Mercy review

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The Testament of Ann Lee review

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE: 

AMANDA SEYFRIED SHINES IN AMBITIOUS BUT OFTEN MEANDERING EPIC MUSICAL-DRAMA! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: *** out of 4

SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee

 

            Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, Les Miserables (2012), The Housemaid) brings the real-life Shakers founder to the screen in The Testament of Ann Lee, the new film written and directed by Mona Fastvold (The Sleepwalker, The World to Come) and co-written and produced by Brady Corbet (The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux, The Brutalist). Aside from seeing the trailer a few times, I came into this somewhat cold, my knowledge of Ann Lee and the Shakers is very thin so I’m not sure how accurate this portrayal or film is. 

            The movie looked interesting from what I saw from the trailer and poster, I had never seen any of Fastvold’s previous projects not counting her producing collabs with Corbet and Seyfried clearly had the best 2025 as she was not only in this but also The Housemaid which came out recently. Well, I can proudly say that Amanda Seyfried is easily the best part of Testament of Ann Lee because the film itself is pretty standard and at times tedious. 

            Yeah, I didn’t really fall in love with this film like a lot of other people did, but I wouldn’t say it’s a bad movie either. There are some very impressive things about it in terms of the cinematography and production design and various story elements that can be quite fascinating, but this film drags a lot and can easily be trimmed down in the runtime department. 

            The film is set in 18^th century England and chronicles the life of Ann Lee (Seyfried), the founding leader of the Shakers religious sect. Ann was a woman who preached gender and social equality and was revered by her followers during her quest to build a utopia with all the ecstasy and agony that came with it. 

            The film also stars Lewis Pullman (Bad Times at the El Royale, Top Gun: Maverick, Marvel Cinematic Universe) as Ann’s brother William Lee, Thomasin McKenzie (Leave No Trace, Jojo Rabbit, Last Night in Soho) as Ann’s closest friend Mary Patington who also narrates the film, Stacy Martin (Nymphomaniac, All the Money in the World, The Night House) as Jane Wardley, Christopher Abbott (Martha Marcy May Marlene, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Wolf Man (2025)) as Ann’s husband Abraham Standerin, Tim Blake Nelson (Minority Report, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Lincoln) as Pastor Reuben Wright, Matthew Beard (An Education, One Day, The Imitation Game) as James Whittaker, Viola Prettejohn (The Nevers, The Crown, Amadeus (2025)) as Ann’s niece Nancy Lee, and David Kale (Radio Days, Pollock, Two Lovers) as John Hocknell. 

            Overall, The Testament of Ann Lee is an impressive feat and definitely seems like a story that should be told on film, but I just found this film simply decent at best outside of Seyfried’s performance who as far as I’m aware keeps this movie at a 3 star rating for me. She is great as Ann Lee and brings a lot of emotional weight to the film through her performance to the point where I often forgot I was watching Amanda Seyfried, she practically disappeared into the role. 

            The movie also looks great from a production design and cinematography standpoint, tons of interior scenes in large 18^th century England buildings, exterior shots of English architecture, and large-scale sequences at sea. It’s nowhere near as epic as something like Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, but the production designers deserve a lot of credit for making this film as big as they possibly could. 

            The songs are well-performed and orchestrated and the musical numbers while not bombastic and overblown like other musicals are very hypnotic by how they’re filmed and choreographed. It’s almost like musical sequences if they were done in a church and surprisingly that’s not as ludicrous as it sounds. 

            The plot itself is solid and explores some interesting ideas about religion and fighting for civil rights that could make for a captivating, maybe even Oscar-worthy movie, but there’s one fatal issue with this movie for me, the pacing. The movie is 2 hours and 10 minutes which in all seriousness is not a super long runtime, but the film is slow with scenes that go on for too long, take too long to get to the point, and also scenes that have this very drab look to them that aren’t all that visually interesting to look at for a 2+ hour movie. 

            I don’t know if it was a result of me coming in somewhat blindly or knowing practically nothing about Ann Lee, but the movie did start to lose me at certain points before finally coming back and regaining some momentum. I feel like this movie is going to hit differently with various moviegoers and maybe if I rewatch it, I’ll start noticing things I didn’t fully appreciate the first time and understand it better. 

            The Testament of Ann Lee isn’t a bad movie by any means, there’s quite a bit to appreciate about its production, intention, and the acting particularly from Seyfried. For me, it’s a decent but very overhyped awards season movie that didn’t leave nearly as big an impact on me as films like Hamnet or Marty Supreme last year, watch it if you’re curious and know what you’re getting into. 

Return to Silent Hill review

RETURN TO SILENT HILL: 

THIRD TIME IS NOT THE CHARM FOR THIS VIDEO GAME-BASED HORROR FRANCHISE! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: * ½ out of 4

CINEVERSE

Silent Hill calls Jeremy Irvine back in Return to Silent Hill

 

            The popular horror video game franchise returns to the big screen for the third time in Return to Silent Hill, the latest film based on Konami’s Silent Hill video game series following its first cinematic outing in 2006 and the 2012 sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation. I should make this clear before I get started, my experience with the Silent Hill games is paper thin with most of my knowledge coming from watching other people play it and hearing it being discussed on video game YouTube channels. 

            I got the basic gist of what they were all about and how they’re played, but it didn’t grab me as much as other games when I was growing up. Still, I checked out the 2006 Silent Hill movie sometime later despite my indifference to the franchise and thought it was fine for what it was. It’s a very mid video game movie, but I can see the admiration for the source material and the cast and crew trying to be as faithful as they could, it is one of the better video game film adaptations from that era. 

            The 2012 sequel, Silent Hill: Revelation is crap and aside from a few unintentionally hilarious moments, I’m struggling to remember it despite watching it the night before seeing this. It was also made and released when almost every big movie was in 3D and I only remember like a couple of sequences where the 3D filmmaking was actually noticeable.

            Now, we have this third film released nearly 14 years after Revelation and loosely based on the Silent Hill 2 game’s plot with the director of the first Silent Hill movie, Christophe Gans (Crying Freeman, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Beauty and the Beast (2014)) returning to direct this outing. I didn’t have any expectations going into this, but we’re kind of in this golden age for video game film adaptations thanks to the three Sonic the Hedgehog movies, the recent Mario movie and its upcoming sequel, and even movies I personally wasn’t a fan of like the Minecraft Movie and the Five Nights at Freddy’s films did find huge success at the box-office so, maybe there’s hope for the new Silent NOPE! 

            Return to Silent Hill is bad and only a slight improvement over the last film, this one at least felt more like a Silent Hill movie than Revelation. Unfortunately, it’s bogged down by baffling storytelling, stilted acting, and scares that will likely leave audiences unintentionally laughing instead of squirming in their seats. 

            The film follows artist James Sunderland (Jeremy Irvine-War Horse, The Railway Man, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again), a broken man suffering from depression and alcoholism who receives a mysterious letter calling him back to Silent Hill in search of his lost love, Mary Crane (Hannah Emily Anderson-Jigsaw, X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Purge(TV series)). However, this once-recognizable town has since become a living nightmare as James encounters terrifying figures and a dark truth as he begins to question his own sanity. 

            The film also stars Evie Templeton (Lord of Misrule, Wednesday) reprising her role from the 2024 Silent Hill 2remake video game as Laura and Nicola Alexis (The Bill, Lucky You, EastEnders) as M (No relation to the James Bondcharacter). 

            Overall, Return to Silent Hill despite it being slightly better than Revelation is a painful reminder as to why video game-based cinema still has a negative stigma even after a fair amount of solid adaptations in recent years. It’s not Uwe Boll rock bottom bad and it does try to recapture the look and feel of the source material, but what a disastrous film outside of the production design. 

            The plot is simply absurd, was anyone asking for a Silent Hill movie about a man coming to terms with the death of his girlfriend and his struggles with alcoholism? I barely played the games so, I wouldn’t know if this is an integral part of Silent Hill 2’s storyline, but coming off of the other movies, it seems like such a jarring focus that doesn’t mesh well with the Silent Hill franchise (Ironically, getting yourself piss-ass drunk would be the best way to get through this heinous film!). 

            I’m not saying the first Silent Hill movie’s plot was anything great, but at least it felt like something out of the games, a mother takes her daughter to Silent Hill only for the daughter to mysteriously disappear after a car crash and now the mother has to traverse the nightmare town in order to get her back. I was able to follow that and be invested enough so, what the hell happened here!?! 

            Maybe it is possible to make a decent Silent Hill movie about letting go of your loved one’s death and fighting alcoholism, but I need to be invested in the characters and their dilemma and sadly that is not the case here. I did not give a fuck about James in this movie and I’m sure Jeremy Irvine has acted well in other projects, but his performance in this ranges from wooden to hammy to the point of hilarity even though I’m supposed to be emotionally torn by what’s happening in his life. 

             One huge misstep about the plot structure is that most of Jeremy Irvine’s James and Hannah Emily Anderson’s Mary’s relationship is shown through flashbacks as he’s trying to find her in Silent Hill. Show us what their romance was like before all this shit hit the fan so we can actually be captivated by something in this film, despite the first film being severely flawed, at least I gave a shit about Rose and Sharon. 

            I’ll say a couple nice things about the movie, the production design looks good and does capture the look of a Silent Hill game with all the fog, ash, and overall gloomy atmosphere and it’s neat to see the creatures fans from the games recognize brought to life on the big screen…okay, that’s it! The attempts at scares are so bad, they’re borderline comical with dreadful CGI that makes the 1999 Mummy effects look like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, what’s scary about being attacked by an obviously computer-generated spider demon or a young girl scaring holding a crying demonic baby like she’s its mother? I guess in that way I could see people enjoying moments like that in a So Bad It’s Good way, but for one of the most influential horror video game franchises of all time, it deserved much better. 

            Return to Silent Hill is a shitty video game movie, shitty January horror movie, and already a potential Worst Film of 2026 contender that’s marginally better than the last movie, but that’s like saying stepping on a turd on a sidewalk is better than submerging your foot in a puddle of diarrhea. My advice is to leave this town as fast as you can and never, ever return to it. 

All You Need is Kill review

ALL YOU NEED IS KILL: 

ANIME FILM ADAPTATION OF HIROSHI SAKURAZAKA’S SCI-FI NOVEL IS A VISUAL GASM! 

By Nico Beland

Movie Review: **** out of 4

GKIDS AND WARNER BROS. PICTURES

Rita in All You Need is Kill

 

            Two people begin to experience the same day over and over in their battle against an extraterrestrial threat in All You Need is Kill, an anime film adaptation of Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s science fiction novel of the same name. This isn’t the first time the book was adapted to film as it was used as the basis for the 2014 sci-fi action film, Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt and directed by Doug Liman which I’ll go on record and say was one of the best films released that year. 

            I was interested in seeing this when I heard it was being released, I absolutely loved Edge of Tomorrow though I’m certain it wasn’t a fully faithful adaptation of the source material (I had never read the original book to confirm that FYI). I’m mostly going into this based on my knowledge of what happened in the previous adaptation and its trailer and…yeah, I still prefer Edge of Tomorrow, but this is still a damn good flick especially for anime enthusiasts. 

            The film follows Rita (voiced by Stephanie Sheh-Naruto, Sailor Moon, Sonic x Shadow Generations), a resourceful but lonely young woman who doesn’t fit in with her peers being tasked with cleaning a giant, mysterious flower called Darol that appeared in Japan. But when the flower starts unleashing a barrage of alien creatures to attack, Rita is killed only to wake up and repeat the same day again and again until she meets Keiji (voiced by Jadon Muniz), a shy young man who is also going through the same experience as Rita as the two work together to stop this alien invasion and save the planet, one death at a time. 

            Overall, All You Need is Kill is an absolutely gorgeous anime film that is worth seeing on the big screen and while it does hit a lot of the same beats as its Tom Cruise counterpart, it’s different enough even if you’ve never seen Edge of Tomorrow. I initially thought it was just going to be Edge of Tomorrow’s storyline done in anime style, but that’s not exactly the case with this. 

Both have the same premise (Groundhog Day with an alien invasion) and the two protagonists fight in mechanized suits, but the execution of the All You Need is Kill movie and Edge of Tomorrow are radically different from each other. Edge of Tomorrow did not have a giant space flower that sprouted the aliens, it didn’t have any talking robots and drones reminiscent of things you’d see in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, and this film dives more into the protagonists’ pasts often with very trippy results when you see it onscreen. 

This definitely does seem more in-line with the original book (I wouldn’t know because I haven’t read it) than Edge of Tomorrow and both adaptations utilize the source material well for their specific versions. However, I’ll argue that Edge of Tomorrow is the more accessible option that is easier to digest for a casual viewer and is better paced in my opinion with more focus on the action and the chemistry between its two leads in the form of Cruise and Blunt whereas this one is more surreal and cerebral. 

That’s not to say this is a bad film or inferior to Edge of Tomorrow or anything like that, but there were times during my viewing of this where I didn’t fully understand what was going on during a scene and certain details didn’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s a different interpretation of the same ideas Edge of Tomorrow explored and still done spectacularly well for the most part. 

Rita and Keiji are very endearing protagonists for this version and both have very likable chemistry with both of them essentially being social outcasts who don’t fit in with their peers. You love seeing them work together to try and stop this attack, bicker, laugh, and feel legit emotion when something tragic happens to one of them or there’s a revelation about either one. 

The animation is gorgeous with a ton of visual razzle dazzle, most notably during the action scenes which are easily where the animation shines the brightest. It’s so kinetic, flashy, and in your face that at times it puts Dragon Balland Demon Slayer’s action sequences to shame with how energized, intense, and darkly comical things get. 

I’m sure anime fans and devotees of the original novel will surely appreciate seeing this version of All You Need is Kill and if you can see it in theaters, do so whether it’s English dubbed or the original Japanese language. It’s a wild trip that begs to be seen on the big screen and while I don’t think it quite holds a candle to its Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt predecessor, I still very much enjoyed my time with this film. 

Fan Expo Portland 2026 Recap