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Junior ( Paul Mescal ) and Hen ( Saoirse Ronan ) are not a happy couple. The spark of their early love seems to have withered away in the harsh landscape of the near future. The year is 2065, our planet has been ruined, and people are looking to the sky as a way to survive. But to colonize space, the unholy match of government and private companies will first need an army to help build their new spaceship oasis. A stranger named Terrance ( Aaron Pierre ) arrives to recruit Junior, but not Hen, and given little time to enjoy their days together, the pair faces uncertainty about their relationship and future. Terrance offers them one bit of solace: there will be a flesh-and blood-clone of Junior here on Earth to keep Hen company once the real Junior leaves for space.

If the premise of “Foe” sounds familiar, that’s because sci-fi has grappled with the idea of robots or artificial beings becoming too real since before Philip K. Dick ’s monumental book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? From the replicants in “ Blade Runner ” (an adaptation of Dick’s novel) to the boy who yearned for his mother in “ A.I. Artificial Intelligence ,” there’s no shortage of examples of looking for signs of life in man-made creations. However, “Foe” stumbles rather spectacularly by leaning more on melodrama than logic and choosing cliche over originality. Aside from rehashing tropes and offering some laughably bad moments, the film accomplishes little.

Garth Davis (“ Lion ”) both directed “Foe” and co-wrote the screenplay with Iain Reid , the author of the source material, but something must have been lost on the way from the page to the screen. It’s as if the director doesn’t trust his audience to figure out the story, so not only must there be painfully obvious signs, he opens the movie explaining what’s happened. Now that I knew human-like artificial beings existed in this world, I assumed they’d appear at any moment, and well, I guessed correctly within the first few minutes of the movie. Removing the element of suspense in favor of easy answers takes away much of the story’s thrill.

Things do not improve from there. Mescal and Ronan give this film their all, but it’s almost too much. Davis doesn’t seem to realize that languishing his camera on their pained expressions makes scenes feel overwrought and accidentally comical. It's almost a challenge not to laugh when these awkward close-ups are coupled with dialogue like, “You’re going to hell! This can never be forgiven!” Take, for instance, a close-up of Ronan as she’s trying to pull her face into a smile. She tries repeatedly, but Davis doesn’t cut or allow her the cry her character so badly needs. She just keeps stretching her face into a pained smile like the Joker. This is supposed to be a sad scene, not a descent into madness, but its emotions are mishandled to the point of a punchline.

It’s odd how “Foe” feels so lifeless, so incurious about what it means to be in a relationship with a facsimile of someone who has fallen out of love with you. A lot of the movie feels off—like the weird, hostile dynamic in Junior’s need to control Hen or the awkward racial dynamic of Junior, a white man, and his rage against Terrance, a Black man from the government/private space company, and what Junior thinks is Terrance’s attraction to Hen, a white woman. While cinematographer Mátyás Erdély reimagines the landscape of Australia into the Midwest of the future, Davis tries to make two Irish actors into Americans, but that doesn’t sound right either. They are supposed to be living in one of the most remote places left, but she works at a sizable diner, and he reports to a rather busy chicken factory? The reason for the government to choose Junior is also vague at best, and if they can make a Xerox copy of his relationship, why couldn’t they send the copy to space? Ah, but “Foe” doesn’t do well under questioning.

Not even the many sweaty close-ups of the movie’s hot stars tussling in the sheets can replicate life in this strangely inert film. We are forced to watch Mescal and Ronan try their damnedest to convince viewers to root for their characters, only to watch their onscreen counterparts reduced to being treated like Frankenstein’s Monster, forced to suffer in front of an audience. The misplaced earnestness of lines like, “We never dreamed it would experience love,” further emphasizes how this once-promising script was badly executed. Images of pink landscapes and Ronan lounging on an ancient tree in a satin dress look more like the premise of a magazine spread than moments from a story. As AI and climate crises become an ever-growing concern for our reality, more sci-fi movies will likely ask the same question as before: “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Hopefully, they find more interesting answers than “Foe” does.

This review was filed from the 2023 New York Film Festival. "Foe" opens on October 6th in theaters before a Prime Video exclusive launch.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to RogerEbert.com .

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110 minutes

Saoirse Ronan as Henrietta

Paul Mescal as Junior

Aaron Pierre as Terrence

Garth Davis

Writer (based on the book by)

Cinematographer.

Mátyás Erdély
Peter Sciberras
Oliver Coates

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Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal in bed together

Foe review – Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal captivate in clunky sci-fi drama

The Irish actors rise above Garth Davis’s overly contrived tale of a marriage torn apart by a space mission and an AI replicant

I n a near-future world that has been baked by a climate apocalypse into a state of existential burnout, a young married couple cling to what’s left of their life together in an isolated American prairie homestead. Inherited from his family, it’s a reproachful remnant of the past: a once-loved wooden foursquare farmhouse surrounded by a graveyard of dead trees in formerly rich agricultural land. There may once have been a spark between Junior (Paul Mescal) and Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan), but now their marriage is as arid and unrewarding as the land they no longer attempt to cultivate.

Then one night a stranger calls: Terrence (Aaron Pierre) is a slick government official who drops a bombshell into their not-so-happy home. Junior has been selected to work on an off-planet space community, and while he is absent he will be replaced, in his home and marriage, by an identical AI replicant. Junior is not thrilled by the idea. But somehow the news jolts some passion back into their atrophied relationship.

The latest from director Garth Davis ( Lion ) is too clunkily contrived and disingenuous to engage audiences fully, and too reliant on mood over ideas – a parched sand-and-dust colour palette; lots of despairing, sweat-glistening sex scenes – to add much to the human/robot intersection already thoroughly mined by films such as AI: Artificial Intelligence , Blade Runner and After Yang . But for all this, Mescal and Ronan are captivating: her watchful, raw-nerved longing; his stinging sense of betrayal. It almost eases us past an overwrought final twist. Almost, but not quite.

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Foe review: One of 2023’s best sci-fi movies that will break your heart

“Garth Davis' Foe is one of the most original and moving sci-fi movies of 2023.”

An intriguing story
Great performances from the two lead actors
Beautiful cinematography
A third act twist that isn't that surprising

We live in a time when science fiction is quickly becoming a reality. Self-driving cars are becoming more commonplace on highways. Artificial intelligence is challenging, or threatening depending on your stance, the very idea of individual human consciousness. And virtual reality is now a regular part of life; less The Lawnmower Man -type horrors than more of a banal extension of our daily routines like shopping, paying bills, or dating.

A sci-fi dystopia that looks all too familiar

More than meets the ai, a talented cast and crew, not your typical downbeat sci-fi movie.

The beauty of Garth Davis’ new movie, Foe , is that it plays as both a throwback to the humanistic sci-fi tales of the 1960s and 1970s, when the genre was concerned more with personal dilemmas than with elaborate space battles or exotic alien species, and as a cautionary mirror to the near future, when climate change and technology has forced all of humanity to change…or else. Yet unlike Hollywood’s recent alarmist blockbusters like The Creator or Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1 , Foe uses its future dystopia as mere window dressing to get at something deeper and more universal. When all is said and done, Foe isn’t about the future, really, but rather about something far more intimate and unsettling: the vulnerability of marriage tested by inertia and outside change.

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Right away, Foe paints a bleak picture: It’s the near future, the world’s water supply has run low, and climate change has devastated virtually every corner of the world. Situated in the dried-out Dust Bowl of America’s heartland, young married couple Henrietta, or Hen, (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) do their best to get by. Hen works as a diner waitress and tends to their lifeless homestead, sparing enough recycled water to feed one tree, while Junior works at a meat processing plant in a nearby town. Life is hard, but not impossible; there are moments of lightness and humor between the two, and they fight and make love just like any other couple.

Hen and Junior’s daily routine is disturbed one night by the arrival of Terrance, a stranger who proposes an intriguing offer: Junior has been selected to be a test subject in a space colony that will eventually replace Earth as a habitat for humanity. Will he go and become one of the first citizens of a fully functional outer space station? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime proposal, one that will give meaning to Junior’s life and a potential future for them both.

There is, of course, a catch: Junior will be away for a long time, leaving Hen to take care of the house and potentially harming their marriage. As a solution, Terrance offers Hen an AI companion who looks, acts, and sounds exactly like Junior. After some brief hesitation from Hen and uncertainty from Junior, they eventually accept the offer. Junior goes off to space, and Hen is left with AI Junior

I’ve described Foe ‘s plot as best I can, but the movie unfolds in a slightly different way, with a buildup and a third-act narrative twist that’s at once shocking and logical. From the very first scene, things seem a bit off , and for a long while, you can’t really tell why. Is Hen suspicious of her husband from the get-go? Why does Junior appear to be jealous of Terrance? And what’s the deal with that pesky beetle, which carries more metaphorical weight than you realize?

The director, Garth Davis, strikes a delicate balance between establishing a believable marriage while also laying the foundation for a story that will eventually reveal another hidden layer, one that will question everything you’ve just seen. yet what could have felt manipulative and dishonest instead feels genuinely suspenseful and intriguing; it’s not a cheap trick. In a sci-fi movie largely set in an old home straight out of the 20th century, Foe still feels modern and urgent; there are few lulls in its narrative, and that’s because Davis keeps you engaged with the story and makes you care about the movie’s central relationship.

Of course, it helps that Davis has a talented cast and crew that help bring this skewed sci-fi tale to life. As Hen, Ronan finds shades of subtlety and strength in a character that could’ve been shrill and one-note. Hen isn’t a victim, but she isn’t a symbol of independence either, and Ronan brings out all of the character’s complexities without going overboard. As Junior, Mescal adds yet another sad-eyed man-boy to his filmography, but his performance here feels different from his previous work in Normal People and Aftersun . His Junior is alternatively angry, confused, and defiant, and he pulls off a tricky act that sells the third act twist. As Terrance, Aaron Pierre doesn’t have much to do except look vaguely menacing, but he gives the character a surprising charge, one both violent and erotic, that adds more depth to the character than probably what was intended.

Visually, Foe is one of the richest-looking movies of the year. The cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, uses dusty browns and washed-out yellows to suggest a thirsty earth as well as a starved marriage, but he punctuates these scenes with occasional bursts of shadow and color that suggest a life beyond the homestead and the promise of change for both Junior and Henrietta. There’s one bravura scene in the middle of the movie that’s unforgettable; at sunset, Junior and Hen run after a wild horse, only to discover a wildfire burning in the dark, with both humans and animals trying to take cover from it. It’s a visual that encapsulates what the movie is about: a fire scorching the earth, disturbing everyone around it, but also giving life to the couple that run toward it, suggesting rebirth and a new start.

Foe could’ve been a bummer of a movie, yet another sci-fi tale that tells us we’re all doomed, but instead, it’s one of the most hopeful movies out there. It’s also one of the most original sci-fi movies in the last 10 years as, like Ex Machina and Arrival before it, it is less concerned with the superficial pleasures the genre brings and more interested in asking basic questions about humanity without finding any easy answers.

It’s not a stretch to say that the movie, in its sometimes brutal portrayal of a disintegrating marriage, has more in common with the 1966 classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? than, say, Alien , and that’s what makes it so special. You won’t see anything quite like Foe this year, and you won’t soon forget it either.

Foe is currently playing in theaters nationwide.

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‘Foe’ Review: Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan’s Marriage Is Threatened by A.I. Replacements in Smart but Stilted Sci-Fi Chamber Piece

David ehrlich.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 New York Film Festival. Amazon Studios releases the film in theaters on Friday, October 6; it starts streaming on Prime Video on Friday, January 5.

Instead, Davis’ screenplay — co-written by “ I’m Thinking of Ending Things ” author Iain Reid, and adapted from his novel of the same name — leaves it to linger in the air like a faint smell as it settles into a story about a married couple who find themselves facing a sci-fi threat of a different sort when the government selects one of them to be sent into space.

High school sweethearts Hen ( Saoirse Ronan ) and Junior ( Paul Mescal ) have been husband and wife for seven years, all of them spent alone together in the isolated Midwestern farmhouse that Junior inherited from centuries of Juniors before him. By the time the movie starts, this bonny pair of definitely- not -Irish twentysomethings are already grappling with the kind of identity crises that more typically creeps up on people a decade or two down the road, and the barren fields that surround their property offer a fitting backdrop for the faded love between them.

Massive dust storms and sandy rivers that run pink like dried blood add to the symptoms of a planet suffocating to death so fast that an agency called OuterMore has started conscripting healthy Americans into off-world trials aboard a satellite called the Installation, and the headlights that appear outside of Hen and Junior’s window one night indicate that one of them will be the next to go. Yes, only one of them.

Terrance frames the opportunity with OuterMore as “a chance to be a better version of yourself,” but the mere threat of personal iteration opens Junior’s eyes to the reality that he and Hen have been in flux since the moment they got engaged. Has she always had such a distant look in her eyes? Has her body always felt so uncertain to Junior’s touch, and her abiding beauty so detached from the feelings that it once provoked in him? Did she ever actually play the dusty piano they keep in the basement, or has she always just run her fingers over the keys as if settling for sense memory without any hope of music? It’s not that Junior doesn’t know the answers to these questions, but rather that he’s never accepted the need to ask them in the first place.

“What am I to you?,” Hen wants to know. What else would she be?

Some couples will do anything to remain seaworthy, while others would sooner go down with the ship. Most of them sit there and watch the water slowly rise through the cabins, hoping that they’ll die of natural causes before they drown (not incidentally, the same breakdown could be applied to our relationship with the environment). “There’s only one of me,” Junior insists, but he’s only half right: There’s only one of him at a time , an abstraction made literal by the fact that he won’t be allowed to meet the simulant that OuterMore creates from Terrance’s data.

If anything, Davis’ cast is so good at conveying their inner turmoils that “Foe” can’t help but belabor the point; absent the interiority of Reid’s prose (and wisely opting to be selective about its voiceover), this adaptation struggles to find pockets of life amid the torpor of of its circumstance. It is and should be oppressive to watch two people who are stuck in a rut and isolated from both each other and the world at large, but the film’s sci-fi machinations — all of which are hiding in plain sight — prove stifling in ways that stunt its drama, as some of the things that Hen and Junior are hiding from each other need to be kept hidden from us as well.

And so, like its characters, “Foe” itself often seems as if it’s stalling for time, and the nuances introduced along the way do little to complicate the quasi-love triangle that forms between Junior, Hen, and Terrance (id, ego, and superego, respectively). The movie’s final stretch reveals a satisfying and non-judgmental method to its madness, but much of the journey there feels as frustratingly elusive to watch as it would be to live through.

Most of all, they can’t know the bittersweet reality of being replaced, because neither of them will be around to see it happen for themselves. All they can hope for is to find self-liberation through the acceptance of a new reality, whether that means riding out the relationship they started with or making peace with the one they built along the way. “Strange how dying can still be beautiful,” Hen sighs as she eyes the motionless body of a beetle on the floor. And sure enough it can be, but the beautiful thing about “Foe” is how it leads its characters to remember there’s more to life than that.

“Foe” premiered at the 2023 New York Film Festival. Amazon Studios will release it in theaters on Friday, October 6.

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Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Foe’ on Amazon Prime Video, in Which a Sci-fi Dystopia Disrupts Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal’s Troubled Marriage

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Stream It Or Skip It

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The world is dying and so is the marriage between Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal in Foe ( now streaming on Amazon Prime Video ), which isn’t quite the most uplifting movie you’ll see this year. This melodramatic sci-fi psychological thriller is from Lion director Garth Davis, adapting the novel of the same name by Iain Reid , who also wrote I’m Thinking of Ending Things , which became one hell of a movie in the hands of filmmaker Charlie Kaufman. Foe is also one hell of a movie, albeit in a different way, and yes, that means it’s not nearly as good as I’m Thinking of Ending Things . Here’s why.

FOE : STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Hen (Ronan) stands in the shower, weeping. Is it a deeply personal weeping or an existential weeping? One assumes both. It’s 2065, and the way-overpopulated planet is on its way out. Water is scarce, it hasn’t rained in god knows how long, there’s not much habitable land left, AI robots are replacing humans for manual labor, everyone’s looking to WALL-E their asses right off Earth and why is she taking such a long, sad shower if there isn’t much water to go around? I dunno! She and hubby Junior (Mescal) live on an 200-year-old farm in a middle-of-nowhere flatland occasionally battered by billowing dust storms of the type that has us wondering if Mad Max lives just up the road a stretch.

Nothing grows here but scrub and despair, the latter of which has crept into Hen and Junior’s seven-year marriage. They’re always a little dewy with sweat from the persistent heat, which hangs in the air whether they’re cold to each other or doinking the bejeezus out of each other – such is the rollercoaster of a troubled relationship. There’s contempt and resentment between them, and their isolation from the rest of the population only intensifies the love lost. They joylessly drink a bit too much beer and wine, and simmer in their misery. She waits tables at a diner and he works at an industrial chicken factory and at this point you’re shaking your head at how her name is Hen and she lives on a farm and he works in a chicken factory. Does that mean something? Thematically speaking, maybe, but it for sure means I’m annoyed.

One night, a vehicle that looks like a third- or fourth-gen Cybertruck pulls up to the house. It’s Terrance (Aaron Pierre of The Underground Railroad ), a kind of mysterious government guy who informs Junior that he’s been drafted to live on a space station. Terrance gives a heavy-handed sales pitch, if only to soften the notion that Junior has no choice in the matter. Is it good news or bad news that they’ll be separated for a while? Not sure. But the juice here is, Junior will be replaced by a “self-determining life form,” which is doublespeak for “will you even be able to determine which one of them is the clone.” Maybe this kind of thing happens all the time, or maybe Junior and Hen are guinea pigs here, who can tell? This reality is bleak. I mean, there’s dystopia out there in the heat, and dystopia in here between the sheets, but is there any hope-ia for Junior and Hen or humanity itself?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Mahershala Ali came face-to-face with his replacement clone in the similarly maudlin Swan Song (which is far more worthy of your time than this). The Host (absolutely not the Bong Joon-ho The Host ) was Ronan’s previous gig anchoring cloddish sci-fi. And Foe cribs more than a little from Never Let Me Go and the two Blade Runner s.

Performance Worth Watching: Ronan and Mescal are past Oscar nominees, absolutely worthy ones, and that’s evident in how they work their tails off to try to transcend this garbled and ineffective screenplay.

Memorable Dialogue: “It’s strange how dying can be beautiful,” Hen says, as she and Junior share a loving moment in a gorgeously pink salt-flat wasteland

Sex and Skin: A fair amount of sweaty-moany soft-R nookie, with occasional shirtlessness and bare bums.

Our Take: The key question here is, are we buying any of this? Ronan and Mescal can sell us nearly anything, and there are moments when they turn up enough emotional truths to give Hen and Junior’s thorny relationship some dramatic heft. They cultivate believable intimacy and efficaciously walk the line between love and loathing – and make sure Foe isn’t as dry and barren as its setting.

But there also are moments that don’t do the talent any favors: Ronan is asked to venture into a basement and pull the cover off a piano and therefore indulge a hoary cliche about smothered joy and creativity, and Mescal’s histrionic soliloquy about pus and snot and other bodily grossnesses is an unintentional laffer, maybe even for the ages. Meanwhile, the Terrance character acts strangely enough that we start to wonder if he’s a “self-determining life form” within the plot, or a self-determining Movie Character specifically calculated to never let us get a firm grip on him and therefore keep us from getting too comfortable; he’s warm, he’s cold, he’s almost-but-not-quite nice, and he seems to be going through a whole lot of trouble for, what, exactly? A weirdly cruel experimental government program? Wouldn’t it be easier to just send them both to outer space than to take one and make a clone and needlessly eff with everyone’s heads?

Considering the story is set on such an arid and lifeless plain, its inability to hold much water is Foe ’s only functional metaphor. Davis indulges a few moments of visual beauty, capturing desolate landscapes with undertones of melancholy grief. He also delivers a few surrealistic flourishes that hammer us with hackneyed symbolism – a wandering horse, a burning barn, an is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex dream sequence. This unwieldy melange of psycho-thriller and antiutopian sci-fi aims to be suggestive but lands somewhere between confused and obtuse, hot-messing its way to a third act that offers the type of explanations that grind most movies to a halt, but are welcome here, because at that point, our frustration has set in. Kudos to Davis for not wanting to spoon-feed anyone, but, to mix the shit out of a metaphor, he also leaves us lost in the woods. So often, we yammer on about how movies do and don’t “work,” and Foe is a prime example of this, its array of potent components never coming together to create a functional narrative.

Our Call: Foe tries to be a head trip, but ends up being a head scratcher. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Paul Mescal
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‘Foe’: For this brainy but bloodless sci-fi film, faux is more like it

Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal play a couple whose already-strained marriage is threatened by the prospect of an android interloper

The title of the film “Foe,” a cerebral-to-the-point-of-bloodless marital drama set in a dystopian future, is apt in more ways than one. The most obvious meaning could refer to one or both of its central characters: Saoirse Ronan’s Henrietta, or Hen, a waitress at a rural diner, and her husband, Junior (Paul Mescal), a worker in a giant chicken-processing plant.

What either of them does for a living is irrelevant in a drama of a strained relationship that takes place almost entirely in and around their home, a 200-year-old dilapidated farmhouse in the middle of a desolate landscape surrounded by leafless trees. On-screen titles tell us the year is 2065, during a time of environmental degradation, urban overcrowding and flight by most other people from the barren countryside. (Who exactly is eating in Hen’s apparently busy restaurant, of which we catch only a glimpse, is one of the film’s mysteries. Perhaps it’s a company canteen for the chicken plant employees.)

But “Foe” might also refer to Terrance (Aaron Pierre), the enigmatic, slightly malevolent official who shows up one day at their door with an offer Hen and Junior can’t refuse. Junior has been conscripted to spend two years on a space station (known as the “installation”) that is being built by something called OuterMore to accommodate the human race when we eventually abandon the planet we have destroyed. In Junior’s absence, a biomechanical doppelgänger will take his place.

Junior 2.0, whom Hen’s husband is understandably none too pleased about, is also the film’s potential titular antagonist. Though Terrance, who eventually moves in with Hen and Junior in preparation for the switcheroo, is also a disruptive force. He’s part observer, part marriage counselor and part busybody.

One other interpretation of this A.I.-themed psychological/philosophical thriller about the nature of identity and what it means to be human involves, of course, a play on the word “faux,” meaning false. But the prospect of an android husband is, unfortunately, only the most literal sense of artificiality. Dispiritingly, in a movie that stars two of today’s most talented young actors, “Foe” is defined not by human drama but by a pervasive sense that neither Ronan nor Mescal is actually playing a real human being. Each of their characters comes across as an automaton in service of the film’s larger themes of — ironically — selfhood and individuality.

The stilted, stagy and self-conscious dialogue by writer-director Garth Davis (“ Lion ”) and Iain Reid — adapted from Reid’s 2018 novel and delivered amid impressionistic scenes that swing wildly between episodes of mundane domesticity, moments of sudden emotional intensity and impressionistic vistas of bleak natural beauty — never quite sounds like actual conversation. The whole thing plays like a post-apocalyptic sci-fi flick directed by Terrence Malick: all talk bordering on pretentious poetry and close-ups of body parts.

That said, there are brief shots of the orbiting space station here and there, and a scene or two in which we see some UFO-like vessels hovering over Hen and Junior’s farm, as well as a bit of vaguely futuristic tech. But more than anything, “Foe” feels less like a story that engages with the idea of artificial intelligence in any real way than a clinical essay, one in which the characters are stand-ins for some theoretical point that Davis is trying to get across. Paradoxically, “Foe’s” message ultimately comes across as both unsubtle and annoyingly oblique.

There’s even a scene in which Hen, Junior and Terrance are shown drunkenly chanting along to a recording of poet-singer Gil Scott-Heron’s 2010 “I’m New Here,” a half-spoken, half-sung ditty whose lyrics include: “I did not become someone different that I did not want to be, but I’m new here. Will you show me around?”

Thanks. Like subtitles, the words come in handy in case you can’t figure out what “Foe” is about.

Obtuseness may also be a problem. “Foe” parcels out information sparingly, and at times viewers may feel temporarily adrift. (By the time Terrence says to Junior, toward the film’s climax, “You must be confused,” I had been scratching my head for some time.) Yes, there is a massive twist coming — not just one but two — that unravels and then reknits everything we’ve just seen in this corkscrew of a movie. But the ending of “Foe” is not the problem. It’s the beginning and the middle that feel phony: at once as calculated and as uncanny as ChatGPT.

R. At area theaters. Contains coarse language, some sexual situations and nudity. 108 minutes.

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DVD & Streaming
Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy , Thriller

Content Caution

In Theaters

October 6, 2023
Saoirse Ronan as Hen; Paul Mescal as Junior; Aaron Pierre as Terrance

Home Release Date

November 7, 2023
Garth Davis

Distributor

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

Movie Review

In the future, life on Earth is difficult.

Rain doesn’t fall in 2065. The merciless sun beats down. Water comes at a premium. And what once were lush green fields and thick forests are now barren stretches of inhospitable dirt peppered with dead snags and bone-bare stumps.

Such is the case with the land around Junior and Henrietta’s place. The generations before them lived in the same house and farmed the same fields. But those days, and all of the farms, are gone. These days, the old, peeling-paint house is just a hideaway that keeps out the grit when swirling dust storms kick up.

Hen and Junior survive—he works at a local poultry processing plant, she a local diner—but just barely. Their sweaty lives are strained.

Then one night a car pulls up outside. A man comes to their door.

He says his name is Terrance. He says he has an opportunity. He says he’s there on behalf of a company called Outer More.

With the land and the sea transforming as they are, Terrance explains, some important entities have taken the initiative to, well, create another place to live up in space. It’s a vast base that, eventually, will be humanity’s migration spot. A better place. A better life.

Outer More promises to make that happen.

Junior balks at the idea that he and Hen would ever go there, however. If that’s what Terrance is suggesting, he can drive back to wherever he came from. Junior isn’t keen on leaving his family home, and he’s pretty sure that Hen would hate the idea of flying off to some platform in space.

In fact, though, Hen might not be so against leaving this dust bowl of a place. And as Junior and Terrance talk, you can see that truth flit across her face. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because Terrance declares that Hen isn’t one of those chosen by the national lottery: only Junior. Besides, he’ll only be gone for a year, two at tops.

Junior does more than balk at that point. There’s no way in the world that he’d ever fly off and leave Hen alone here for a year or two! He assures Terrance that he can take his offer and shove it.

Again, though, Terrance calmly smiles, as he dabs the sweat from his brow and neck. This opportunity isn’t just an offer . “Have you ever heard the word conscription ?” he asks.

“The government wouldn’t allow that,” Junior pants as he slumps back in his chair.

“We are the government,” Terrance declares. But not to worry, Junior’s little Hen won’t be alone, Terrance goes on. Oh, no. She won’t be alone or in danger. Outer More has something very special in mind that will keep Hen company. Very special. Why … it’ll almost be like Junior never left.

“You wait. You’ll see,” Terrance says with a reassuring smile.

Positive Elements

In the course of this movie, we see the difference in a husband and wife’s relationship when the partners are open and communicative and when they are not. The film recognizes that when we don’t take the time to communicate our feelings well, we end up with crumbling relationships. But when a couple is close and truthful, they have a better chance, the movie states, of enduring almost anything.

Foe also raises questions about infidelity. It looks at character choices made and challenges viewers to think about their own choices, their own hopes and dreams. (It should be noted, however, that these concepts are not examined from a biblical perspective.)

Spiritual Elements

Sexual content.

Seemingly because of the oppressive heat, Hen wears loose tank tops, shirts and open front dresses without a bra. And Junior walks around shirtless or with his shirt open as well.

Hen and Junior kiss and make love (while the camera looks on at times) on a number of occasions. One scene shows them sitting naked next to each other (seen from the rear) as he reaches over to fondle her breast. In several instances they are fully naked with strategic coverings of sheets or a partner’s body parts. But Hen’s breasts are fully exposed several times.

Both Hen and Junior are shown in the shower at different times. In her case we see her naked upper torso and legs. In Junior’s case we see him squatting down in the shower with his forehead to his knees.

Junior is fully naked and seen from the rear several times. (He’s running without pants in a field once.) In one of those cases, he is laying on the floor while his clothes are removed, and a gelatin compound is applied to his body by several technicians.

Violent Content

We hear that government officials are burning some of the old buildings in the area. And Hen and Junior spot a barn burning and a group of horses running from the flames. Junior runs toward the blaze and almost goes into the building before being violently tackled to the ground by a man.

When we see Junior next, his arm is in a sling, and we’re told that the tendons in his shoulder were operated on. He pulls off the bandages later to expose light scar tissue.

Someone pins Junior down and puts his hand over Junior’s mouth as if to smother him. Junior runs after strange men, shooting at them with a shotgun. He’s then knocked down, his face is bloodied, and an object is implanted in the back of his neck. A needle is stuck in between two of his knuckles. We see Junior, bloodied and chained to the floor by his wrist.

Junior also has something of an emotional breakdown at one point and slams his fists into a wall until his knuckles are badly bleeding. (A man watches this with an almost pleased expression on his face.) After washing away the blood, Junior pours the bloody water on a tree outside.

Hen smashes a wine glass and angrily slaps someone’s face. She also smashes a piano keyboard with a shovel. She struggles and screams as two men forcefully drag her away from a violent scene. The camera watches closely as someone smashes a large beetle with a bottle.

Crude or Profane Language

There are more than 40 f-words and some eight s-words in the dialogue. And God’s and Jesus’ names are misused a total of five times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

This film is set in a dusty, sweaty house and its local environs. The characters all regularly drink cold bottles of beer; and in some cases, glasses of wine. Several people sip glasses of champagne after a successful experiment.

Terrance smokes a cigarette on several occasions and what appears to be a joint in one case. After an injury, Junior takes what seems to be prescription medication. Once, he downs the pills with a beer.

Other Negative Elements

Junior mentions the revulsion he feels he has when he sees people chewing with their mouths open, as well as hawking up phlegm and spitting it on the ground. We see several people eating with their mouths open.

Foe is a play-like sci-fi flick (with Sam Shepard-esque overtones) that sweats and despairs its way through a never-what-it-seems-to-be dystopian tale. Even its title is phonetically polysemous. It’s all based on and bolstered by the skills of the three main actors. (Saoirse Ronan being a particular standout.)

And by the time we get to its closing, script-flipped moments, Foe raises interesting questions about the choices we make, the things we don’t say and the resulting sallow lives we often live.

That may be the sort of thought-provoking stuff that you could chew over with a friend and a cup of coffee. But be forewarned, the journey to that coffeeshop conversation can be a grind.

Aesthetically, the early circling-dialogue moments of this film feel almost like an absurdist slog that’s peppered with unnecessarily nasty language and unexpectedly explicit sexuality. Those latter inclusions are strong enough, in fact, that you may want to skip the movie altogether.

You know, go straight to the conversation over coffee. There’s always a piece of pastry to chew on.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Foe's Ending Explained: The Massive Plot Twist And How The Movie Pulled It Off According To The Cinematographer

How Foe pulled off its massive AI plot twist.

Paul Mescal resting his head on Saoirse Ronan's shoulder in Foe.

Spoilers for Garth Davis’ Foe are ahead. If you haven’t seen the sci-fi drama, you can check it out now in theaters.

Many of the best sci-fi movies feature an epic plot twist. Take Arrival and Interstellar for example, both films simultaneously blow your mind, and have you contemplating your humanity. Well, the latest science fiction film to hit the 2023 movie schedule , Foe , features a pretty epic (and unexpected) twist that needs to be broken down. Luckily, after speaking with the film’s cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, I have a good understanding of what went down in this intimate story about AI, and how they pulled off the big reveal at the end of the film starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal .

Before we hop into the nitty gritty of this movie’s ending, first let’s review the basic story. This book-to-screen adaptation based on Iain Reid’s novel of the same name follows a couple, Jr. ( Paul Mescal ) and Hen ( Saoirse Ronan ), after Jr. is selected to be part of a group that goes to a space station to see if it's habitable. When a man, Terrance, shows up at their rural farm to discuss this proposition, he also explains how when Jr. leaves, they’ll give Hen an AI version of her husband. However, we’re not made aware of when the switch happens. So, the ending of this sci-fi drama revolves around the audience figuring out that we’ve been watching AI Jr. this whole time.

Saoirse Ronan as Hen with hair blowing in her face in Foe.

What Happened At The End Of Foe?

The beginning of the end comes when we find out that the Jr. we’ve been watching for the majority of the movie is actually AI. The human version of Hen’s husband returns from his space mission, and it’s determined that the artificial intelligence version of him needs to be laid to rest.

It’s a jarring experience watching one man witness his AI clone’s demise, and as Jr. calmly watches the proceeding, Hen freaks out.

After AI Jr. is gone, the human Jr. and Hen try to work out their marriage. Throughout the entire movie, it’s made clear that Mescal’s character is very stuck in his ways, and doesn’t want change. However, Hen desires her own agency, is curious about the world, and wants to leave their farm. The two have a conversation about how Ronan's character developed feelings for AI Jr. while human Jr. was gone, and he gets extremely mad, in a scary way.

This leads to Hen giving her husband a letter with nothing written on it – something she told Terrance she would do – and leaving their farm. Then, a green light is shown, which we discover is how AI is activated, and what I took to be an artificial intelligence Hen appears at Jr.’s home.

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In the end, it seems like AI Hen and Jr. live happily in their home, and Mescal’s character is not forced to adapt or change with the times. Meanwhile, human Hen is seen flying away. We don’t know where she’s going, but we know she finally got what she wanted.

Foe’s ending hinges on the moment we find out that the Jr. we’ve been watching for the majority of the movie is not the human version. It’s a major, and mind-boggling, reveal, and the cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, broke down how they pulled it off while speaking with CinemaBlend.

Paul Mescal looking a bit shocked in a screenshot from Foe.

How Foe’s Cinematographer Filmed Paul Mescal’s Big Plot Twist

When I saw Foe, what immediately struck me during the plot twist was how Jr. reacted to seeing a being who looked and talked exactly like him. At that point, AI Jr. is freaking out and begging those around him to not put him down. Meanwhile, human Jr. is very calmly watching his doppelgänger struggle.

While this shot is mind-boggling to watch, and Mescal's two performances show off his range, it was actually quite simple to shoot as Mátyás Erdély explained to me:

It's actually much simpler than I originally imagined. Basically, we're shooting these scenes twice, once with Jr. and once with J.R., which were these two characters names, you know one for the AI and one for the real person. We just had a very strict breakdown of what are the shots that we're gonna see them both at the same time? And then we would frame, we had a [body] double. So we shot some of this with a double. So if it was out of focus or if it was partly visible, we would use the double. So it's super simple. But if it's both characters then we would shoot one pass with J.R. and then one pass with the other character and then it's in post, the effects would merge these two images together.

Throughout our interview, Erdély told me that they shot this movie as simply and as practically as they could. This included the massive plot twist where Paul Mescal plays two characters at the same time. It turns out that the harder part of shooting this film, and building to the end, came with how they created the first two-thirds of Foe .

How Foe's Creative Team Kept The Plot Twist A Secret From The Audience

While shooting the reveal about the two versions of Jr. was fairly easy, keeping this fact a secret proved to be a bit challenging. Mátyás Erdély elaborated on the conversations he had with director Garth Davis about how they would shoot the story since Hen knows about AI Jr. and the audience doesn't. He said:

I think what was even more interesting is that when the film starts, Hen, Saoirse’s character, obviously already knows. And we had a lot of conversations with Garth about how do we deal with that fact? How do we shoot her? But, [in] creating this tension, obviously, we cannot reveal that something is off. But we also have to have something, you know? We as filmmakers, we have to deal with that somehow. So that was this very fine line of what we were able to do and what we were not able to do.

Ultimately, Davis wanted the movie shot “very straightforward” so they wouldn’t reveal anything to the audience. However, Erdély noted that even though he used his camera to show how life literally was for Hen and Jr., you can sense that something is wrong because of Ronan’s complex performance. She’s in the know the entire time, and her “inner struggle,” as the director of photography put it, is what helps us better understand the bigger picture.

In the end, the audience has to come to terms with the horrors of what’s happening in this movie in real-time. There really isn't much warning; it's just clear that something is off. The plot twist and the AI reveal are unsettling, it’s also the final nail in the coffin of this couple who has been on the ropes for a long time. The plot twist emphasizes their differences, and drives them to make life-changing decisions – for Jr. it’s to stay home, and for Hen it’s to leave.

If you are interested in watching or re-watching Foe , you can do so by checking it out in theaters. Also, it’s an Amazon Studios film, which means it will likely be available through a Prime Video subscription at some point in the near future.

Riley Utley is the Weekend Editor at CinemaBlend. She has written for national publications as well as daily and alt-weekly newspapers in Spokane, Washington, Syracuse, New York and Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated with her master’s degree in arts journalism and communications from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Since joining the CB team she has covered numerous TV shows and movies -- including her personal favorite shows Ted Lasso and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel . She also has followed and consistently written about everything from Taylor Swift to Fire Country , and she's enjoyed every second of it.

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Bleak, ponderous AI sci-fi drama has language, sex, nudity.

Foe movie poster: A close-up of Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan as married couple Junior and Hen, lying next to each other.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The film offers stark warnings about the future if

Junior and Hen are in marriage that is struggling.

The main two characters are a White American heter

A character tries to run into a burning barn but i

A married couple are briefly seen having sex on a

Multiple uses of "f--k" and variants of. Also "s--

Characters are seen drinking beer and wine on mult

Positive Messages

The film offers stark warnings about the future if something is not done about climate change. It also raises questions about artificial intelligence and what form this may take in the future. Relationships must be worked at, but this includes allowing each other to express themselves and behave freely. Courage is shown in stepping up to help a greater cause, but at what cost.

Positive Role Models

Junior and Hen are in marriage that is struggling. Both admit to being unhappy but try to make the relationship work. They show kindness to each other, although Junior does behave harshly at times. Terrence is polite but also devious and deceitful. His behavior frustrates and angers Junior and Hen on occasion, particularly Junior.

Diverse Representations

The main two characters are a White American heterosexual married couple played by Irish actor Paul Mescal and American-born Irish actor Saoirse Ronan . The other main actor is the Black-British actor Aaron Pierre who plays a U.S. government official. The screenplay is written by two men, a White Canadian and a White Australian, the latter also directs.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

A character tries to run into a burning barn but is tackled and then knocked out. They wake up in their home with a damaged shoulder. After spotting some people on their land, a character chases after them firing their rifle. They miss and are then apprehended, being punched unconscious before having a chip inserted in their neck. In what appears to be a dream sequence, a character tries to suffocate another. A character repeatedly punches a wall until their fist bleeds. Another character smashes a piano with the butt of a rifle. During a dinner, someone climbs over the table and slaps a guest. Characters become anguished and there is a distressing scene where a character is wrapped in plastic and has the air sucked out of it. An infestation of bugs is briefly seen. Later one is squashed. References to and visualisations of the planet being destroyed due to climate change.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A married couple are briefly seen having sex on a number of occasions; grunting is heard, breasts and buttocks seen. Characters naked lying in bed covered by sheets and each other. Characters seen naked from behind in a non-sexual context. Characters shower but no sensitive parts shown.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Multiple uses of "f--k" and variants of. Also "s--t," "bulls--t," "jeez," "hell," "idiot," and "dumb." "Oh my God," "Jesus," and "God" used as exclamations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters are seen drinking beer and wine on multiple occasions. In one scene, three adults are clearly drunk, one of whom admits to being so. Flutes of champagne are handed out to toast a success. Some smoking including a character offering what could be a cannabis joint, although that's not clear. Pills, which are said to be an anesthetic, are consumed. A character is injected with a syringe.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Foe is a sci-fi drama that deals with themes around artificial intelligence (AI) and climate change. Set in the year 2065, in a world that has been made barren by years of droughts and harsh winds, Junior ( Paul Mescal ) is told that he has no choice but to go on a mission to space to help build an alternative home for humans. While he's gone, his wife Hen ( Saoirse Ronan ) will be supported by an AI replica of Junior. The film paints a depressing future and poses a number of ethical questions about the use of AI. There are a few brief sex scenes with some nudity depicted including breasts and buttocks. Language includes variants of "f--k" and "s--t," and there is smoking and drinking. In one scene, Junior, Hen, and a U.S government official called Terrence ( Aaron Pierre ) get drunk together. Violence is infrequent but does include a character being punched unconscious after firing his rifle at people. In another scene, the same character punches a wall until their fist bleeds. Characters become distressed, which in turn can be upsetting to watch. The film is based on a book of the same name by Ian Reid. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Foe: Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal as married couple Hen and Junior, sit on a bench, Hen leaning on Junior who is holding a beer.

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What's the Story?

FOE takes place in 2065, in a world that has been ravaged by years of drought. Married couple Junior ( Paul Mescal ) and Hen ( Saoirse Ronan ) live on an isolated farm, their relationship faltering, when a U.S. government official called Terrence ( Aaron Pierre ) suddenly turns up to make an offer that will change their lives forever.

Is It Any Good?

Despite its big ideas about AI, climate change, and what the future holds for human existence, this sci-fi drama never manages to take off. Based on a book by Ian Reid -- Reid shares co-writing credits with director Garth Davis for the screenplay -- Foe is set in the year 2065. Years of drought have left lands barren to the point that the U.S. government is conscripting selected young men to head into space to build an alternative home for humans. One of the chosen is Mescal's Junior, whose marriage to Hen (Ronan), like the land that surrounds their isolated Midwest farm, is slowly dying in front of them. Standing in for Junior while he's gone will be an artificial intelligence replica, who after a series of tests and interviews will be indistinguishable from the real-life Junior. If this is sounding familiar, it's likely you've seen a Black Mirror episode that tackles similar ideas, only better. Mescal and Ronan both give it their all, but the story is ponderous and leaves too many questions unanswered. Perhaps that's Davis respecting the audience's intelligence, allowing them to come up with their own answers and interpretations. But then the final five minutes ruins this theory, hammering home a final twist that had already been revealed.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about what Foe had to say about artificial intelligence. What do you think the film was trying to say about AI ? How do you think it will impact our future? Are you scared about it, excited, or both?

How did the film portray the sex and nudity? Was it affectionate and respectful? Was it tastefully handled? Parents, talk to your teens about your own values regarding sex and relationships.

What impact did climate change have on the world? How concerned are you with how we treat the planet? What can you do to make a positive change ?

Discuss the strong language used in the movie. What did it contribute to the movie? Is a certain kind of language expected in a movie like this?

Movie Details

In theaters : October 6, 2023
Cast : Saoirse Ronan , Paul Mescal , Aaron Pierre
Director : Garth Davis
Inclusion Information : Female actors, Black actors
Studio : Amazon Studios
Genre : Science Fiction
Topics : Book Characters , Robots , Space and Aliens
Run time : 110 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language, some sexual content and nudity
Last updated : January 7, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Foe review: Why is a film about robot clones starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal so boring?

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Any desire to see two of Ireland’s bright, young things – Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal – finally united on screen will be swiftly drained by Foe , a sci-fi drama desiccated of meaning. They’ve been coupled up here, playing young lovers out on a Midwestern farm. She, Henrietta, wears calf-grazing, tradwife skirts. He, Junior, has on a James Dean uniform (jeans and a white T-shirt, with the sleeves rolled up). Their Terrence Malick, Days of Heaven role-play is rudely interrupted by the arrival of a strange man, Terrance (Aaron Pierre), who informs them that Junior has been hand-picked to colonise space.

It is, in fact, not 1965, but 2065 – fresh water and habitable land are now rare commodities. Humanity has not been able to fix the problems on Earth, so we’ve opted simply to abandon it. Junior will be a canary in the metaphorical space mine, set out into the galaxy to test whether a person can thrive amongst the stars. Henrietta, Terrance adds, will be duly compensated: with an AI substitute for her absentee husband, so fleshy and freethinking that she’ll barely recognise the difference.

But, first, Terrance has to stick around and observe the couple, so that Junior’s replacement can be as accurate as possible. His presence alone – an interruption to the status quo – triggers earthquakes in the lives of these wistful, lustful, American dream types, their brows perpetually slick with sweat. Henrietta drapes herself mournfully over dead trees, as she watches her man work the land; Junior, puffed up by turmoil and envy, punches holes in the stained, floral wallpaper of their home.

Ronan and Mescal try their best to connect on screen here, but it’s impossible to shake the knowledge that this is all merely the performance of passion, a false dream captured by Matyas Erdely’s sun-streaked cinematography. A braver film could have even lent into that artificiality, almost as a sly commentary on AI and self-identity – ideas that inevitably consume the film’s third act and its thuddingly obvious climactic twists.

This is the third feature by Garth Davis, following his Rooney Mara/Joaquin Phoenix starrer Mary Magdalene and the adoption drama Lion . His usual self-seriousness and sincerity seem ill at ease with the material he’s adapting, even if his script was co-written alongside its source novel’s author, Iain Reid. The first of Reid’s books to make it to screen, I’m Thinking of Ending Things , felt poles apart from this. Directed by the surrealist Charlie Kaufman, the Jessie Buckley-led Netflix film was complex and dreamlike in its structure, with room for all kinds of emotional contradictions and tricky thoughts. Foe is far too plain-spoken. “He doesn’t really see me anymore,” Henrietta laments. “It’s as if he’s replaced me with someone else.” She does so several scenes before anyone’s even mentioned the robot clones.

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There are other questions for Foe to ponder. Terrance (who Pierre plays as a cool-headed enigma) asks Junior whether he wants to live a mundane life or open himself up to the possibilities of the cosmos. Foe , as a film, settles comfortably for the former. It’s easier, it seems, to chase after Tennessee Williams-sized exasperations, with Mescal a hair’s breadth away from shaking his fists in the air and screaming, “Henrieeeeetttttttaaaaaa!” From what I’ve heard, he did the Stanley Kowalski schtick a lot better on stage – when he actually played Stanley Kowalski.

Dir: Garth Davis. Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Aaron Pierre. 15, 110 minutes.

‘Foe’ is in cinemas from 20 October

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‘The Idea of You’ Review: Surviving Celebrity

Anne Hathaway headlines a movie that’s got a lot to say about the perils of fame.

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A man and a woman, both wearing sunglasses, walk down a city street. The man has his arm around the woman, who is holding a cup of coffee.

By Alissa Wilkinson

Women of a certain age (that is, my age) feel like they grew up alongside Anne Hathaway, because, well, we did. We were awkward teens together when she made “The Princess Diaries” in 2001. We felt ourselves to be put-upon entry-level hirelings right when “The Devil Wears Prada” came out in 2006. We understood her broken-down narcissistic addict in “Rachel Getting Married,” because who couldn’t? And we watched the Hathaway backlash, pegged to public perception that she was trying too hard, and worried that people saw us the same way.

Now we’re 40-ish. We know for sure that Gen Z considers millennials to be cringe, and, thankfully, we no longer feel the need to care. The greatest gift of reaching middle age is having settled into yourself, and that is apparently what Hathaway, age 41, has done . She has been through the celebrity wringer (and more ) and come out the other side looking radiant, with a long list of credits in movies that swing from standard commercial fare to auteurist masterpieces.

This is perhaps why it’s so satisfying to see her name come first — alone, before the title credit — in “The Idea of You,” which is on its surface a relatively fluffy little film. Based on the sleeper hit novel by Robinne Lee, “The Idea of You” is plainly fantasy, in the fan fiction mold, that poses the question: What if Harry Styles, the British megastar and former frontman of One Direction, fell madly in love with a hot 40-year-old mom? In this universe, the Styles character is Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the British frontman of a five-member boy band called August Moon.

Hathaway plays Solène Marchand, an art gallery owner whose arrogantly useless ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), buys v.i.p. meet-and-greet tickets for their 16-year-old daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), and her two best friends, all of whom were huge August Moon fans … in the seventh grade.

The event is at Coachella, and Daniel is set to take the teenagers but backs out at the last second, citing a work emergency. Solène reluctantly agrees to take them, and while at the festival, mistakes Hayes’s trailer for the bathroom. They meet, it’s cute, and you can guess what happens next.

Or can you? It was clear about 10 minutes into the movie that what was required for enjoyment was to surrender to the daydreaming, and so, with very little internal protest, I did. How could I resist? Solène is smart, competent, kind and secure; she has great hair and a great wardrobe; and most important, she seems like a real person, even if the situation in which she finds herself greatly stretches the bonds of credibility.

More than once, I was struck by how authentically 40 Solène seemed to me — a woman capable of making her own decisions, even ones she thinks might be ill-advised — and how weirdly rare it is to see that kind of character in a movie. She has a kid, and friends, and a career. She reads books and looks at art, and she is flattered by this 24-year-old superstar’s attention but takes a long time to come around to the idea that it may not be a joke.

Solène also feels real shame and real resolve in the course of the winding fairy tale story, which predictably has to go south. But most of all, she’s in a movie that doesn’t try to shame her, or patronize her, or make her appear ridiculous for having desires and fantasies of her own. She’s just who she is, and it’s simple to understand her appeal to someone whose life has never been his own.

Directed by Michael Showalter, who wrote the adapted screenplay with Jennifer Westfeldt, “The Idea of You” succeeds mostly because of Hathaway’s performance, though she and Galitzine spark and banter pleasurably (and he can dance and sing, too). It tweaks the novel in a number of ways — Hayes is older than the book’s character, for one thing — and also seems to implicitly know it’s a movie, and that movies have a strange relationship with age-gap romances.

In fact, that’s one of its strengths. Several times, characters remark on the double standard attached to people’s judgment of Solène and Hayes’s relationship, hypothesizing that in a gender-swapped situation, people would be high-fiving the older man who landed the hot younger star. Sixteen years looks like a lot on paper, but in the movies, at least, it is barely a blip.

That musing is interesting enough, if a familiar one. More fascinating in “The Idea of You” is its treatment of the cage of celebrity. Hayes seems mature compared with his bandmates and the girls who follow them around, but he’s also clearly stuck in some kind of arrested development. And I do mean stuck: He is self-aware enough to tell Solène, plaintively, that he auditioned for the band when he was 14 and not much has changed beyond his level of fame. He wants a life beyond the spotlight, badly.

And that’s just what he can’t get. Neither can Solène, nor, eventually, anyone around her. The idea of living a quiet life might obviously be out of reach, but the added elements of tabloid news and rabid fans unafraid to treat Hayes as if they know him make things far worse. The film starts to feel a little like the tale of a monster, but the monster is parasociality, encouraged by the illusion of intimacy that the modern superstar machine relies on to keep selling tickets and merch and albums and whatever else keeps the star in the spotlight.

It’s probably coincidental that “The Idea of You” comes on the heels of Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” on which she strongly implies that her carefully cultivated fandom has made her love life a nightmare. But spiritually, at least, they’re of a piece — even if the origins of the film’s plot seem as much borne of parasociality as a critique of it. And that makes Hathaway’s performance extra poignant. She’s been dragged into that buzz saw before. And somehow, she’s figured out how to make a life on the other side of it.

The Idea of You Rated R for getting hot and heavy, plus some language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Prime Video .

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

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'The Fall Guy' review: Ryan Gosling brings his A game as a lovestruck stuntman

In “Barbie,” Ryan Gosling ’s job is Beach. In “ The Fall Guy, ” it’s Stunt and he’s pretty great at his gig.

Gosling nicely follows up his Oscar-nominated Ken turn as an embattled Everyman who falls 12 stories, gets thrown through glass and pulls off an epic car jump, among other death-defying moments in the breezily delightful “Fall Guy” (★★★ out of four; rated PG-13; in theaters Friday).

Director David Leitch, former stunt double for a fella named Brad Pitt, revamps the 1980s Lee Majors TV show as an action-comedy ode to the stunt performers who never get their due, while Gosling and Emily Blunt dazzle as likable exes who reconnect amid gonzo circumstances.

"I'm not the hero of this story. I'm just the stunt guy," says Colt Seavers (Gosling) in voiceover as we first meet him. Colt is considered Hollywood's best stuntman, doubling for egotistical A-lister Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and fostering a flirty relationship with camera operator Jody Moreno (Blunt). However, a stunt goes accidentally awry in his latest movie, breaking his back as well as disrupting his love life, mental health and entire status quo.

'The Fall Guy': Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt talk 'epic' 'I'm Just Ken' Oscars performance

A year later, down on his luck and confidence still shaken, Colt is parking cars as a valet at a burrito joint when he gets a call from producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham). Jody, now an on-the-rise director, needs him in Sydney to work on her first huge sci-fi epic “Metalstorm.” He gets there and after a gnarly cannon roll in a stunt car where he takes out a camera, Colt learns that not only did Jody not ask for him, she doesn’t want him around at all.

Still, the old spark's there and it turns out she does really need him: Tom has befriended some shady dudes and gone missing, and Gail tasks Colt to both keep Tom's disappearance a secret and also find the dude. Alongside stunt coordinator and pal Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), Colt uncovers a criminal conspiracy and in the process goes undercover as Tom in a nightclub (wearing some Ken-esque shades and cool coat), gets so high he sees unicorns and teams up with a dog that only takes commands in French.

Colt is put through the physical ringer during his twisty hero's journey, and it’s impossible not to love him through every punch, kick, stab and dangerous feat because of Gosling’s offbeat charisma. Before “Barbie,” he showed his considerable comedic talents in “The Nice Guys” and “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” yet marries them well here with a healthy amount of vulnerable masculinity and sublime nuance. With him, a thumbs-up – the stuntman’s go-to signal that everything’s OK – is also a way for Colt to try and hide his sensitivities.

Like Leitch’s other movies, from “Bullet Train” to “Atomic Blonde,” “Fall Guy” is filled with fights, explosions and assorted derring-do for Colt to (barely) live through. One mayhem-filled car chase scene has Gosling’s character tussling with a goon on an out-of-control trailer interspersed with Blunt singing Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds.” (It's essentially a two-hour argument for a stunt Oscar category.) The movie sports a definite musical heart, with an amusing scene between Jody and a weepy Colt set to the Taylor Swift lovelorn jam “All Too Well,” and is also interestingly timely considering a plot point about deep fake technology.

The one downside with this sort of stunt spectacular is Colt’s mission to find the narcissistic Tom and getting into hazardous shenanigans takes away from his romantic stuff with Blunt. Playful and quick with the zingers, their characters awkwardly rekindle their romance – in one sequence, she spills all sorts of tea about their past relationship in front of their crew – and you miss them when they're not together.

For ’80s kids, Majors was the “Fall Guy” – and Leitch’s movie pays tribute in multiple ways to the show and its scrappy spirit – but Gosling makes for a fabulous heir apparent. He’s not just Ken. He’s also Colt, and Gosling’s not done showing us the true extent of his talents.

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Jerry seinfeld’s ‘unfrosted’ divides critics: “one of decade’s worst movies”.

The comedian's directorial debut is getting strong reviews from some top critics, but most are not bowled-over by the Netflix cereal comedy.

By James Hibberd

James Hibberd

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Jerry Seinfeld is having an odd time lately.

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‘Unfrosted’ Review: Jerry Seinfeld Directs and Stars in a Biopic of the Pop-Tart. It’s Based on a True Story, but It’s Knowingly Nuts

It's in the genre of movies like "Flamin' Hot" and "The Founder," only this one is an absurd surrealist fruitcake cartoon.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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‘Unfrosted’ Review: Jerry Seinfeld Directs and Stars in a Biopic of the Pop-Tart. It’s Based on a True Story, but It’s Knowingly Nuts 4 days ago
‘Humane’ Review: Caitlin Cronenberg’s First Feature Is a Searing Domestic Thriller About Crimes of the Not-So-Distant Future 1 week ago

UNFROSTED - (L to R) Jerry Seinfeld (Director) as Bob Cabana, Adrian Martinez as Tom Carvel, Jack McBrayer as Steve Schwinn, Thomas Lennon as Harold Von Braunhut, Bobby Moynihan as Chef Boyardee and James Marsden as Jack LaLanne in Unfrosted. Cr. John P. Johnson / Netflix © 2024.

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As a kid growing up in the late ’60s and ’70s, I confess that I never understood Pop-Tarts. My family would buy them, and every so often I would put one in the toaster, wanting it to be a tasty treat. Such is the power of advertising that I always thought it was my fault that I found Pop-Tarts to be…just okay. Twinkies, by contrast, were junky but succulent. And even good old dry cereal, when you were in the mood for it, was pretty great — the delicate crunch of Rice Krispies, the sweet-milk-bath rapture of Sugar Frosted Flakes. To me, though, Pop-Tarts never lived up to their billing. They were bland when untoasted (though a lot of folks ate them that way). Once you toasted them, the hot fruit filling had a soothing tasty tang, but the rectangular pastry was still cardboard pie crust. It wasn’t awful, but it’s not like biting into it gave you a rush of joy. Prefab and a little dull, the Pop-Tart was a “product of the future” that seemed stuck in the past, like astronaut food.

I suspect the answer is that Seinfeld knows the Pop-Tart was a rather bland leftover-’50s concoction, but that he has a primal attachment to it anyway. And maybe it doesn’t even matter, because “Unfrosted,” once you get onto its wavelength, passes 93 minutes in a pleasurably light and nutty way. On some level, Jerry was clearly drawn to the quaint capitalist energy of the film’s essential (true) story: that in the early ’60s, the two reigning cereal companies in America, Kellogg’s and Post, were both based in Battle Creek, Michigan, a town of 50,000, yet they were fighting like rival European fiefdoms of the 14th century.

The movie is told from the point-of-view of Kellogg’s. Seinfeld plays Bob Cabana, the company’s head of development (loosely based on William Post), and Jim Gaffigan is Edsel Kellogg III, the head of the company, who’s still just a blowhard of an empty suit because all his success is inherited. Their rival company, Post, another family dynasty run by a descendent (Marjorie Post, played by Amy Schumer ), are the also-ran losers. They’re Pepsi to Kellogg’s’ Coke, Burger King to their McDonald’s, Avis to their Hertz. At the Bowl and Cereal Awards, a Battle Creek event that’s like the Oscars of boxed breakfast food, Kellogg’s sweeps all the categories (like Easiest to Open Wax Bag). They’re on top. But Post is about to change the game, with a pastry product ripped off from Kellogg’s’ own research.

If “Unfrosted” actually were a movie like “Blackberry,” it might have had a terrific resonance. But Seinfeld stages it like a dramatized series of stand-up-comedy stunts. We first learn how insanely anachronistic the movie is going to be when Bob stumbles on two children who are climbing into Post dumpsters to taste discarded cans of fruit filling. “It’s garbage!” says Bob. “Is it?” says Cathy (Eleanor Sweeney). “Or is it some hot fruit lightning the Man doesn’t want you to have?” What 10-year-old girl in 1963 would use the phrase “the Man”? But that’s the film’s comic aesthetic. “Unfrosted” is a period piece, but it’s as Dada as a Mad satire crossed with a second-half-of-the-show “Saturday Night Live” sketch.

The movie, in its totally kitsch way, frames itself as a thriller, with the competition to create the Pop-Tart likened to the race to the moon shot or the Manhattan Project. Bob takes a meeting with a South American sugar lord named El Sucre (Felix Solis), and the union of milkmen is presented as a Mob faction (presided over by Peter Dinklage) who will kidnap and threaten, since the Pop-Tart, if successful, would end their business: the daily pouring of milk onto America’s cereal. Bob, Stan and Edsel take a meeting in the Oval Office with JFK, played by Bill Burr as the testiest JFK imaginable. He agrees to intervene with the milk union, even as he readies himself for a meeting with the Doublemint Twins. There are jokes about naming a cereal Jackie O’s (even though Jackie is years from being Jackie O). And Jon Hamm pops up as his character from “Mad Men,” pitching a name for the Kellogg’s pastry product — Jelle Jolie — that’s out of the film noir of Don Draper’s dreams.

“Unfrosted” is brimming with Atomic Age ephemera. Like Sea-Monkeys. Bazooka bubblegum. X-Ray specs. G.I. Joe. The Slinky. Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots. Wax lips. Silly Putty. The references, though, aren’t limited to kids’ stuff. Walter Cronkite (Kyle Dunnigan) is shown, off camera, to be a babbling alcoholic loon. We see cereal-world versions of the Zapruder film and even the January 6 insurrection, with Hugh Grant , as the haughty British thespian who’s the voice of Tony the Tiger, leading a strike of the Kellogg’s mascots.

The acting is cartoon lite: casually broad sketch-comedy mugging, which is why Jerry (who is great at playing himself, but not really an actor) fits right in. Most of the jokes are LOL rather than guffaw-worthy. But I confess that I chuckled at the sheer insanity of how the movie deals with the naming of the Pop-Tart. The genius name that Bob and his team have come up with is…the Trat-Pop. It will take Walter Cronkite puttering around with Silly Putty to set that right. “Unfrosted,” in its way, is a quintessential comedian’s movie. It thumbs its nose at everything without necessarily believing in anything. Yet it has an agreeable crunch.

Reviewed online, May 1, 2024. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 93 MIN.

Production: A Netflix release of a Columbus 81, Skyview Entertainment, Good One production. Producers: Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Beau Bauman. Executive producers: Andy Robin, Barry Marder, Cherylanne Martin.
Crew: Director: Jerry Seinfeld. Screenplay: Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Andy Robin, Barry Marder. Camera: William Pope. Editor: Evan Henke. Music: Christophe Beck.
With: Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Jim Gaffigan, Max Greenfield, Hugh Grant, Amy Schumer, Peter Dinklage, Christian Slater, Bill Burr, Dany Levy, James Marsden, Mikey Day, Cedric the Entetertainer, Fred Armisen, Jon Hamm.

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The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.

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Movie Review: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are great fun in ‘The Fall Guy’

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Ryan Gosling in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Eric Laciste/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Emily Blunt, right, and Ryan Gosling in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Ryan Gosling in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Winston Duke in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Ryan Gosling, left, in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Emily Blunt, left, and Ryan Gosling in a scene from “The Fall Guy.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

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One of the worst movie sins is when a comedy fails to at least match the natural charisma of its stars. Not all actors are capable of being effortlessly witty without a tightly crafted script and some excellent direction and editing. But Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt seem, at least from afar, adept at that game. Just look at their charming press tour for “The Fall Guy.” Theirs is the kind of fun banter that can be a little worrisome — what if their riffing is better than the movie?

It comes as a great relief, then, that “The Fall Guy” lives up to its promise. Here is a delightful blend of action, comedy and romance that will make the audience feel like a Hollywood insider for a few hours (although there are perhaps one too many jokes about Comic-Con and Hall H).

Loosely based on the 1980s Lee Majors television series about a stuntman who made some extra cash on the side bounty hunting, Gosling takes up the mantle of said stunt guy, Colt Seavers.

Colt is a workaday stunt performer and longtime go-to for a major movie star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Tom is the kind of deeply egotistical and self-conscious A-lister who tells everyone he does his own stunts and worries out loud about Colt’s jawline being distractingly softer than his. I think the word “potato” is thrown around as a descriptor. Taylor-Johnson has quite a bit of fun playing up all his eccentricities that you hope, and fear, are at least somewhat inspired by real horror stories of stars behaving badly.

This image released by Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures shows Mike Faist, from left, Zendaya and Josh O'Connor in a scene from "Challengers." (Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures via AP)

The film comes from director David Leitch, the Brad Pitt stuntman and stunt coordinator who helped bring “John Wick” to the world and directed “Atomic Blonde” and “Bullet Train.” He’s a guy who not only has the vision and know-how to bring the best in stunts to films and make them pop, but also has a vested interest in putting them in the spotlight. Forget the Oscar, how about just any acknowledgement? Perhaps “The Fall Guy” is just one tiny step on the path to making audiences more aware of some of the behind-the-scenes people who really make movies better and risk it all to do so.

It’s revealing that the movie starts with Colt suffering a terrible injury on a set. The stunt that goes wrong is one he’s just done and doesn’t seem remotely nervous about. The film cuts to his recovery and semi-reclusive retirement until he gets a call from Tom’s producer Gail (a delightfully over-the-top Hannah Waddingham) begging Colt to come back for a new film. They need him, she pleads, as does his longtime crush Jody (Blunt), who is making her directorial debut. She waits to inform him that Tom is missing and he’s the one who has to find him. On the quest, Colt encounters tough-guy goons, enablers, a sword-wielding actress, and a dead body on ice that all lead up to something big and rotten. And like a selfless stunt guy, he does it all out of sight of Jody — trying his best to save her movie without giving her something extra to worry about. Nothing about it is particularly plausible, but it’s not hard to get on board for the ride, and much of that is because of Gosling.

While he’s not quite underappreciated for his comedic timing, especially after “Barbie,” it’s fun to get to see him really embrace and lean into the goofiness — whether it’s crying and singing along to Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” or quoting movie lines to his stunt coordinator pal (Winston Duke, always a good addition) in the midst of an actual fight.

There is something very juvenile and sweet about Jody and Colt’s will-they-won’t-they romance, with its mix of attraction, banter, misunderstandings and hurt feelings. It was a genius stroke to cast these two opposite each other and it leaves you wanting more scenes with the two.

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a scene from "The Fall Guy." (Universal Pictures via AP)

Working with a script from Drew Pearce (“Hobbs & Shaw”), Leitch packs the film with wall-to-wall action, in both the film’s movie sets and its real world. And with the self-referential humor, the industry jokes and the promise of a little romance, it feels like one of those movies we all complain they don’t make anymore.

“The Fall Guy,” a Universal Picture release in theaters Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association of America for “action and violence, drug content and some strong language.” Running time: 126 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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'Unfrosted': Jerry Seinfeld's movie about the fictional history of Pop-Tarts

NPR's A Martinez talks to comedian Jerry Seinfeld about his new Netflix film, Unfrosted . It's a made-up history of Pop-Tarts, and the cereal rivalry between Post and Kellogg's.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Foe movie review & film summary (2023)
Foe. Junior ( Paul Mescal) and Hen ( Saoirse Ronan) are not a happy couple. The spark of their early love seems to have withered away in the harsh landscape of the near future. The year is 2065, our planet has been ruined, and people are looking to the sky as a way to survive. But to colonize space, the unholy match of government and private ...
Foe
[Full review in Spanish] Rated: 3.5/5 Jan 10, 2024 Full Review Read all reviews Movie Info Synopsis Academy Award nominees Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal star in Foe, a haunting exploration of ...
'Foe' Review: The Space Between
Oct. 5, 2023. Foe. Directed by Garth Davis. Drama, Sci-Fi, Thriller. R. 1h 50m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate ...
Foe review
Foe lavishes plenty of visually intriguing shots on moments meant to be ominous - the wind brushing the crinkled grass, blood pooling in the shower, beetles scrambling on wood, lush crop circles ...
'Foe' Review: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal in a Replicant Love ...
Amazon Studios. " Foe " is a grandly muddled dystopian sci-fi movie starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal as a Midwestern farm couple in 2065 (they appear to be the only Midwestern farm ...
Foe (2023)
Foe: Directed by Garth Davis. With Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Aaron Pierre, Jordan Chodziesner. Hen and Junior farm a secluded piece of land that has been in Junior's family for generations, but their quiet life is thrown into turmoil when an uninvited stranger shows up at their door with a startling proposal.
Foe review
Foe review - Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal captivate in clunky sci-fi drama. This article is more than 6 months old. The Irish actors rise above Garth Davis's overly contrived tale of a ...
Foe review: One of 2023's best sci-fi movies will break your heart
Score Details. "Garth Davis' Foe is one of the most original and moving sci-fi movies of 2023.". Pros. An intriguing story. Great performances from the two lead actors. Beautiful ...
Foe Review: Paul Mescal and Saoirse Ronan Star in A.I ...
Editor's note: This review was originally published at the 2023 New York Film Festival. Amazon Studios releases the film in theaters on Friday, October 6; it starts streaming on Prime Video on ...
Foe
Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 20, 2023. Foe initially presented as a sc-fi but settled into a relationship film where we meet the couple at the fragmented stage. The singular focus was ...
Foe
Foe - Metacritic. 2023. R. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) 1 h 50 m. Summary Hen (Saoirse Ronan) and Junior (Paul Mescal) farm a secluded piece of land that has been in Junior's family for generations, but their quiet life is thrown into turmoil when an uninvited stranger (Aaron Pierre) shows up at their door with a startling proposal.
Foe (film)
Foe is a 2023 science fiction psychological thriller film directed by Australian director Garth Davis, from a screenplay he co-wrote with Canadian writer Iain Reid, based on Reid's 2018 novel of the same name.An Australian-U.S. co-production filmed in Australia, the film stars Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, and Aaron Pierre.The core story concerns a young couple, Hen and Junior, having marital ...
Foe Review
Published on 19 10 2023. Release Date: 19 Oct 2023. Original Title: FOE. It's hard to make an original marriage drama and it's hard to make an original dystopian thriller, because somehow both ...
Stream It Or Skip It: 'Foe' on Amazon Prime Video, in ...
Stream It Or Skip It: 'Foe' on Amazon Prime Video, in Which a Sci-fi Dystopia Disrupts Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal's Troubled Marriage By John Serba Published Jan. 5, 2024, 3:30 p.m. ET
Review
October 10, 2023 at 3:49 p.m. EDT. Paul Mescal, left, and Saoirse Ronan in "Foe." (Amazon Studios) 4 min. ( 1.5 stars) The title of the film "Foe," a cerebral-to-the-point-of-bloodless ...
'Foe' Review: Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal in Dystopian Sci-Fi
Foe. The Bottom Line Fee Fie Foe Fumble. Venue: New York Film Festival (Spotlight) Release date: Friday, Oct. 6. Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Aaron Pierre. Director: Garth Davis. Screenwriter ...
Foe Review
Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan) are a husband and wife in their mid-20s who live in Junior's family farmhouse. When government agent Terrance (Aaron Pierre) shows up one night to ...
Foe
Movie Review. In the future, life on Earth is difficult. Rain doesn't fall in 2065. The merciless sun beats down. Water comes at a premium. ... Foe is a play-like sci-fi flick (with Sam Shepard-esque overtones) that sweats and despairs its way through a never-what-it-seems-to-be dystopian tale. Even its title is phonetically polysemous.
Foe's Ending Explained: The Massive Plot Twist And How The Movie Pulled
Well, the latest science fiction film to hit the 2023 movie schedule, Foe, features a pretty epic ... Before we hop into the nitty gritty of this movie's ending, first let's review the basic ...
Foe Movie Review
Our review: Parents say: Not yet rated Rate movie. Kids say: Not yet rated Rate movie. Despite its big ideas about AI, climate change, and what the future holds for human existence, this sci-fi drama never manages to take off. Based on a book by Ian Reid -- Reid shares co-writing credits with director Garth Davis for the screenplay -- Foe is ...
Foe review: Why is a film about robot clones starring Saoirse Ronan and
Any desire to see two of Ireland's bright, young things - Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal - finally united on screen will be swiftly drained by Foe, a sci-fi drama desiccated of meaning.They ...
Rotten Tomatoes: Movies
Rotten Tomatoes, home of the Tomatometer, is the most trusted measurement of quality for Movies & TV. The definitive site for Reviews, Trailers, Showtimes, and Tickets
'The Idea of You' Review: Surviving Celebrity
The Idea of You. Directed by Michael Showalter. Comedy, Drama, Romance. R. 1h 55m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an ...
'Fall Guy' review: Ryan Gosling movie proves he really isn't just Ken
In " The Fall Guy, " it's Stunt and he's pretty great at his gig. Gosling nicely follows up his Oscar-nominated Ken turn as an embattled Everyman who falls 12 stories, gets thrown through ...
'The Fall Guy' review: Ryan Gosling plays a stuntman in an ...
The Fall Guy is undoubtedly a passion project for Leitch, who once worked as a stunt double for actors including Brad Pitt and Jean-Claude Van Damme. (He nods to this by giving Colt a handy canine ...
Jerry Seinfeld's 'Unfrosted' Reviews: "One of Decade's Worst Movies"
The Chicago Sun-Times declared Unfrosted "one of the decade's worst movies. I'm surprised …. Seinfeld, one of the sharpest and most observant comedic minds of his generation, didn't halt ...
'Unfrosted' Review: Jerry Seinfeld Directs a Biopic of the Pop-Tart
Music: Christophe Beck. With: Jerry Seinfeld, Melissa McCarthy, Jim Gaffigan, Max Greenfield, Hugh Grant, Amy Schumer, Peter Dinklage, Christian Slater, Bill Burr, Dany Levy, James Marsden, Mikey ...
Back to Black (2024)
Back to Black: Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. With Marisa Abela, Jack O'Connell, Eddie Marsan, Lesley Manville. The life and music of Amy Winehouse, through the journey of adolescence to adulthood and the creation of one of the best-selling albums of our time.
Movie Review: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are great fun in 'The Fall Guy'
Updated 1:01 PM PDT, April 30, 2024. One of the worst movie sins is when a comedy fails to at least match the natural charisma of its stars. Not all actors are capable of being effortlessly witty without a tightly crafted script and some excellent direction and editing. But Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt seem, at least from afar, adept at that game.
'Unfrosted': Jerry Seinfeld's movie about the fictional history ...
MARTÍNEZ: (Laughter) Pop-Tarts have had a particularly warm place in the toaster of Jerry Seinfeld's heart, so much so he wrote, directed and stars in a new film for Netflix about the fictional ...

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