Icyerre

Travis Knight's Masters of the Universe (2026) sends exiled prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) home to a fractured Eternia, where reclaiming the Sword of Power and facing down Skeletor (Jared Leto) means confronting what it takes to be both a man and a hero; the film looks the part more convincingly than it earns it. Eternia here is a lush, over-saturated playground of practical costuming and nostalgic set dressing, but a screenplay credited to six writers treats its own inquiry into masculinity as background noise, burying real stakes under a steady stream of self-aware quips that keep undercutting the sincerity the story needs to land. That indecision shows most in the cast: Galitzine has the physicality for He-Man but not yet the range to anchor a film built on interiority, Camila Mendes's Teela is scripted into passivity rather than command, and Leto's Skeletor is the rare performer who seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he's in. It's a serviceable, occasionally charming nostalgia exercise likely to win over a new generation of He-fans, but one too unsure of itself to justify the mythic weight it keeps invoking.

Jeff Wadlow's The Devil's Mouth (2026) strands a group of Thailand-bound twenty-somethings in submerged caves with a shark, and the only real spine of the film is Sara's slow shift from deferential bystander to reluctant survivor, set against Max's controlling nature. The scenery is genuinely gorgeous, and the CGI predator is more convincing than expected, but the murky, underlit cinematography seems engineered to mask the shark's budget rather than build tension. Everywhere else, the writing falters: dialogue reduces everyone but Sara and James to interchangeable scream-fodder, and the PG-13 rating defangs whatever visceral stakes a story built on grief and self-preservation might have carried. Derivative of 47 Meters Down: Uncaged (2019) and limp through its final stretch, the film proves that pretty scenery and a passable shark cannot substitute for a screenplay without anything new to say about the people it drowns.

Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender (2026) moves like a film certain of its craft and unsure of its purpose, animating wind and water with a tactile beauty that makes every clash of elements feel newly alive. Aang's quiet grief over a vanished people gives the story its one genuine vein of feeling, but the question of whether a culture survives through its relics or its principles gets buried under a MacGuffin hunt and a villain, Tagah, assembled wholesale from better-drawn foes the franchise has already given us, while Katara is left with scraps of agency and Zuko, Sokka, and Toph are reduced to reunion cameos. Once the plot turns toward Dragon Ball Z-esque spirit-monster theatrics and unearned power surges, the disciplined tension that once defined this world gives way to scale for its own sake, and the emotional stakes thin out precisely when they should sharpen. What remains is a visually stunning, well-mannered nostalgia exercise, content to borrow its predecessor's gravity rather than build any of its own.

Malcolm D. Lee's psychological thriller wants to be an unnerving study of inherited trauma and predatory wealth, but the film coasts on the strength of its premise rather than the discipline of its craft, and the atmosphere it builds never quite tightens into tension. Laila's descent into the Jelani household carries real narrative potential, a woman drawn back toward a past she cannot name, yet the film telegraphs its central deception, Audra's entanglement with Marcus, so far ahead of its reveal that the third act arrives already spent, an unraveling with nowhere left to go. Alan B. McElroy's script leans on the well-worn architecture of wealthy Black dysfunction, a genre Tyler Perry helped calcify into shorthand, stranding Imani and Zuri in reactions dictated by plot convenience rather than earned by character, while a score that insists on lightness during moments meant to unsettle undercuts whatever dread the film manages to build. "Strung" is, in the end, a pleasantly appointed but hollow thriller, its ambitions toward Get Out-style social horror curdling into something closer to melodrama with better lighting.

Curry Barker's film trusts its craft more than its convictions, marshaling suspenseful sound design, disciplined cinematography, and a grounded, patiently observed first half, anchored by a ferocious dual performance from Inde Navarrette, whose Nikki conveys an entire fracturing psyche through the smallest shift in expression, while Michael Johnston turns in competent, unglamorous work as the spineless Baron even when the script gives him little beyond timidity to play. The story's deeper strain shows in how long Baron is allowed to explain away Nikki's escalating possessiveness and self-harm before anyone, including the film itself, treats it as the crisis it plainly is, a lapse in plausibility that exposes Barker's reach toward incel culture and parasocial delusion as an idea he raises far more often than he examines. The result is a film built with real technical patience, flashes of genuinely sharp dialogue, a commendable use of imagery, and only occasional narrative subtlety, more assured at generating dread than at following its ideas, its characters, or its own better instincts through to the end.