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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“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.  

AUSTIN, Texas — One of the most anticipated events at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival wasn’t a movie at all, but a speaking appearance by director Steven Spielberg. The talk, a live taping of the podcast “The Big Picture” lead by co-host Sean Fennessey, covered many aspects of the Hollywood legend’s career, with a through line of sci-fi and space aliens in conjunction with Spielberg’s upcoming alien invasion thriller “Disclosure Day,” due June 12.

Though no real details about the new film were revealed, references to it peppered the conversation as if it were very much on Spielberg’s mind — the film he was ostensibly there to promote.

To an audience that included filmmakers Robert Rodriguez and Daniel Kwan, the event began with a clip reel that served as a reminder (as if anyone in the packed hotel ballroom needed one) of just how influential the 79-year-old filmmaker is. A selection of Spielberg’s work plays like a trailer for the idea of movies themselves; this one included “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.” “Schindler’s List,” “Jurassic Park,” “The Sugarland Express,” “Catch Me If You Can,” “Munich” and many more.

Fennessey noted that Spielberg wanted to make 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” his first sci-fi movie about the existence of aliens from other worlds, even before making 1975’s “Jaws.” Spielberg went further, saying he had actually wanted to make “Close Encounters” — then just referred to as “The UFO Movie” — even before 1974’s “Sugarland Express.”

Asked about President Obama’s recent comments about the possible existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and how his own feelings may have evolved over the years, Spielberg said, “I think that for one thing, when President Obama made that comment, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is so great for “Disclosure Day,”’ and then, two days later, he stepped back the comment and said what he believed in was life in the cosmos, which of course everybody should believe that because no one should ever think that we are the only intelligent civilization in the entire universe. So I’ve always believed, even as a kid, that we were not alone. So that just goes without saying. The big question is: Are we alone now?”

He added this interest was “reinvigorated” by a 2017 New York Times article about U.S. Navy pilots seeing unexplained aerial phenomenon, then by a 2023 Congressional subcommittee hearing on the topic.

“I don’t know any more than any of you do,” Spielberg said, “but I have a very strong, sticky suspicion that we are not alone here on Earth right now. And I made a movie about that.”

As to how he feels about that possibility, Spielberg added, “I’m not afraid of any aliens, there or here. I have no fears about that, whatsoever. I think our movie does take into consideration, without giving too much away, the social dislocation that could occur, theologically, if it would be announced that there’s evidence — not only evidence, where it’s interaction that’s has been going on for decades, that we are not just now finding out about. It is going to cause a disruption in a lot of belief systems, but I don’t think it’s a lethal disruption at all.”

Among other topics that were discussed, Spielberg revealed he is developing a western that would shoot in Texas, though he was reluctant to discuss it in any further detail except to say it would contain “no tropes.”

He also said he is not on any social media, but did install Instagram on his phone once for two weeks and felt as if he had been abducted by aliens for the amount of time he lost.

To that end, he also noted, with comic frustration, how he himself has never had any sort of alien encounter.

”I made a movie called ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ I haven’t even had a close encounter of the first or second kind,” Spielberg said. “Where’s the justice in that? If you’re listening out there, I’m talking to you.”

There was a brief moment of confusion when Fennessey asked Spielberg for his thoughts on AI and Spielberg wasn’t clear if he was asking about his own 2001 movie or the broader topic of artificial intelligence.

Once that was cleared up (Fennessey meant the latter, a serious labor issue in Hollywood), Spielberg noted he has not used AI on any of his own films. “I don’t want to go into a whole rant about AI because I am for AI in many different disciplines. I am not for AI if it replaces a creative individual.”

Speaking to the theatrical experience, Spielberg made a brief allusion to the flare-up around comments by Timothée Chalamet regarding the popularity of opera and ballet in relation to the movies.

He noted that he does not decry the at-home streaming experience and that he works with Netflix, but that “for me, the real experience comes when we can influence a community to congregate in a strange dark space. All us are strangers and, at the end of a really good movie experience, we are all united with a whole bunch of feelings that we walk into the daylight with or into the nighttime with. And there’s nothing like that. I mean, it happens in movies, it happens at concerts and it happens in ballet and opera.”

Here there was a round of applause from the audience. “And we want that sustained and we want that to go forever.”

Spielberg noted how many of his favorite filmmakers, including David Lean and Billy Wilder and more recent examples such as Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan, are always making films that feel different from what they have done before. He sees himself as part of that same school.

“If we’re just not making the same sequel over and over and over again and they’re not the same Marvel title over and over and over again, we all get a real chance to experience something, which is freshness,” Spielberg said. “And that is why I don’t judge my accomplishments based on a single film.”