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‘The Deb’ Review: Rebel Wilson’s Directorial Debut Is a Campy, Mixed-Bag Teen Musical

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‘The Deb’ Review: Rebel Wilson’s Directorial Debut Is a Campy, Mixed-Bag Teen Musical

When Maeve (Charlotte MacInnes) gets suspended from school after a political demonstration backfires, her mother (Susan Prior), who also happens to be the institution’s principal, sends the Sydney teenager to live with her cousin Taylah (Natalie Abbott) in the Australian outback.

Dunburn, the fictional locale in which Rebel Wilson’s uneven directorial debut The Deb is set, is a small town recovering from a years-long drought and dereliction of duty by national ministries. The local government desperately needs money to maintain their water supply and have resorted, in one of the film’s more humorous gags, to making a viral video to bring attention to their plight. Of course, none of these issues concern Maeve, who arrives in Dunburn already plotting her escape. 

The Deb

The Bottom Line

Overstuffed with both good and bad.

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Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
Cast: Rebel Wilson, Shane Jacobson, Tara Morice, Natalie Abbott, Charlotte MacInnes, Julian McMahon
Director: Rebel Wilson
Screenwriters: Hannah Reilly, Meg Washington, Rebel Wilson

2 hours 1 minute

Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Deb chronicles Maeve’s fish-out-of-water adventures in Dunburn. Upon arrival, the cosmopolitan teen loudly rejects the town’s regressive traditions. In particular, Maeve bemoans the annual debutante ball, which Taylah dreams of attending. She can’t understand why her cousin would submit herself to such retrograde pomp and circumstance. Soon, of course, Maeve realizes that she can’t so easily write this small town or its people off.

The Deb is based on the well-received stage musical of the same name by Hannah Reilly (who returns to write the screenplay) and Meg Washington (who serves as an executive producer). It’s a campy movie musical whose cultural self-awareness when it comes to teenage life might draw comparisons to this year’s Mean Girls musical adaptation but whose narrative owes much to Muriel’s Wedding. Taylah, like Muriel, is a big-hearted country girl who dreams of love and social acceptance — the kind of underdog screen protagonist who has become more common since P.J. Hogan’s 1994 film premiered at TIFF. 

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Whereas Muriel wanted to get married, Taylah wants to find a date to the debutante ball, a tradition that makes her feel closer to her deceased mother. Her transformation and friendship with Maeve drive most of the film’s action and offer a heartwarming, if predictable, relationship to root for. It helps that MacInnes (who played Maeve in the stage production) and Abbott fully embrace their characters and the exaggerations required of the movie musical. Their performances, as well as a handful of others including Shane Jacobson as Taylah’s father Rick and Tara Morice as a local tailor, soften the film’s more glaring contrivances. 

Outside of the acting, which leans into the ridiculous and amplifies the campy nature of the film, The Deb struggles in its translation to the screen. The music is contemporary pastiche — riffing on different genres and arranged in ways that recall the Pitch Perfect covers — and although a handful are memorable, thoughts of many fade with the credits. Wilson’s direction is similarly uneven, especially toward the middle of the film, which packs in convenient plot points to distract from narrative thinness. The result is off-kilter pacing that threatens to undo the film’s more successful parts. 

Like this year’s Mean Girls, The Deb does successfully play with the tools of the social media age, adjusting the aspect ratio to mimic iPhones and incorporating the use of platforms like TikTok or Instagram into its storytelling. The film opens with a bullish pop number (one of the movie’s strongest) introducing Maeve’s world at an elite private school in Sydney. The new teenage experience involves documenting every aspect of their lives and engaging in Plastics-like mocking and cruelty.

The catch, of course, is that all of these students are hyper-attuned to injustice so they always punch up instead of down. Maeve’s popularity — both IRL and online — stems from her outspokenness on feminist issues. But she’s also a classic bully, and after one of her political acts goes awry, her classmates are more than eager to obliterate her reputation. In the spirit of the most high-profile cancellations of the 21st century, Maeve retreats from public life to reflect. 

The country air doesn’t suit our chronically online city girl, so from the moment Maeve arrives in Dunburn, she begins plotting her departure. She plans to make her great return to Sydney with a podcast that chronicles her small-town life and begins recording all of her interactions. She ropes in Taylah, making her journey to the deb ball the main narrative, and interviews the resident mean girls, Danielle (Brianna Bishop), Chantelle (Karis Oka), Annabelle, (Stevie Jean) and Annabelle’s mother Janette (played by Wilson), a beautician who makes Regina George seem angelic. As Maeve zips around town investigating, she’s also pursued by a bad boy named Mitch (Hal Cumpston), whom we never learn all that much about. 

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A significant portion of The Deb’s plot revolves around Maeve keeping the true intentions of her podcast a secret while forming a genuine friendship with Taylah, but there are other narratives stuffed into this film. One involves the fate of Dunburn, which is in desperate need of government funds, and the other concerns a will-they-or-won’t-they romance between Rick and Shell (Morice), the town’s tailor. These threads are introduced with confident set pieces and catchy tunes that accompany decent choreography, but the balance is lost once the plot lines require more involvement. Despite its 2-hour runtime, parts of The Deb can feel frustratingly shallow. 

That could be forgiven if the rest of the movie meaningfully cohered, but it doesn’t. The Deb, much like Maeve’s experience in Dunburn, is ultimately a mixed bag. 

Movie Reviews

Movie critic Grae Drake reviews the latest releases

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Movie critic Grae Drake reviews the latest releases
Movie critic Grae Drake reviews the latest releases – CBS Los Angeles

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Grae Drake shares her opinions about “Last Breath,” “My Dead Friend Zoe,” and “Riff Raff.”

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‘Nickel Boys’ movie review: In another life, RaMell Ross’s devastating adaptation would have won Best Picture

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‘Nickel Boys’ movie review: In another life, RaMell Ross’s devastating adaptation would have won Best Picture

A still from ‘Nickel Boys’
| Photo Credit: Prime Video

RaMell Ross has been trying to reshape our understanding of what storytelling can be. His debut, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, turned everyday Black life into something lyrical and ineffable, demonstrating how cinema could hold time gently and reverently, before it slips away. Now, with Nickel Boys, his adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel, he has done something even more audacious. His reimagining of the novel wrestles with the weight of history in a reckoning that lingers in the body, mind, and in spaces that were never meant to be remembered.

Most filmmakers would approach a novel as precise and devastating as Whitehead’s with a kind of solemn fidelity, ensuring that every plot point is accounted for. Ross breaks the story open and lets its spirit breathe, unearthing something inside that feels even more elemental. He understands that trauma is how it is felt, rather than merely a retelling of how it happened, and the film unfolds not as a sequence of conclusive events but as elliptical and sensory, and as fractured as memory itself.

Nickel Boys (English)

Director: RaMell Ross

Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor

Runtime: 140 minutes

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Storyline: Elwood Curtis’ college dreams are shattered when he’s sentenced to Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory in the Jim Crow South

The film tells the story of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse), a bookish Black teenager in Jim Crow- era Florida. He is studious, hopeful, the kind of kid who absorbs Dr. King’s words like scripture and assumes that if he walks the righteous path, the world will walk with him. But America has never been kind to children like Elwood, and a cruel twist of fate sees him thrown into a brutal reform school for wayward boys — the titular Nickel Academy. There, he meets the streetwise and world-weary Turner (Brandon Wilson), and their friendship and tenuous hope forms the film’s emotional core.

A still from ‘Nickel Boys’

A still from ‘Nickel Boys’
| Photo Credit:
Prime Video

Ross’s decision to shoot Nickel Boys in first-person feels at once radical and deeply empathetic (although admittedly disorienting at first). Stories like these conventionally offer observation, but this one demands immersion. Ross reclaims the trick to mimic the sensation of a video game or a found-footage thriller as something deeper — a way of dissolving the barrier between audience and subject and stripping away the safety of detachment. There is no looking away because there is no “other” to look at; there is only us, trapped in the body of a boy whose fate pulses beneath our skin.

The infamous White House, where boys are taken to be abused, is filmed with an almost abstracted malice and its terror is only amplified by the unbearable sounds of a whirring industrial fan, meant to drown out the screams but failing to do so. Cinematographer Jomo Fray captures these moments with a disturbing detachment, letting shadows stretch and encroach, suffocating the frame as the school’s buried horrors make themselves felt.

His camera lingers on the textures of the world — dust catching in the air, the dull shine of sweat on a boy’s temple, the sweltering sun above a field where unspeakable things have happened. Ross even understands the story as a history of unnerving sensations —  the sickening lurch in your stomach when you realize the world doesn’t see you as a child but as a problem. The sound of footsteps in a hallway, the knowledge that someone will be taken, and it might be you.

But he’s uninterested in suffering for suffering’s sake. The film embeds us so deeply in Elwood’s interiority that his pain, and his small, stubborn joys, feel like our own. Both Elwood and Turner are still just boys, in all the ways boys are — restless, curious, alive. The world has tried to steal that from them, but Ross refuses to let it.

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A still from ‘Nickel Boys’

A still from ‘Nickel Boys’
| Photo Credit:
Prime Video

As it draws to a close, Ross makes Nickel feel so deeply, viscerally, in the marrow of our own memories that it forces us to sit in the terrible knowledge that the past is not past, that justice is often deferred into oblivion, and that the bodies buried in unmarked graves continue to shape very real landscapes. 

RaMell Ross has done something that far transcends just adapting a really good novel — it has altered the way we see. Nickel Boys is a redefinition of what cinema can do, how it can speak to us, how it can reshape the very act of remembering, and serves an argument for documented fiction as something more than just a well-meaning exercise in period-accurate suffering. In another life, it would have made for one of the most inspired Best Picture winners of this decade. But that’s unlikely.

Nickel Boys is currently available to stream on Prime Video

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Christopher Landon’s ‘HEART EYES’ (2025) – Movie Review – PopHorror

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Christopher Landon’s ‘HEART EYES’ (2025) – Movie Review – PopHorror

Slashers are among the favorite subgenres of most horror fans. When you add in the murder mystery elements of a whodunit, it becomes even more of an immersive and nostalgic watch. Such is the case with Heart Eyes, the newest Valentine’s Day related entry in the horror world. Let’s take a look at why this may make the perfect date night movie selection.

Heart Eyes is written slickly by Christopher Landon (Happy Death Day 2U 2019), Phillip Murphy (Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard 2021), and Michael Kennedy (Freaky 2020), and directed by Josh Ruben (Scare Me 2020). It stars Olivia Holt (Totally Killer 2023) and Mason Gooding (Scream 2022, read our blu-ray review here) as love-scorned co-workers who are forced together on a business assignment as the Heart Eyes Killer runs amok in their town against established couples.

Holt and Gooding have phenomenal timing and chemistry together, and their relationship really brews nicely as the body count starts to build. Heart Eyes really feels like the coming out party for Gooding, though the characters in general are given such fun dialogue that provides genuine laughs. Part love story and part meta commentary, this movie feels like Scream meets Cherry Falls.

Horror is experiencing a return to the 80s in the reemergence of the casual holiday-themed slashers, and Heart Eyes has the makings of a yearly watch-party flick. It’s not all witty banter though, as the jump scares and exquisite gore leave enough meat on the bone for darker genre fans. It’s simple and doesn’t try to be ‘elevated’. The diversity in this movie will help it to amass an audience of many different types of movie-goers.

The balance of Heart Eyes skews a bit more toward comedy than horror, even to a point of being over the top at times in some of its background characters. But the mystery and relationships do resolve in a very satisfying, fast paced way. It’s quite easy to see why a movie like this could end up in the hearts of viewers as one of the most fun murder mysteries of 2025.

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