In the Grey, 2026.

Written and Directed by Guy Ritchie.
Starring Henry Cavill, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rosamund Pike, Eiza González, Fisher Stevens, Jason Wong, Carlos Bardem, Emmett J. Scanlan, Christian Ochoa, Rana Alamuddin, Kristofer Hivju, Kojo Attah, and Gonzalo Bouza.

SYNOPSIS:

A covert team of elite operatives are living in the shadows. When a ruthless despot steals a billion-dollar fortune, they’re sent to take it back-an impossible heist that erupts into a deadly game of strategy, deception and survival.

Right at the top, In the Grey begins in medias res, with an under-fire Rachel (Eiza Gonzalez) narrating the legal-illegal tightrope she walks while recovering assets for clients from crooked billionaires, literally stating that she works in a grey area. Writer/director Guy Ritchie is also operating in that area as a filmmaker; he remains serviceable at staging action and is technically proficient, but there isn’t much motivation felt behind it. As I have said before reviewing some of his latest films, Guy Ritchie is just making films to make films at this point, apparently inspired by nothing but a paycheck and collaborating with new and old faces.

With a crack team of experts covering a wide range of skills, Rachel, employed by Rosamund Pike’s Bobby, has crafted an elaborate plan (a pincer movement) to expose Manny Salazar’s (Carlos Bardem) crimes and flush out details of his financial dealings and the whereabouts of his money through his equally shady lawyer, William Horowitz (Fisher Stevens, adding some light touches of humor profusely sweating more and more after each encounter). This multi-step operation also includes deploying her muscle, Henry Cavill’s Sid, to Saudi Arabia on an undercover mission to expose corruption with building renovations (and because that’s where some of the funding for the film came from), whereas Jake Gyllenhaal’s Bronco is the intimidator, heading off to Manny’s personal island to prepare for an inevitable meeting between all parties, which also includes creating evacuation routes through all modes of transportation and directions.

They work alongside demolition experts and stunt drivers, while hackers and other individuals with remote skill sets work elsewhere. Essentially, no stone is left unturned, and there is no avenue Rachel won’t take, moral or immoral, to amass crucial information and put the pressure on Manny. Admittedly, it is also fun to take in just how much effort the filmmakers have put into setting up and showing off the escape routes, which we know will come into play even if we don’t quite know how or why. Between this and the constant snappy editing depicting brief glimpses of Rachel getting what she needs in a court of law against William and other snippets of Sid and Bronco pulling off their part, there is something stylishly breezy here, in what is ultimately an hour of setup before an extended third act of nonstop action, making use of every set piece the film has set up prior.

For a film that has nearly no story or characterization (all that’s learned is that Rachel broke Sid and Bronco out of jail to work for her, seizing assets from criminals for reasons that are never explained why she got into), and that is once again another Guy Ritchie exercise in visual flair, double crosses, and destruction, he almost pulls it off as a slice of mindless fun that constantly moves at such a rapid clip that there is no time to dwell on the empty narration, and one that is aware not to take itself seriously even for a minute.

The big issue is that, while the action is moderately effective, there’s no real payoff or even much of an ending. When the credits for In the Grey roll, one practically feels annoyed for having been semi-invested in these games. It’s as if Guy Ritchie and everyone involved went to shoot with a sloppy rough draft of a script, with no intention of elevating it into anything memorable or worthwhile beyond a couple of well-executed action scenes. The hollowness hits like a grenade launcher once that ending comes, doubling as another reminder that Guy Ritchie may technically be making movies, but they possess almost no trace of a filmmaker actually excited about making movies. He is simply sleepwalking through his signature style. There’s nothing grey about that assessment.

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

Robert Kojder

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

Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), the pivotal figure in Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales,” is a French novelist whose better days are behind her. She lives in a stately old Paris apartment that’s starting to fray at the seams, and her whole vibe is that of an analog crank. When she goes into writing mode, she lights up a cigarette, puts on her stodgy spectacles and sits down at her ancient Olivetti electric typewriter, which is clearly the same machine she’s been using for decades.

As she starts the writing process, she pecks at the typewriter a few letters at a time. It’s doubtful, however, that a veteran writer would sound like that — instead, the keys would be flying. It’s a minor but telling detail, since Farhadi is generally a stickler for authenticity. But in “Parallel Tales,” Isabelle Huppert, putting on overdone grouchy airs, seems to be playing less a real-world novelist than a stylized cornball-movie version of a Venerable French Author. The character seems not so much drawn from experience as plucked from a vat of pulp cliché. And that’s mostly true of the rest of the movie as well.

“Parallel Tales” is a very different sort of Farhadi film. It’s not the first project the fabled Iranian director has shot in France — that would be “The Past” (2013), which he made on the heels of his international breakthrough with “A Separation.” But though he had already begun the painful process of parting ways with Iran (in 2024, Farhadi vowed not to shoot another movie there until the ban against depicting women without headscarves was lifted), “The Past” was every inch a Farhadi film. It had his domestic psychodramatic intensity, and his flowing ingenuity.

The new movie, by contrast, is an inflated meditation on fiction and reality. It’s all about people spying on each other, which can be a good jumping-off point for a movie. And no one is saying that Farhadi has to stick to his familiar and often starkly artful mode of neorealist drama. But “Parallel Tales,” it’s my grim duty to report, is a meandering and rather amorphous mess. It’s a far-out parable of voyeurism and imagination, loosely based on the sixth episode of Krzysztof Kieślowki’s “Dekalog,” which was about a young man spying on a woman across the street and falling in love with her. But “Dekalog: Six” had suspense; “Parallel Tales” has longueurs.

As Sylvie starts peering through her small telescope at the fifth-floor apartment directly across from her, what takes place behind those windows is not what we expect. The place is a sound-effects recording studio, with three sound designers creating and dubbing aural effects — footsteps on a sandy beach, flapping bird wings — onto pieces of film footage. But the three are also involved in a love triangle: the curly-brown-haired Anna (Virginie Efira), who is romantic partners with the older head of production (Vincent Cassel), is seeing her younger co-worker (Pierre Niney) on the sly. We watch this and think: Okay, so what? But it turns out that the triangle we’re observing is already Sylvie’s fictionalized version of what she saw through the telescope.

Since Sylvie hasn’t exactly been taking good care of herself, her niece, Céline (India Hair), who owns half the apartment, sets her up with a young drifter, Adam (Adam Bess), who rescued Céline from a subway pickpocket. The doleful, scruffy Adam cleans the apartment (though he also shepherds a family of mice), and he then takes Sylvie’s abandoned manuscript — the fictional scenario we’ve been watching — and palms it off as his own. He gives it to a woman named Nita (also played by Virginie Efira, now blonde), who he meets at a coffeeshop. He wants her to read the manuscript, even as the film now segues into showing us the real version of what’s been going on in that apartment. (It’s less racy, though it still involves a lurch toward adultery.) Are we having brain spasms yet?

The most baffling dimension of “Parallel Tales” is how little life there is to the characters outside of these fiction-vs.-reality gambits. It’s not that the actors are bad. Vincent Cassel invests Pierre with a no-longer-young sense of regret, and Virginie Efira, in her double role, makes you feel the sharpness of Nita’s pain in contrast to Anna’s more libertine ‘tude. Yet none of this comes to much. When Nita rebuffs the advances of the lightweight cad Christophe (who’s Pierre’s brother), that’s the one focused emotion in the movie — a woman rejecting workplace harassment. No problem there, but it feels like a different film. 

In an abstract way, Farhadi is looking back to films like “Rear Window” and “Blow-Up” and “The Conversation,” as well as De Palma’s “Blow Out” and “Body Double.” But those movies, in different ways, were about trickery and deceit, about drawing the audience into a head game of perception. (“Blow-Up,” 60 years ago, was one of the movies that made art cinema fun, while “Body Double,” preposterous as it is, is vintage guilty-pleasure De Palma.) In “Parallel Tales,” Farhadi doesn’t play the audience so much as stymie it with the obliqueness of his storytelling. The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel, all right. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.

4/5 stars

With a story driven by beautifully restrained emotions and conversations steeped in philosophical queries about the meaning and significance of art, the Franco-Japanese co-production Nagi Notes combines the best of the two cinematic worlds it was born out of.

Playing in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition, Nagi Notes is based on Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata’s Tokyo Notes, a play revolving around 20 characters sitting in a museum hall talking about their lives while a devastating war rages in faraway Europe.

In Fukada’s very loose adaptation of the 1994 play – which retains only two of the original characters and removes the spatial confines in Hirata’s Beckett-ish narrative – war and its imitations are also omnipresent.

On television, they see the devastation in Ukraine; up close, they contend with military trucks rumbling past their homes and the constant boom of regular drills taking place at a nearby training camp.