How to Make a Killing (2026)

John Patton Ford's movie should have been so much more fun. Zach Woods, Topher Grace, and Ed Harris seemed to know what movie they were in—and this was the real potential of How to Make a Killing: a series of hilarious and flamboyant heirs that our hero kills off in various humorous ways before he kills the big bad at the top.

Unfortunately that isn't how How to Make a Killing shakes out. Ford has overburdened his comedy-thriller with loads and loads of sentiment and moralizing. It felt like I was watching a movie made in the 1980s when Hollywood apparently thought that all of the capitalists who voted for Reagan need to be told that what "really matters" is family and having someone to love you, and that money isn't everything if you can't enjoy it. Giving this film a moral center corrupted this movie from the inside out.

But the real killer here is that How to Make a Killing just isn't very much fun despite the obviously winning presence of Glen Powell. Topher Grace and Zach Woods get some good laughs here, but although it was not his fault at all, this was a dreary Glen Powell vehicle and didn't live up to its considerable promise.

The Drama (2026)

Kristoffer Borgli's film is a romantic comedy, first and foremost. And it works very well as that, with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments. (Jeremy Levick had me cackling.)

The Drama tries for something more than this, though, and it mostly succeeds, skewering today’s culture of moral superiority. It also manages to be a really intriguing critique of our American eroticization and affection for guns and gun violence. I’m not sure the film does more than open these topics, but I guess I’m not sure it needs to. 

I certainly haven’t left a theatre talking with my companions quite this much in a while. It gave us lots to chew on: What would you do? How would you feel? Why didn't he recover more quickly? We would feel very differently if it was him and not her, wouldn't we? 

The one thing that I think we can all agree on is that Alana Haim’s character is the worst person—and the worst thing that character did is much worse than the worst thing anyone else did. I am of two minds about the horribleness of Alana Haim's character, though. On the one hand, it feels good to feel morally superior to her. She's just so awful, and so clearly in the wrong about everything. On the other, it seems to me that one of the film's central points is, perhaps, that we ought not to be so invested in moral superiority as such.

In any case, I quite enjoyed The Drama. It's worth seeing and it's worth talking about.