Movie Reviews

Cosmic Circus has been covering movies and TV/streaming series for over five years now. Please take some time to read through some of our movie reviews below to find out what the writers think of past and new films.

Refer to the Stellar Picks archive to find some of our top-rated movies, shows, books, games, and more!


 

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‘Fjord’ is a Necessary Exercise of Introspection | TIFF 2026 Film Review

The metaphor is heard loud and clear in Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord, this year’s Palme d’Or-winning picture, as the evangelical, conservative Gheorghiu family moves into a highly progressive (and liberal) neighborhood in Norway. If you didn’t click it because you didn’t meet Mungiu’s latest at its terms, it’s an apt parallel for the return of conservatism, which has become more prominent around

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‘Hope’ is Cinema at Its Purest | TIFF 2026 Film Review

There isn’t a better way to open the 51st edition of the Toronto International Film Festival than with a special screening of Na Hong-jin’s Hope. This is the South Korean genre artist’s first feature in ten years, following the masterful The Wailing in 2016. It’s been a while, which made the prospect of a Cannes premiere all the more special for

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‘Mayday’ Review: Daley & Goldstein’s Fresh Take on the Action-Comedy

In Apple TV’s Mayday, writer-directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein take us back to 1980’s Russia in the midst of the Cold War, a markedly harsher and more grounded backdrop than the two have explored before. Daley and Goldstein are no strangers to the action comedy genre: both 2018’s Game Night and 2023’s Dungeons and Dragons – Honor Among Thieves

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‘By Any Means’ Review: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Shines in Uneven Drama

After an incredible feature directorial debut with The Inspection, Elegance Bratton returns with a more politically charged drama by recounting the unlikely alliance between the FBI and the mob in By Any Means. While this partnership has never been officially confirmed by the bureau, historical records indicate that the agency hired notorious mob enforcer Gregory Scarpa Sr. (Mark Wahlberg) to perform

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‘Buddy’ Movie Review: A Twisted, Violent ‘Barney’ Satire

The 2026 horror film Buddy acknowledges a point about Barney the Dinosaur that we’ve all been quietly thinking about for the past thirty years: The purple behemoth is a low-key narcissist. The film by Casper Kelly cleverly unwraps the pop culture craziness of the time period when every child became fixated on a character that ended on a song about “loving”

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‘Idiots’ Review: A Maximalist and Outrageous (Dumb) Comedy

What you need to know about Macon Blair’s Idiots is simple: this movie is very dumb. The film follows two idiots, Mark (Dave Franco) and Davis (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), as they are tasked with a very simple assignment: transport a troubled teenager to a rehabilitation facility. The two individuals recently lost their respective jobs and have now found a gig that

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‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Review: Proves It Deserves To Be Seen

Virtually everyone knows of the tumultuous hurdles Coyote vs. Acme has jumped across to get to this point. A timeline of being a straight-to-HBO Max release, to a tax write-off to save money by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, to possibly being saved through purchase by another studio thanks to online outcry, to being in limbo again. Then the film

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‘Mutiny’ Review: A No-Frills Jason Statham Actioner

A scholar of the Cannon Group, French genre auteur Jean-François Richet is no stranger to big, goofy actioners. His last movie, Plane, was mocked for its title but lauded as an effective and downright nasty vehicle that would’ve made a killing if it had been released in the 1980s and starred Chuck Norris instead of Gerard Butler. Richet has now reached

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‘Colony’ Review: Zombie Thrills Searching for Emotional Center

Colony sees the Train to Busan filmmaker Yeon Sang-Ho return to the zombie genre after the subpar follow-up Peninsula. With his new film, he pivots back to his familiar strengths, taking a group of survivors in a single-location setting and throwing as many flesh-eating zombies at them as humanly possible. But Colony adds new concepts to the zombie mayhem. Colony has

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