Razor blades and pointe shoes prove pretty lethal in Vicky Jewson’s bloody and blistered ballet thriller, which finds a dysfunctional ballerina troupe fighting for survival after a run-in with a deadly Hungarian mob. Streaming on Prime Video later this month, “Pretty Lethal” couldn’t have come at a better time, given all the drama and discourse surrounding Timothée Chalamet’s controversial remarks on the cultural value of ballet and opera relative to mainstream art forms, which earned pointed responses from both worlds.

While the film, written by former ballerina Kate Freund, is far from a critique on the material decline of the live arts, it clearly gestures towards a shrewd observation Chalamet and his particular brand of sleaze might easily dismiss: the body, and therefore ballet, as a vessel of cinematic storytelling — a visceral physical language turning into an audiovisual one. For hardcore fans of the genre and ballet alike, it’s basically a treasure trove, regardless of whether it cannot reference other ballets past “The Nutcracker,” regardless of whether all the hijinks miss a beat or stop short of depth.

The five Los Angeles-based prima ballerinas — played by Maddie Ziegler, Lana Condor, Avantika, Millicent Simmonds, and Iris Apatow — have been preparing all their lives to debut at the National Theatre in Budapest, which could change the course of their careers. Especially for those who aren’t as lucky to have a head start in life, like the left-out Bones (Ziegler), who wouldn’t be able to compete without the sponsorship of the mother of spoiled brat and bully Princess (Condor). “Ballet is a rich bitch sport,” as Bones puts it, perhaps the same point the “Marty Supreme” star is trying to make, albeit conceitedly.

After landing in Hungary, a day before the grand showcase, the group’s bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Fretting over the dance of their lives, they have to steel themselves for something far worse. Opting to keep out of the forest, they take shelter in a dingy roadside inn run by Uma Thurman’s Devora Kasimer, a fallen ballet prodigy, and her henchmen. It doesn’t take long for the danger to make itself known, with the young women’s mentor (Lydia Leonard) as the first casualty. As the ballerinas hatch a plan to come out of their predicament alive, bodies begin to drop dead.

“Pretty Lethal” is fundamentally a movement movie, featuring a C+C Music Factory needle drop early on — one that is deeply attuned to swapping men for women in the realm of action cinema. At times, the film is tolerably grotesque body horror or an acid trip movie filled with Bible verse reciting, as Avantika plays the moral, religious North Star; at others, it’s an outright revenge tale, particularly as the sparse plot pivots to Devora, who is out to settle an old score with Michael Culkin’s Lothar Marcovic, a cruel crime lord. A vindictive pursuit that ends rather predictably, as we scan the routine, but are never allowed to behold the dance in its full glory. 

The “Kill Bill” star is exciting to watch, but not compelling enough to make up for the shortcomings of the uninspired script, which displays an annoying knack for stating the obvious via clichéd dialogue, that indeed the ballerinas have to band together to survive, paired with pretty lethargic pacing. Ziegler, meanwhile, is already fantastic as the only character with survival instinct, at least initially, at which point I thought it would tip “Pretty Lethal” into a final girl movie. It’s hard to ask more of Ziegler, given she really doesn’t have much to work with.

The camerawork is adequate, but never lifts the movie to a greater aesthetic delight. Close-ups on framed photographs depicting Devora’s younger, more graceful self offer less a sense of history than ambient suspense. If anything, backstories here are neatly left to the imagination. Likewise, the dreary inn, through Zsuzsa Kismarty-Lechner and Charlotte Pearson’s production design, is emblematic of Devora’s faded dream — a space where “The Nutcracker” somehow never ends. The centerpiece is, of course, the melee/dance-off between the ensemble in white tutus and the violent thugs, toe blade and all. Choreographed to stunning and outrageous effect, this might just be the most death-dealing dress rehearsal you’ll ever come across. That the goons didn’t just instantly shoot at the ballerinas also makes it all the more silly.

Despite the contrivance, Jewson makes fascinating theater out of this, flipping the archetypal image of the ballerina, and therefore femininity, on its head and rendering it as a kind of weapon, forged by years of putting up with enormous pain, against a world beset by patriarchal violence. The quintet spins, stretches, and slits throats, combining grace and discipline in what one might call “ballet-fu,” perhaps a new genre to invest in. They cram their bodies into kitchen cabinets, as does a doll in a window box. They move as a single, cohesive unit. Yet, while most of that seems top-tier entertainment, where the actors are clearly having all the fun working together, testing out new stunts, all the bone-breaking can only keep you on the edge of your seat for so long.

Framing ballet as a source of high-octane action is incredibly inventive, but “Pretty Lethal” remains a standard suspense thriller, a work that is ultimately kneecapped by a writing that renders the deeper textures of the characters largely gestural, only meant to drive the proceedings onward with sheer force. The more it generates spectacle, the more you notice how the screenplay fails to keep in step. Glimpses into past lives, including that of Bones, are hardly given any attention past suggestive pathos or plainly stating them up top that before the final dance graces us to hammer home the film’s feminist message, “Pretty Lethal” has already, totally, worn us down. No plié to absorb all the shock. In this way, Jewson’s vision is quite fatal.

Grade: B-

“Pretty Lethal” premiered at the 2026 SXSW Film and TV Festival. It streams on Prime Video globally on March 25.

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It has been nearly three years since Hollywood writers went on a historic strike that lasted 148 days and ushered in an extraordinary period of labor unrest that virtually shut down the film and TV business.

Now, writers are poised to commence another round of bargaining with the major studios on a new three-year film and TV contract. Few observers think the union is girding for another showdown, especially at a time when many of its members are struggling to find work amid media consolidation and belt-tightening.

But in advance of negotiations that begin on Monday , union leaders are eager to dispel any perception that they might have scaled back their demands.

“Our members have shown many times that they’re willing to fight for what we need as a collective group,” WGA West President Michele Mulroney said in an interview. “And there’s no exception here.”

With its current contract expiring on May 1, the WGA hopes to improve its members’ healthcare plans, increase streaming residuals and expand AI protections.

Ellen Stutzman, the union’s executive director, said despite popular belief, the studios have weathered the transition from cable television to streaming “very well,” citing their efforts to maximize revenue with streaming bundling, rising subscription fees and advertising revenue.

“Writers are watching as Netflix and Paramount are fighting it out to acquire Warner Bros… Paramount is spending $81 billion,” said Stutzman. “There’s money for a fair deal for writers.”

The union leaders agree that this year’s negotiations are all focused on the sustainability of a writer’s career.

A spokesperson from the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the major studios in negotiations, said in a statement that they look forward “to engaging in a constructive and collaborative bargaining process with the WGA. Through continued good-faith dialogue, we are confident we can reach balanced solutions that support talented writers while sustaining the long-term success and stability of our industry and its workforce.”

A top priority for the WGA is to increase the caps that companies contribute to the union’s healthcare plan. Union officials say the current cap has remain unchanged for two decades as healthcare contributions have steadily declined due to fewer writers working.

AI is also top of mind for the WGA.

In 2023, the guild secured various AI protections by establishing that AI isn’t a writer and nothing it produces is considered literary material.

But as major studios start to make deals with AI companies, like Disney’s $1 billion investment into OpenAI’s Sora platform, many writers are concerned about how their work could be used.

“AI is using [studios’] IP, which is stuff that we wrote to license these models,” said John August, the co-host of the “Scriptnotes” podcast and WGA’s negotiating committee co-chair. “With the Sora deal, it seems clear that the companies intend to monetize this IP for use with AI.”

August says the union will be skeptical toward arguments that it’s still too early to seek more safeguards around such a nascent industry, citing the union’s past history with the rise of DVDs and the internet and how profoundly those technologies changed the compensation for writers.

“If you’re taking the work that we created to generate AI outputs, we are owed money. They’re using our work to do something down the road,” added August.

WGA’s negotiating committee also is looking to boost streaming residuals, expand the minimum number of people allowed in a writers’ room and add protections for scribes working on pilots.

“We very much hope that lessons were learned in 2023 and that the AMPTP will come to the table ready to take our proposal seriously and to make a fair deal, and to do that quickly,” Mulroney said. “It provides stability for the companies and for our membership. It’s better for everybody.”

WGA is entering contract negotiations nearly a month after the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, began its bargaining sessions. Last week,
the AMPTP said it was extending negotiations another seven days.

“Ready or Not,” the 2019 horror-comedy hit that turned “The Most Dangerous Game” into an aristocratic Victorian funhouse slasher movie, was nothing more (or less) than a well-executed piece of ultraviolent schlock. Yet there’s a funny way in which that movie has more resonance now than it did then. Its depiction of a clan of homicidal sickos, who in accordance with the family “rules” end up trying to murder their son’s new bride by dawn (she’s played by Samara Weaving, who comes on like a final-girl-gone-psycho version of Margot Robbie), anticipated our current fixation on the hidden horrors of the Epstein class.

Given all that, you’d expect the follow-up to be even timelier. And “Ready or Not 2: Here I Come,” a go-more-splattery-or-go-home sequel, is a film that very much taps into our vision of “the elites” as a global cabal of evil. It’s also more gruesomely over-the-top than “Ready or Not” (if that’s even possible), not to mention more operatic, more debased, more macabre, and more of a luridly preposterous cartoon. But all of that made it an ideal film to showcase to a crowd of screaming hellcats at SXSW, where the movie premiered tonight.

Is “Ready or Not 2” the bloody megaplex bash as knowing midnight movie? Does it combine honest laughs with a general invitation to crack up at its overboiled misanthropic cheesiness? Does it make up rules as it goes along? Yes and yes and yes, though we increasingly live in a movie world where all those things are attributes. “Ready or Not 2” delivers exactly what it promises: a garishly booby-trapped, winkingly clever-dumb good time. If that’s your idea of a good time.

The film opens by replaying the final scene of “Ready or Not”: Samara Weaving’s Grace, drenched in blood and pierced with wounds, having dispatched the most threatening members of the La Domas family (the rest of them exploded into bloody smithereens — cursed by her having survived The Game), sits on the steps outside the mansion that’s going up in flames behind her. She lights a cigarette and takes a weary victory puff, at which point a rescue worker asks, “What happened to you?” She replies, “In-laws.” She is then taken to a Connecticut hospital, where she wakes up handcuffed to the bed, with a cop informing her that she is wanted for murder and arson.

But that’s just a red herring. At the clinic, Grace is reunited with her younger sister, Faith (Kathryn Newton), who’s been estranged from her for seven years. Attacked by a coked-up goon who’s a harbinger of threats to come, Grace changes from her hospital duds back into her signature bloody wedding dress and dirty yellow sneakers, and that’s when she and Faith find themselves, bound and ball-gagged, sitting before the Council, a star chamber that consists of the representatives of six families, one of whom were the La Domases.

There’s another game afoot — or, at least, another Inviolable Rule dictated by the late Mr. Le Bail, who founded the La Domas fortune. (But why would his rules apply to other families? Oh, never mind.) A second dusk-till-dawn challenge looms: With the Le Domases gone, one member of each of the Council’s remaining clans must try to kill Grace. Whoever does will occupy the high seat and become the most powerful person on Earth. (If they fail, Grace will occupy the high seat.)

We meet the ailing old man who currently occupies that post — Chester Danforth, played by the legendary film director David Cronenberg, who makes his quizzical dourness felt for one scene. Chester has two adult twins, Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Titus (Shawn Hatosy), who are theoretically aligned but will duke it out for power. The other families are represented by characters who are like suspects in a third-rate “Knives Out” movie. But once again: Are we laughing with or at what low-kitsch nitwits they are? Maybe there’s no longer any difference.

“Ready or Not,” set inside the La Domas mansion, had a compact trap-door video-game ingenuity. The action of “Ready or Not 2” sprawls all over the grounds that make up the Council compound, and for a while the film is a ham-handed and rather scattershot slaughter fest. Viraj (Nadeem Umar-Khitab), a stoned club hound, proves to be a bumbler with a shotgun; other would-be assassins strike out in comparable ways. This gives Grace and Faith, between attempted killings, a chance to air their differences and engage in some sisterly therapy. But their relationship, as dramatized by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy’s screenplay, is overdone and unconvincing. Faith despises Grace…for having “abandoned” her by going off to college. For years, both have been living in New York City…without any awareness of the fact. Are we supposed to believe any of this? It’s just a mechanism. The film’s co-directors, Matt Bettillini-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who made the first film (which won them the right to direct the rebooted “Scream” and “Scream VI”), are kinesthetic gamesmen who are also one-dimensional psychologists.             

Yet they know how to bang the thriller puzzle pieces together, and to stage a scene of personal combat so that you feel the existential viciousness. At one point, they get two ultraviolent duels going at once: Grace facing off against Francesca (Maia Jae), who was originally engaged to Alex La Domas (it’s a cat fight on steroids), while the depraved rich boy Titus, in another locale, shows his murderous colors, the whole double fight set to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (are you laughing yet?). Titus and Ursula make tasty villains, with Sarah Michelle Gellar turning up the icy hauteur, and Shawn Hatosy amusingly evoking the entitled blankness of George W. Bush. Standing above it all is Elijah Wood as the Council lawyer, who seems to be silently smirking at everything that happens, which is not an inappropriate response.  

It all climaxes with another wedding, this one unfolding in the church of Satan. It’s a scene that suggests “Eyes Wide Shut” as remade by Jerry Bruckheimer, and in that sense you could say that it taps into current obsessions. Will “Ready or Not 2” satisfy the audience that made “Ready or Not” a hit? No doubt. The way Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett work, the film has enough pulp craft to walk the line between violence and camp. Weaving, even more than before, makes Grace an ingénue gone banshee. But if there’s ever a “Ready or Not 3,” it would be good to see the elites in it do something that’s as interesting as it is brutal.