizable difference between fans (currently 85% on Rotten Tomatoes with over 5,000 verified ratings) and critics (55% with 299 factored in). It was refreshing to have fights that didn’t skimp on the game series’ violence, but some muddled plotting, a failure to fully capture the game’s feel, and centering the film on an original character (rather than a fan-favorite from the games) were ill-received.

Mortal Kombat II is a bigger and more faithful adaptation in many ways. The tournament actually feels deadly, and many of the fight sequences are sufficiently bloody to accurately reflect the games. The actual narrative falls apart somewhat when you think too hard about it, but it largely works, and certain characters (Kano, Johnny Cage) steal every scene they’re in. If you like your movies bloody with a side of silly, you’re in luck.

Mortal Kombat 2 Has Stellar New Additions

Warner Bros.

Mortal Kombat II doesn’t waste time in setting the stakes, with an opening fight between Eternia’s King Jerrod and Shao Kahn (Martyn Ford). The helmeted tyrant Kahn’s violent victory allows him to raise Jerrod’s daughter, Kitana, as he comes to rule Eternia thanks to his tournament victories. That backstory sets up the complex journey of adult Kitana (Adeline Rudolph), who fights for Kahn alongside longtime friend Jade (Tati Gabrielle), but has understandable reservations.

Another major element of this iteration is the addition of washed-up action star Johnny Cage (Karl Urban), who is recruited to fight for Earthrealm despite lacking powers. Cage has to fight under the tutelage of Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano), alongside mainstays including Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Jax (Mehcad Brooks), Cole Young (Lewis Tan), and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin). Our heroes have to defeat Shao Khan’s warriors to save Earth, all the while preventing him from acquiring an amulet that would render him immortal.

Urban is a stellar addition to the series, with a huge and charismatic personality that fits Johnny Cage and is fun to watch onscreen. Josh Lawson’s dirtbag mercenary Kano gets some fantastic scenes here, and the two add a lot of charm that some other characters may lack. Adeline Rudolph is empathetic and believably tactical as Kitana. Gabrielle’s Jade isn’t given enough key scenes to shine, but there’s clear potential for the character in future iterations.

Baraka (CJ Bloomfield) isn’t the deepest character, but Bloomfield makes him memorable, and his relationship with Johnny Cage is always a fun watch. While Tan’s Cole Young has something to do in Mortal Kombat II, he’s much less of a focus here, as are returning favorites like Hiroyuki Sanada and Joe Taslim’s Bi-Han.

There are new characters, many moving parts, and a narrative that’s more a string of battles than a traditional Hollywood tale, leaving some favorites underutilized. Because of the need to introduce new characters, most of the existing ones are relatively one-note. Kitana and Johnny Cage get ample screen time, even character arcs, and Kano, Baraka, and some others do get standout moments. Most characters, however, remain one-note figures.

Mortal Kombat II Doesn’t Fully Make Sense, but It Mostly Hits Hard

Lewis Tan as Cole Young in Mortal Kombat 2. — Warner Bros.

While Mortal Kombat 2 doesn’t have the biggest fights you’ll see this year (that would be The Furious), it does have quite a few memorable ones with great finishers. The final fight with Shao Kahn has a solid ending, and many get standout moments as the movie proceeds. Kitana, Baraka, Liu Kang, Hanzo Hasashi/Scorpion, and Kung Lao all get particularly unforgettable moments.

A more faithful structure also makes this round’s fights feel a bit more like one is playing an actual Mortal Kombat game, which is welcome. Most are well-paced, though a few could use tighter editing. Unfortunately, the story is more than a little muddled. Shao Kahn wants a Maguffin to be unkillable, sure, but if the tournament rules allow an invasion of Earthrealm if and only if Earth’s champions defeat Outworld’s five times, isn’t an immortality-granting amulet the equivalent of steroid use? Where are the referees?

Some characters (like Jade) change allegiances almost at random, with no consistency. There are several moments when characters make choices that don’t make sense, or at least we don’t have enough information to understand them.

Altogether, Mortal Kombat II learned from quite a few of the issues the first film had. It swapped out protagonists for one with a flashier personality, better replicated the game’s elements and structure, and had kills to boot. That’s largely enough to succeed for the kind of film it is, but it still has issues.

There are too many characters to develop in any interesting way, the tournament rules and character plans don’t make total sense, and the pacing is quick in some moments and slow in others. Nonetheless, it’s a delightful outing and feels just like a big ol’ violent video game (complimentary).

Final Rating: 7/10

Mortal Kombat 2 is playing in theaters.

Movie Reviews

1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy

Published

19 hours ago

May 9, 2026

Press Room

1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy

by Sean P. Aune | May 9, 2026

Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.

We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.

Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.

The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.

This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.

Dangerously Close

I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.

An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?

The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.

Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.

Fire with Fire

Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.

Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.

This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’

Last Resort

Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.

George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.

There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.

Short Circuit

Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?

NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.

Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.

His whole character is mystifying.

Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.

1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.

Movie Reviews

Movie Review: AFFECTION – Assignment X

Published

1 day ago

May 9, 2026

Press Room

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026

AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.

There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.

Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.

But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.

The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.

Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.

Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.

The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?

AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.

Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.

We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.

As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.

Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.

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