5 HR AGO

Ep. 8 | Wuthering Heights — When a Director Mistakes Desire for Depth

Emerald Fennell wanted to recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading Wuthering Heights for the first time. That is the stated intention. It is also, perhaps, the most honest description of what the film actually achieves and where it ultimately falls short. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we go deep on the most divisive film of early 2026. Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Charli xcx on the soundtrack. Anachronistic costumes that belong at the Met Gala. A film that is simultaneously gorgeous, provocative, frequently entertaining and surprisingly hollow. A film that knows exactly what it wants to look like but is not always sure what it wants to say. Let us start with what nobody is disputing. Wuthering Heights is visually extraordinary. Linus Sandgren's cinematography makes the Yorkshire moors feel simultaneously historical and completely contemporary, saturated with a color palette that owes more to fashion photography than to period drama. The production design is outrageous in the best sense. Jacqueline Durran's costumes exist in a space between 18th century England and something you might see on a runway in Paris today. Fennell is one of the most confident visual stylists working in mainstream cinema, and every frame of this film announces that confidence without apology. Robbie is doing real work here. Her Catherine is restless, sensual, furious, and occasionally terrifying, a woman who understands exactly the cage she has been born into and cannot decide whether to escape it or set it on fire. It is a performance that strips away every trace of the warmth and accessibility that made Barbie a cultural event, and replaces it with something rawer and considerably more dangerous. Whether the film is worthy of that performance is the question we keep returning to. Elordi as Heathcliff is more complicated. Physically, he is exactly what the role requires: imposing, brooding, and possessed of an intensity that reads across the moors as easily as it reads across a close-up. But Heathcliff is one of the most psychologically complex characters in English literature. He is not merely a romantic lead. He is a man shaped by class violence, racial othering, and a specific kind of love that has curdled into something indistinguishable from hatred. The novel gives him an interior life of almost unbearable depth. Fennell's film gives him a series of extraordinary entrances and very little underneath them. This is the central problem. Brontë's Wuthering Heights is not a love story in any conventional sense. It is a novel about what obsession does to people, about class and race and the specific cruelty of a society that decides who counts and who does not, about love as a force that destroys rather than redeems. The novel does not want you to find Heathcliff romantic. It wants you to find him terrifying and to understand exactly why he became that way. Fennell's version wants you to find him devastating and beautiful, which is a fundamentally different project. One that the source material was never written to support. The anachronisms are the most revealing choice. Charli xcx on the soundtrack, Met Gala gowns in the Yorkshire countryside, a red acrylic floor in the Linton house. Fennell has spoken about these choices as a way of arguing that the love story transcends its period setting, that Catherine and Heathcliff are so eternal they cannot be contained by the 18th century. It is a defensible idea. The problem is that the period setting is not merely backdrop in Brontë. We came for Brontë and found Fennell. That is not the worst thing to find. It is just not the same thing. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠

18 min

1 DAY AGO

Ep. 7 | Crime 101 — The LA Noir That Almost Became a Masterpiece

Los Angeles. A jewel thief who has never left a fingerprint. A detective who has finally found a pattern. An insurance broker standing at the edge of a decision that will change everything. And a wildcard who is about to blow the whole thing apart. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we go deep on Crime 101, Bart Layton's adaptation of Don Winslow's novella, and ask the question that has been nagging at us since we left the theater. How does a film this well cast, this beautifully shot, and this confidently directed still leave you feeling like something slightly more was possible? Let us be clear about what the film gets right. Layton is a director who understands Los Angeles the way only a handful of filmmakers do. The coastal night photography is stunning. The moody synth score hums with the specific melancholy of a city that glamorises its own decay. The action sequences, particularly a freeway chase in the film's second act, have the kind of spatial clarity and physical weight that most contemporary action cinema has completely forgotten how to achieve. This is a film that looks and sounds extraordinary from first frame to last. Chris Hemsworth is doing something genuinely interesting as Mike Davis, a disciplined high-end thief who plans every job with the patience of a surgeon and the paranoia of someone who knows exactly what prison looks like. Playing against type, Hemsworth strips away the movie star ease and finds a man who is socially uncertain, quietly exhausted, and increasingly aware that the life he has built requires him to be alone in ways that are slowly becoming unbearable. It is not a perfect performance. You still occasionally see the star behind the character. But the attempt is real and the attempt is worth something. Mark Ruffalo is the best thing in the film. His detective Lou is a man who has been doing this so long that caring and not caring have become indistinguishable. Ruffalo plays the specific weariness of someone who is very good at a job that has cost him everything he was good at before. The scenes between Ruffalo and Hemsworth, when the film allows them to simply exist in the same space, have a tension that owes more to two actors genuinely listening to each other than to anything in the screenplay. Halle Berry as Sharon is electric in every scene she appears in. The film's most interesting choice is to place her at the intersection of the thief and the detective without making her a pawn of either. Sharon has her own calculus, her own damage, and her own quiet desperation, and Berry plays all of it simultaneously. The film gives her less to do than it should, which is perhaps its most significant structural failure. Barry Keoghan as Ormon is pure controlled chaos, a man made entirely of bad decisions and coiled menace. He does not share the film's tonal register with anyone else in the cast and he does not care. The scenes where Ormon enters the frame feel like a different movie has briefly taken over, which is both his greatest strength and the element that most disrupts the film's otherwise careful architecture. And here is where the conversation gets complicated. Crime 101 knows its influences. It has studied Heat and Thief and the entire canon of Los Angeles crime cinema with something approaching reverence. The problem is that knowing your influences is not the same as transcending them. The film's second half leans on coincidence, and its big reveals land with a shrug where they should land with devastation. The screenplay is clever without being profound. The characters are vivid without being fully excavated. What remains is a film that is genuinely excellent to watch, impeccably crafted, and populated by performances that deserve a slightly better script than the one they were given. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠

21 min

1 DAY AGO

Ep. 6 | Send Help — Sam Raimi Is Back and He Brought Everything

Sam Raimi has not made a horror film since Drag Me to Hell in 2009. Seventeen years. And then he made Send Help, an original R-rated survival horror thriller about a downtrodden office worker and her insufferable boss stranded alone on a deserted island after a plane crash. No franchise. No remake. No sequel. Just Raimi, a wickedly clever script, Rachel McAdams, and a lot of blood. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we talk about why Send Help is the most purely entertaining film of 2026 so far, and why it matters that it exists at all. Linda Liddle has been the invisible woman her entire career. Patient, competent, quietly brilliant, and completely overlooked. She lives alone with her pet bird. She is obsessed with Survivor. She has auditioned for the show. She is, in every way, a person the world has decided does not count. Bradley Preston is her new boss, the CEO's son, a man whose entire personality is constructed from entitlement and contempt. He gives Linda's long-promised promotion to a fraternity brother, plans to sideline her permanently, and then boards the same plane she is on to a company event in Bangkok. The plane goes down. They are the only survivors. And the island does something extraordinary to the power dynamic between them. What Raimi understands, and what makes Send Help more than just a darkly funny survival thriller, is that the horror here is not the island. The island is the mechanism. The horror is seventeen years of accumulated invisibility suddenly finding an outlet in a place where the old rules no longer apply. Rachel McAdams plays Linda's transformation with a precision that is genuinely frightening, building the character's shift so gradually that you find yourself laughing at moments you probably shouldn't, rooting for things you probably shouldn't, and completely unable to stop. Dylan O'Brien is perfectly cast as Bradley, a man whose confidence is entirely borrowed from a context that no longer exists. Strip away the office, the title, the fraternity network, and what remains is someone who has never once had to earn anything. O'Brien finds the specific smallness inside that performance without ever making Bradley cartoonishly hateable, which is the harder and more interesting choice. Raimi's direction is exactly what his fans have been waiting for. The crash zooms are back. The manic energy is back. Danny Elfman's cheeky score is back. The playfully yucky special effects are back. There is a POV shot of a wild boar chasing Linda through the jungle that is a direct callback to the Deadites of Evil Dead and one of the most purely joyful filmmaking moments of the year. Bruce Campbell appears, as he always does, in the only form the film could manage, a photograph on a wall. This is Raimi at his most gleeful and most himself. An original film, made for adults, released theatrically, that trusts its audience to sit with moral complexity and enjoy being made uncomfortable. In 2026, that alone is worth celebrating. Send Help does not need any assistance. It arrives fully formed, wickedly funny, and completely alive. We had a very good time with this one. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠

20 min

3 DAYS AGO

Ep. 5 | Project Hail Mary — The Blockbuster That Actually Earned Its Ending

A man wakes up alone on a spaceship light years from Earth. He does not know who he is. He does not know why he is there. He does not know that everyone else on the crew is already dead. And neither, for a long beautiful stretch of this film, do we. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we talk about Project Hail Mary — Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's adaptation of Andy Weir's Hugo Award-winning novel, and why it is the first genuinely great studio film of 2026. Not the most decorated. Not the most discussed. The most alive. The premise is deceptively simple. Ryland Grace, a junior high school science teacher played by Ryan Gosling, has been sent on a one-way suicide mission to Tau Ceti, the only nearby star that hasn't been dimmed by Astrophage, a single-celled organism slowly eating the sun that will eventually end all life on Earth. The Hail Mary spacecraft carries enough fuel for the journey there and nothing for the journey back. Grace is the last hope of a civilization he will never see again. What Lord and Miller understand, and what makes this film work at a level most blockbusters never attempt, is that the science is not the film. The science is the language through which two completely different kinds of minds learn to trust each other. Because Grace is not alone. Approaching Tau Ceti he encounters an alien spacecraft, and its pilot, a five-legged rock-like creature from 40 Eridani that Grace names Rocky, turns out to be on exactly the same mission from exactly the same desperate necessity. Two beings from opposite ends of the universe, each carrying the weight of their entire civilization, meeting in the void and deciding to help each other anyway. Rocky is the film's genuine triumph. Voiced and performed through puppetry by James Ortiz, he is one of the most fully realized non-human characters cinema has produced in years, funny, stubborn, brilliant, deeply moral in ways that have nothing to do with human morality. The scenes between Gosling and Rocky are where the film stops being a blockbuster and becomes something closer to a meditation on what communication actually costs and what it makes possible. Gosling, who is at his absolute best here, finds the specific warmth of a man who has always been more comfortable with ideas than with people, and who discovers impossibly that the being he connects with most deeply in his entire life is not human at all. Sandra Hüller is quietly extraordinary in the flashback sequences as Eva Stratt, the cold efficient architect of Project Hail Mary, a woman who has made the decision to sacrifice everything and everyone necessary, including Grace, because she has calculated that there is no other choice. Hüller does something remarkable with a role that could easily be a villain: she makes the logic of Stratt's choices feel genuinely tragic rather than monstrous. The film is not perfect. At two hours and thirty-six minutes it runs long, and the final fifteen minutes pile conclusion upon conclusion in a way that slightly dilutes the emotional force of what comes before. Lord and Miller cannot quite resist the impulse to make sure every thread is tied. The novel's ending is more ambiguous, more quietly devastating. The film wants you to leave happy, and it mostly succeeds, but at a small cost to the resonance it had earned. These are minor complaints about a film that does something genuinely rare: it makes you feel the weight of scientific thinking as an act of love. Grace solves problems because solving problems is how he cares about people. Rocky communicates in pressure waves and musical tones because that is how his species expresses everything. Project Hail Mary is the kind of film that makes you walk out of the theater grateful that cinema still exists. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠

22 min

5 DAYS AGO

Ep. 4 | The Long Walk — Stephen King's Darkest Idea Finally Gets the Film It Deserved

Fifty boys. One rule. Keep walking or die. That is the entire premise of The Long Walk — and it is one of the most brutal, psychologically devastating ideas Stephen King ever put on a page. He wrote it as a nineteen-year-old college freshman in 1966. It took nearly sixty years to reach the screen. Francis Lawrence, the director who gave us the best Hunger Games films, was the one who finally got there. And the result is one of the most powerful King adaptations in years. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we talk about what makes The Long Walk work — and more importantly, why a film about boys walking in a straight line for two hours is one of the most tense, emotionally suffocating experiences of 2025. The world is a dystopian alternate America — a totalitarian military regime following a civil war, in the grip of a severe economic depression. Every year fifty boys, one from each state, are chosen to walk. They must maintain three miles per hour without stopping. Three warnings and you are shot. The last one walking wins a cash prize and one wish of his choosing. The sign-up is technically voluntary. Nearly every eligible young man does it anyway because their families have nothing left. What the film understands — and what lesser adaptations of King's work consistently miss — is that the horror here is not the contest. It is the logic that makes the contest possible. A system so total, so suffocating, that fifty boys march voluntarily into a death walk and call it hope. Mark Hamill's Major is not a villain in any conventional sense. He is something more disturbing: a man who genuinely believes in what he is overseeing. That specific quality — the cheerful bureaucratic sadism of someone who has never questioned the machinery they serve — is where the film finds its most unsettling register. Cooper Hoffman carries the film with a quiet, internal intensity that never announces itself. His Garraty is not a hero. He is a boy who keeps walking because stopping means dying and because somewhere behind him his mother is watching on television. David Jonsson is the genuine revelation — his performance is the emotional engine of everything that happens in the second and third act, and the scenes between them are where the film stops being a genre exercise and becomes something closer to a meditation on what it means to be alive and afraid simultaneously. The film has been criticized in some quarters for what it leaves unexplained — the world-building is deliberately sparse, the rules of the society never fully articulated. We think this is a misreading. The gaps are the point. You are not meant to understand how this system works. You are meant to feel it — the same way the boys feel it, without context, without recourse, with only the road ahead and the knowledge that it ends when you stop. Francis Lawrence has made the lean, mean King adaptation that the novel always deserved. It asks one question and spends 108 minutes making you feel the full weight of it. How far could you go? Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠

20 min

6 DAYS AGO

Ep. 3 | War Machine — When Netflix's Biggest Movie of 2026 Has Nothing to Say

Netflix's biggest movie of 2026 is about an alien robot hunting Army Rangers through the Colorado wilderness. It stars Alan Ritchson, Dennis Quaid, and a cast of characters identified by numbers rather than names. It made Ritchson look great and cost him nothing. It cost the film everything. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward, we talk about War Machine — and more importantly, we talk about what it represents. Because the conversation this film deserves isn't really about this film. It's about what happens when spectacle becomes the entire argument. The premise is not the problem. A Predator-style setup with Army Rangers and an extraterrestrial killing machine is a perfectly legitimate foundation for a thriller. Patrick Hughes knows how to build momentum and the action sequences are competent and occasionally inventive. The alien robot design is genuinely interesting — a massive, legged killing machine that overheats when its ventilation is blocked. That single idea, buried in the final ten minutes, is the most original thing in the film. The problem is everything that surrounds it. The recruits are given numbers instead of names. This is either a bold formal choice — stripping identity to emphasize the dehumanizing logic of military selection — or it is a screenplay that couldn't be bothered to write people. The film gives you no evidence it's the former. By the time the third act arrives and characters start dying, you have no idea who you're supposed to mourn. The machine is more fully characterized than most of the humans it hunts. Alan Ritchson is the exception, and he is the reason the film is watchable at all. His Staff Sergeant 81 carries the specific weight of a man who has already lost everything once and is operating purely on the logic of obligation. Ritchson has a physical and emotional directness that cuts through even the thinnest material. He is consistently very good here. The film consistently wastes him. Dennis Quaid appears, delivers exposition, and disappears. The film's most experienced actor is used as a plot delivery mechanism. That choice alone tells you everything about the screenplay's priorities. What War Machine ultimately is — and what we spend this episode unpacking — is a film that mistakes efficiency for craft. It moves. It doesn't breathe. It delivers the minimum required to justify its genre and nothing more. In a cultural moment already saturated with content designed to be watched while doing something else, it is the perfect background film. Which is not a compliment. Netflix's biggest movie of 2026. Make of that what you will. We did. Follow us on: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward Letterboxd: https://boxd.it/4TjKf Substack: https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward X: https://x.com/4thwallinward

21 min

24 MAR

Ep. 2 | One Battle After Another — The Best Picture That Anderson Almost Ruined Himself

This is a big one — Best Picture winner, PTA, DiCaprio, Sean Penn. And you already wrote a review of it. Here's the title and description: Episode Title:Ep. 2 | One Battle After Another — The Best Picture That Anderson Almost Ruined Himself Description: Paul Thomas Anderson just won Best Picture. Six Oscars. Fourteen BAFTA nominations. The most decorated film of the 2026 awards season. And yet something about One Battle After Another refuses to sit still. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward, we take Anderson's sprawling, maddening, occasionally brilliant adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland apart and ask the question the awards season never did: is this a great film, or a great filmmaker operating just below his own ceiling? The case for greatness is real. The camera work is Anderson at his most kinetic — wide angles, fixed framing, action sequences that move like something alive. Jonny Greenwood's score is extraordinary, as expected. And Sean Penn's Colonel Lockjaw is one of the most fully realized characters Anderson has ever put on screen — a man with history, logic, obsession, and a specific dignity inside his monstrousness that Penn inhabits completely. The Oscar was deserved. There is no argument there. But here is what the awards conversation kept quietly stepping around: the film around Lockjaw is populated by characters who exist as revolutionary archetypes rather than people. Bob is paranoid but we never fully understand why. The Sensei — memefied before the film even opened — turns out to be as shallow as the dancing-by-a-police-car clip suggested. The mother abandons her family and the film offers no real excavation of that choice. The daughter, Willa, is perhaps the film's most wasted opportunity — Chase Infiniti gives everything the role asks for, but the role asks for very little. Anderson has always had this tension at the center of his work. He builds extraordinary machines — visual, tonal, rhythmic — and then trusts the machine to do the emotional work that only characters can do. When it works, you get There Will Be Blood. When it almost works, you get this. The political dimension adds another layer of complication. Anderson and DiCaprio insist the film is nonpolitical — a story about a father and daughter, about generational damage, about the weight of the past. And there are moments when the film genuinely is that. But the imagery, the timing, the specific texture of its violence — none of it sits in a vacuum. Whether the film is endorsing radical conviction, satirizing it, or simply holding it up to the light and refusing to decide is a question the film itself never fully answers. That ambiguity is either its greatest strength or its central evasion, depending on where you sit. What we keep coming back to is this: the difference between a good film and a truly great one is whether you believe in the people inside it. Lockjaw, you believe. The rest of the revolution — almost not at all. Six Oscars. Best Picture. And we still have questions. That's what we're here for.

21 min

21 MAR

Ep. 1 | Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die — The Film That Forgot Its Characters

Gore Verbinski hasn't directed a feature in over a decade. That absence matters. This is the man behind the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, The Ring, and Rango — a filmmaker with a specific, unmistakable intelligence. So when Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die arrived — a sci-fi action comedy about a man from the future recruiting diner strangers to stop a rogue AI — the anticipation was real. It is worth talking about. Just not entirely in the way the film intended. A scraggly stranger walks into a Norms diner in Los Angeles at 10:10 PM. He announces he's from the future. That an AI is about to end the world. That he needs a specific combination of these exact people to stop it. That this is his 117th attempt. The premise is immediately compelling — there is something genuinely melancholic in that number. A man who has watched the world end over and over, who carries every failure in the way he moves. Verbinski stages the diner with real theatrical precision. The first act crackles. And then the film has to do something harder: populate its premise with actual people. It mostly doesn't. The ensemble is given archetypes where characters should be — types defined by a single trait and fed into the plot's machinery. In a pure action comedy this is forgivable. But this film is reaching for something larger — a meditation on human connection, on attention, on what we owe each other when civilization is failing. Those ideas need real people to carry them. What we get instead is a gap between the film's ambitions and the thinness of the vessels through which it pursues them. Sam Rockwell saves this film more than once. His Man From the Future — scraggly, exhausted, 117 attempts past hope — is built entirely from entropy, and Rockwell finds the specific sadness of a person who keeps going not because they believe it will work but because stopping is no longer available. It is the kind of performance that makes you forget you are watching one. Haley Lu Richardson is the other genuine surprise — her Ingrid carries the film's quietest arc and its most emotionally honest conclusion. The satire is sharp in places and blunt in others. Verbinski's AI villain is deliberately written as emotionally needy rather than cold and calculating — a reflection of his view of technology as a substitute for human connection. It's a genuinely interesting idea. The problem is the film states it rather than dramatizes it. The commentary is present in almost every scene, and the audience is never trusted to arrive at the conclusion independently. The most effective satire creates the conditions for discovery. This one does the discovering for you. The third act is genuinely exhilarating. Verbinski's technical command is on full display and the action sequences are inventive and precisely staged. But exhilaration without investment is just sensation. Because the film hasn't done enough work to make you care about these specific people, the spectacle lands as spectacle — impressive, not cathartic. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward, we take Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die apart and ask the question the film itself keeps circling: what is the difference between a movie that has something to say and a movie that makes you feel it? Verbinski is back. We're glad he's back. Now we need to talk about what he brought with him. read the full review on my Letterboxd.

22 min

4th Wall Inward

Episodes

Ep. 8 | Wuthering Heights — When a Director Mistakes Desire for Depth

Ep. 7 | Crime 101 — The LA Noir That Almost Became a Masterpiece

Ep. 6 | Send Help — Sam Raimi Is Back and He Brought Everything

Ep. 5 | Project Hail Mary — The Blockbuster That Actually Earned Its Ending

Ep. 4 | The Long Walk — Stephen King's Darkest Idea Finally Gets the Film It Deserved

Ep. 3 | War Machine — When Netflix's Biggest Movie of 2026 Has Nothing to Say

Ep. 2 | One Battle After Another — The Best Picture That Anderson Almost Ruined Himself

Ep. 1 | Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die — The Film That Forgot Its Characters

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