Three high profile, star-studded dramas premiered in Toronto this week and they all produced the same response from this critic: “Great performances, but…” It’s a trio of films with actors giving their all to films that just aren’t willing to give enough to their audiences. They’re also all bleak, disturbing movies about extreme, awful violence. It’s a dark time in 2026, and this trio of disappointments reflects that state of things that everyone can feel in the air.
The best of the three is Courteney Cox’s “Evil Genius,” a tight telling of the stranger-than-fiction story of Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong and Bill Rothstein. If this all sounds familiar, this crazy tale was chronicled in a docuseries of the same name on Netflix in 2018. Whereas that series took four hours to unpack all of the details of one of the oddest bank robberies in history, Cox and writer Courtenay Miles are forced to rush through this complex tale with around a dozen memorable characters. The result is a film that often feels like it’s punching down on a group of oddballs that it never takes the time to really consider as human beings. The people behind the “pizza bomber” case used Brian Wells as part of their plan, never really thinking about his wellbeing, and the film about this incident has an oddly similar disconnect, despite the work by two of its stars to add depth to the rushed screenplay. It’s possible that this is a tale that just can’t be told well in a feature, but this sort of cynical approach certainly wasn’t the best way to try.
“Evil Genius” opens with Rothstein (David Harbour) considering taking his own life before going to the cops with a shocking revelation: There’s a body in a freezer, and it was put there by Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong (Patricia Arquette). At first, Rothstein claims that the body has nothing to do with the currently-under-investigation “pizza bomber” case, but that’s a weak argument. Obviously, it does.
From there, Miles’ script bounces back and forth between one of the most unforgettable bank robberies in history and the bloody aftermath. For a very brief window, “Evil Genius” allows for a little back story as we meet a young Marjorie and Bill, back when life was better. Harbour plays Bill like someone who had a healthy dose of unrequited love for Marjorie from a young age, and Arquette balances that by sketching a character who knows that she can get this burly man to do whatever she wants. Arquette’s work here is unimpeachable, disappearing into an abrasive whirlwind of a character, someone who manipulates everyone around her with alternating promises of glory and compassion-seeking sob stories. She’s so good (and Harbour is excellent as well) that she almost saves the entire movie.
She can’t quite get around the flaws that emerge from this film’s breakneck pacing. It spins through the details of the heist, starting with how Marjorie was convinced that PNC Bank in Erie, PA had essentially stolen her inheritance. She devised a plan with Rothstein and a menagerie of quasi-criminals played by Garret Dillahunt, Michael Chernus, Danielle Macdonald, and Owen Teague that ended up with them kidnapping a pizza delivery driver (played by director Tom McCarthy in a fun casting choice), strapping a bomb to his neck, and sending him into the bank to get the cash. The root of the idea is a little “genius”: robbing a bank that you never enter. Everything after that was pretty dumb.
“Evil Genius” moves so swiftly through the beats that there’s never really enough pause to justify telling this story again, especially if one has seen the Netflix series. Yes, Arquette and Harbour make smart acting choices here and there, but even they get swept up in a film that never really seems interested in understanding these people as much as laughing at them. A movie based on a true story needs more than “Can you believe this shit happened” as its guiding artistic principle.
Of course, the story at the center of Susanna White’s “Prima Facie” is disturbingly believable, but the problem here is in the way it’s told. Adapting her award-winning one-woman show of the same name, screenwriter Suzie Miller has expanded the themes of that to a multi-character piece and lost so much of the impact of the original. A story of a woman who discovers that the “law’s not fit for purpose,” this film is one of those that values message over character. The message is urgent in a society that still doesn’t believe women as often as it should, but it’s conveyed with such blunt didacticism that it drains it of its power. Stuck in this truly disappointing film is Cynthia Erivo, a great actress forced to play a theme instead of a person for way too much of this drama.
The “Wicked” star plays Tessa Ensler, a rising star in the barrister class of legal wunderkinds in England. She has made her mark threading the needle of cross-examinations, more excited about winning a case than pausing to question if her tactics actually served justice. The idea that someone could get this far in the legal profession and not have the moral conversation with themselves about if they’re actually doing what’s right is ludicrous, but it’s required suspension of disbelief for what happens next.
Tessa begins a romance with a colleague named Julian Brooks (Daniel Ings). One night, after a successful date, Tessa feels ill and falls asleep on the bathroom floor. Julian picks her up, takes her to bed, and, despite her strong protestations, he has sex with her. He writes it off as a drunken night when it was very clearly rape, the kind of horrible behavior that Julian has probably done before. He’s the kind of guy who takes what he wants with a smile, and, to his credit, Ings plays him well, avoiding the caricature for the kind of monster that feels all-too-real.
Tessa decides to report Julian, which, eventually, leads to her being on the opposite side of the cross-examination game she played so well. Erivo is very good here, but the whole project hammers its messages in a way that makes it seem like they don’t trust their viewers. It’s a film that opens with the message that cases have been tried on this spot at the Old Bailey since Medieval times, which means that they work on a legal foundation shaped by men for centuries. The very core of the legal process undeniably favors powerful men, but “Prima Facie” is too thin to have anything to say about how to fix that or what to do about it. And draining it of what made it so powerful originally—one character being vulnerable and brave on the immediacy of the stage—leaves “Prima Facie” as little more than factual testimony. Its messages are righteous, but they’re not conveyed cinematically enough to be a star witness.
There’s a similar disconnect between message and storytelling in Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” an exercise in how much an audience is willing to take. This is one of the most brutally violent films in a very long time, a bleak character study that features murdered children, battered women, and capital execution. Nelson’s refusal to soften the horrors of this reportedly true story is admirable, but there’s a saying that a film has to earn its brutality—there needs to be a reason to spend two hours feeling kicked around by a story, whether it’s powerful themes, character work, or even just rich storytelling. “Shedd” has two great performances from a pair of the best actors working today, but they’re lost in everything the movie does wrong.
Scoot McNairy, so good in “Furious” this summer, plays the title character, a criminal introduced through a writing class being taught by a woman named Karen (Amanda Seyfried). Wilson is a “Phase 4” convict in an Oklahoma prison who is drawn to this beautiful teacher who speaks of Dickinson and Hemingway. McNairy finds a really smart balance of menace and intellect. He’s clearly one of the smartest men in the room, but there’s a simmering violence under the surface that he can barely hide. He begins to send Karen letters through his writing assignments, and she sees a way out from a life with her abusive husband. She’s going to help Wilson break out and they’ll run off together.
Nelson structures his film in a manner that shows the folly of this endeavor, jumping around three timelines. There’s the Karen/Wilson burgeoning relationship that serves as the foundation, but the film also cuts regularly to what’s clearly the next two formative chapters in Wilson’s life: His escape and his death. In the former, Wilson and two other convicts kill their way through the South, taking out a cabin owner who stumbles on them before running into a nice family that includes a doomed dad played by the totally wasted William Jackson Harper. In the latter, Wilson prepares for his end by lethal injection, allowing Nelson commentary on how a state killing a man is just about one of the worst things that anyone could ever see in person.
McNairy is powerful and Seyfried is subtle, but “Wilson Shedd” stumbles almost everywhere else. The structure is infuriating, attempting a sort of novelistic style (Seyfried’s character even teaches a class about “story structure,” believe it or not) that doesn’t serve the material. And, again, it’s a film of truly intense violence. From Karen’s bloody face to Wilson’s ultimate end, it feels like Nelson is challenging viewers to truly look at the impact of domestic violence and capital punishment without asking what we’re supposed to take away from the vision. Yes, these awful things happen every day in the world, but a film needs to place human horrors in cinematic context for them to matter beyond sheer provocation.