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Mothers’ Instinct (now streaming on Hulu) pairs Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain for a bit of noirish melodrama that’s a remake of 2018 French-language film Duelles, itself an adaptation of a novel by Barbara Abel. The thought of two multi-Oscar-nominated actresses, surely among the best of their generation, going toe-to-toe as mid-century nextdoor-neighbor stay-at-home moms working their way through a rather tense frenemies period? Sounds delicious, if it’s done right, which, well, let’s get into that, shall we?

The Gist: It’s 1960. Suburbia. Immaculate lawns. Waxed behemoth automobiles. Commuting fathers and stay-at-home mothers. Coifs and heels and strings of pearls. Alice (Chastain) walks into the house, opens a drawer and pulls out an approx. 47-inch gleaming kitchen knife – to cut a birthday cake! Oh boy. Should we prepare ourselves for some eyebrow-raising melodramatic juiciness? Um, no. This little bait-and-switch with the Sears and Roebuck samurai sword hints at the pulp that’ll take more than an hour to rise to the surface. In the meantime, we get some PTA-mom drama and trauma, not necessarily in that order. The setup is thus: Alice and Simon (Anders Danielsen Lie) have an eight-year-old son, Theo (Eamon O’Connell). Right next door live Celine (Hathaway) and Damian (Josh Charles), who have their own eight-year-old son, Max (Baylon D. Bielitz). The boys are tight pals and the adults put them to bed and mix cocktails and dance and then go to their respective homes for, one assumes a little missionary-position action. It’s the perfect life.

OR IS IT. Alice is haunted by the death of her parents when she was young, and her desire to go back to work at a newspaper, which her hubs opposes. Celine has one child, and that’ll forever be all – he’s her miracle, considering her struggle to conceive and carry. Now consider how she feels when young Max tumbles to his death from their balcony. Celine was vacuuming at the time. Alice spotted the boy on the ledge but by the time she dashed over it was too late. Both are overwhelmed with guilt for their roles in an accident that frankly deserves no blame but to the world itself for being so cruelly ironic. There’s quite the incident at the funeral over a stuffed bunny that belongs to Theo but turns up in Max’s coffin – what’s up with that. Not long after, Alice peers out the window and sees a disoriented Celine being led to a car, not to return for a month. 

Considering the era, it’s no conclusionary leap to say Celine wasn’t pampered at a spa, or sent to psychologically heal with her toes in the sand on a tropical beach. The Bunny Incident was just a hint at the awkward never-the-same-againness to come: Alice tries to share her own story of being committed to a mental hospital, but Celine’s response isn’t akin to the sisterly empathy they once shared. Even more awkwardly, Celine and little Theo seem to be bonding in their grief. Nobody’s the same after stuff like this, understandably. But how much are they not the same? Well, Celine is at the center of a series of capital-I Incidents that stir sympathy for her, but also Alice’s paranoia. Does grief inspire or awaken malevolence? Or madness? I don’t have an answer for that, but this movie sure does.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Mothers’ Instinct finds a dull median lane cruising between Master of Melodrama Todd Haynes (think Far From Heaven or Carol or May December) and Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock (think Suspicion or, especially, suburban thriller Shadow of a Doubt). It’s also from a recent Dark Hathaway trend that includes odd films that don’t work at all – Serenity, The Last Thing He Wanted – or work quite well – Eileen, another fringe-noir mid-century drama. 

Performance Worth Watching: Suffice to say that this version of Dark Hathaway lacks the oomph of her vampy turn in Eileen. Chastain is the de facto lead here anyway, and she manages to squeeze more credibility out of this klutzy screenplay than her co-star.

Memorable Dialogue: Is Alice gaslighting herself when she suspects Celine is effing with her? “She manipulates people – that’s what she does!” Alice exclaims. “And you don’t even see it.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There are moments when you’re watching a movie and just say NAH to a plot. Some movies can survive one, maybe two NAHs before it launches off the ramp and clears the shark. But Mothers’ Instinct piles up so many NAHs down the home stretch, it’s a wildly impressive display of self-torpedoing. To say the third act is an utter hogslop mess is to grossly underplay the messiness of hog slop. Your eyes will roll and roll and roll like they were once on top of spaghetti. 

Needless to say, Hathaway and Chastain do not deserve this screenplay. They’ve proved they can do anything, and this movie needs a deft hand to guide it toward the sweet spot between self-aware salacious thrillerdom and probing domestic drama. It considers itself straight-up serious, and convinces us of it for a while, as we contemplate the themes it quietly cultivates: Is there a right or wrong way to grieve? Can propriety be applied in the wake of tragedy? What sexist double standards emerge during such situations? I have a better question to pose, though – is the movie at all truly interested in this stuff? Once it sinks into a mire of convoluted silliness that should be OTT-campy melodrama but is too timid to lean into its own preposterousness, it screams its answer in our face: NAH. 

Our Call: Considering the highly capable talent involved, Mothers’ Instinct is a major disappointment. SKIP IT.

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

Whale oil was a major commodity in the mid-nineteenth century, with demand inspiring sailors to risk life and limb on whaling ships. One particular real-life whaling-ship disaster inspired Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby-Dick as well as, many years later, the non-fiction chronicle In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which in turn inspired a 2015 Ron Howard movie that has docked on Netflix. But is a not-quite-Moby-Dick story worth two hours you could be spending with either book?

The Gist: Even in 2025, with plenty of scientific research at our disposal, whales are mysterious and, in their majestic size, terrifying creatures; just imagine how monstrous they must have seemed two centuries ago. Though In the Heart of the Sea is framed in 1850, with Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) visiting the last survivor (Brendan Gleeson) of a whaling-ship disaster, the bulk of the story takes place on the ocean in 1820, detailing the ordeal when a quest for valuable whale oil gets terribly awry. The story’s lead is not the captain, but strapping and more decisive first mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), who must make even more difficult decision when, 14 months into a lengthy mission that has take his crew far from their Nantucket homes, a whale attack destroys their ship. The sailors continue to fight for survival, starving in tiny sailboats in an ocean that feels more like a lifeless desert. To make matters worse, it seems like that scarred-up whale may be following them.

What Will It Remind You Of?: Besides various incarnations of Moby-Dick, there are hints of the more genteel Cast Away and the similarly harrowing The Perfect Storm or (gulp) Alive. Not a romp, in other words, though it still works as entertainment.

Performance Worth Watching: This is one of those casts that became starrier in retrospect; the ensemble includes future Best Actor Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy and kid who would be Spider-Man Tom Holland. But it’s really a vehicle for Hemsworth, making his second Howard movie in a row after racecar drama Rush. It’s a muscular, borderline cornball performance, and many may prefer Hemsworth when he’s allowed to be a bit funnier, weirder, or more self-deprecating. But it’s undeniably interesting to see Howard treat him as a more old-fashioned sort of movie star.

Sex and Skin: Nope. If there was any funny business going on in the inhospitable environment of a whaling ship, this movie ignores it.

Memorable Dialogue: “So it’s true?” Melville asks his storyteller at one point. “Yes,” he responds. “Too much is true.”

Our Take: Though he started off making comedies and dramedies, Ron Howard has developed a reputation, not undeserved, as a journeyman purveyor of relatively square, straight-ahead studio fare. On paper, that’s just what In the Heart of the Sea is; it contains no truly surprising characters and has no great insight into human behavior. But it’s also a reminder that Howard can really cook as a stylist when he chooses to; this movie in particular could almost be mistaken for a Danny Boyle picture, with frequent Boyle collaborators like Cillian Murphy and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle on hand. Mantle (who also served as DP on the previous Howard/Hemsworth film Rush) is really the key element here. To recreate 1820s Nantucket and ocean life, Howard relies on a lot of computer effects to extend his sets and backgrounds, like a digital version of old-fashioned matte paintings, making the movie’s reality look both immersive and heightened. Of course, the whales, too, require the use of extensive visual effects. Mantle, with his heavy use of blues and greens, willingness to throw in distorted close-ups and unusual angles, and generally impressionistic style, bridges the gap between an old-fashioned epic Howard might have made a decade earlier, and a newer-fangled digital creation that someone like Boyle might have cooked up. The final film isn’t as arresting or thought-provoking as, say, 28 Days Later, nor as rousing as the best Howard films; here Howard sometimes seems hesitant to defy convention, resulting in a harrowing survival drama that sometimes appears to truncate both its emotional moments and its visual invention in turn, trailing off in its final 15-20 minutes. But it nonteheless makes for a memorable hybrid.

Our Call: In the Heart of the Sea is more of a curiosity than a lost classic, but on those terms, it’s worth a two-hour couch voyage to STREAM IT.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream In the Heart of the Sea on Netflix

Netflix’s new reality series Selling The City arrives courtesy of the same production company that brought us Selling The OC and Selling Sunset, but this version features more sky-high penthouses and sky-high stilettos navigating Soho’s cobblestone streets. The new show follows a group of brokers at Douglas Elliman, one of the city’s most recognizable names in real estate, who have been assembled and are led by a woman named Eleonora, one of the agency’s top individual sellers. Her team is exclusively comprised of women and, though there are male agents floating around, the majority of this show’s drama is rooted in the friendships and rivalries that ebb and flow between them all.

Opening Shot: Glossy beauty shots of New York City give way to an interview with Eleonora Srugo, a blonde broker with Douglas Elliman Real Estate. She declares, “New York City is home to some of the wealthiest people in the world,” adding that she’s one of the top brokers at Elliman and closed a $75 million property last year. This year, she’s going for a new personal best.

The Gist: Eleonora has been a successful individual broker at Douglas Elliman in New York, but with lofty goals to increase her sales, she has assembled a team of brokers who work under her. They include Abi, the youngest and newest, who can be a loose cannon; Jordyn, a cool broker to creative rich types like Trevor Noah, whom she also dated; and Taylor, a southern belle who is successful and clearly one of the more mature brokers of the bunch. There’s also Gisselle, a glamorous single mom from New Jersey, and Justin, who’s not on Eleonora’s team but provides the male energy by sitting with all the women in their open plan office. (He and Eleonora also dated once, and she credits the fact that they had sex with her obsession to lose weight and change her entire image. Her glow-up is something of a running theme throughout the show.) And then there’s Jade, another individual broker not on Eleonora’s team, but who is a close friend to Eleonora and offers her opinion on everyone as if she’s a tour guide to the personalities of the office. (In the same way that Selling the OC has like half a dozen agents named Alex, Selling the City makes my brain hurt with all the people whose first names start with J. Jordyn, Justin, Jade, Gisselle – phonetically speaking, in that case. Lord, help me keep them all straight.)

The formula here is comparable to its sister series: this attractive, competitive group of agents sit around an open office while their boss, who has high expectations of them all, oversees their work and defuses their interpersonal drama. Oh, and of course there are the luxury Manhattan apartment listings throughout that are fascinating to look at but incidental to the plot, in most cases.

Eleonora is not the owner of Douglas Elliman, so she’s more of an Alex Hall or Chrishell Stause than a Brett-or-Jason Oppenheim. She is technically the boss to most of these people, but she’s also peers and friends with people like Jade and Justin, a ploy that allows her to also get caught up in some of the drama rather than remain on the periphery of drama at all times. Case in point: when Jade invites her to a lunch also attended by Taylor, Justin, and fellow agent Steve Gold, who works for the rival Corcoran Group, things become uncomfortable when Jade starts talking about commissions and Eleonora brusquely tells Jade she doesn’t care about high commissions, she cares about matching her buyers with the right home. Jade’s behavior irritates Eleonora, who thinks she’s unprofessional, and when Eleonora leaves the lunch to avoid an argument, Jade goes off on her. From episode one, it’s clear that the friction between these two longtime friends is going to simmer for the whole season.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Selling The City arrives to Netflix courtesy of the same production company that gave is Selling Sunset and Selling The OC. While there are no Oppenheims on this show (that we know of), there is a gaggle of primped agents all hustling and competing within the same agency to make big sales and curry favor with the boss. Of course, other antecedents include Million Dollar Listing: New York and Netflix’s Owning Manhattan.

Our Take: Early on, Eleonora seems occasionally clumsy in front of the camera, averting her eyes like she forgot that she’s supposed to ignore the lens in her face. Some of her dialogue feels like forced exposition that she hasn’t gotten comfortable delivering. But it also feels as though she has drastically changed her image almost on a quest to perfectly fit the mold of one of these reality realtors we’re familiar with from other shows. The show is filled with “before” photos of her, as if to say, “Just ten years ago, this woman was average, but look at her now!” and she’s proud of shedding that normie chrysalis.

But while it does seem like Eleanora primed herself for TV, she also takes her job seriously and holds herself to certain professional standards, so she isn’t the one who is necessarily cultivating the drama, that’s left to the team she put together and friends like Jade. (By contrast, Jade is a reality TV natural, she will openly offer unsolicited opinions about anyone with ease and polished, petty delivery.) The women on her team all seem smart and good at one they do, with some of their conflicts arising from the methods they use to do their jobs, their varying levels of experience, and who they align themselves with. It’s hard to say who (besides Jade, clearly set up to be the show’s primary antagonist) will cause the most drama, because every cast member has their own “thing” that might create chaos: Jordyn works with celebs and can be a little too casual with clients, Abi is the least experienced and everyone knows it, Taylor is the most successful but that puts her at risk of being poached (maybe even by Jade). As much as the format of the show feels exactly the same as the other shows in the Selling series, the personalities and the NYC backdrop give this version a slightly harder edge.

Sex and Skin: The wardrobes are as you’d expect from the agents in the world of ultra-luxe real estate (is there one store they all shop at?), with cleavage-baring tops and the like, and there’s a slightly gratuitous scene of real estate agent Steve Gold and his burly, hairy chest getting dressed, but these agents are otherwise keeping it profesh.

Parting Shot: After an excruciatingly awkward and very tense lunch, Jade asks Eleonora is she’s mad at her. Eleonora coolly brushes off that implication but gets up to leave the lunch, which makes Jade even more frustrated with her. Jade continues to trash talk her friend to Justin and Taylor (who looks incredibly uncomfortable, being that Eleonora is her boss), and says, “Don’t come at me. Like, I will f—king have this bitch’s head on a plate.”

Performance Worth Watching: Jade, the woman who is quick to label everyone and has a “if you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me” vibe, is clearly the show’s biggest pot-stirrer.

Memorable Dialogue: “I was raised by a single mother. Her co-parent was the city of New York,” Eleonora says, and damn if that’s not my favorite new variation on “New York is the fifth character.”

Our Call: Selling The City offers some new, refreshing office dynamics and drama, set against the backdrop of luxe Manhattan penthouses. The show’s success lies with its cast, who provide plenty of semi-manufactured drama, yet somehow they still feel authentic. STREAM IT!

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.

Once upon a time in the West, Kevin Costner had an idea for an epic story about manifest destiny with a 12-hour run time, and the first part of that was Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 (now streaming on Netflix, in addition to Max and VOD services like Amazon Prime Video). Dear reader, it flopped, leaving the next nine hours in limbo (Chapter 2’s release date was postponed, Chapter 3 started filming a few months ago, and I daren’t make a wager whether Chapter 4 even gets made). None of this is particularly surprising when the state of theatrical movies is in such flux, and when an old dog like Costner – who wrote, directed and starred in the long-in-the-works project, and ended up ponying up some of his own cash to finance it – insists on grinding out an overstuffed cast-of-dozens ultra-Western that for the most part appeals to a narrow, aging audience. Then again, none of this speaks to whether his efforts are for naught creatively; maybe when we sit down to watch it, it’ll actually be pretty good (he said, to the deafening sound of cheeping crickets, and possibly your snoring).

The Gist: I guess we’ll start with the first massacre. Yes, the first one. There are a few in this movie. It gets pretty rough, but it might be rougher if we ever felt invested in it on a level beyond hey, violence is bad! Anyway. It’s 1859, and White settlers had their eyes set on a riverside plot in the San Pedro Valley. There, they’ll build the town of Horizon. A surveyor pounds some stakes in the ground and ties some string between them and then he and his family are slaughtered by the Apache, who don’t take kindly to such territorial encroachment. A holy man whose name I didn’t catch (and it doesn’t matter because he’s only in a couple of scenes before he’s left in the narrative dust) comes across the bodies and buries them and sets up camp and four years later, there’s Horizon. It’s a batch of tents and a few houses and the Great Day Dance Hall and the White people find some happiness until what’s at least technically the second massacre of the movie occurs, which we get to see this time in all its horror, including an awful bit where a cornered family sparks a gunpowder keg and kills themselves and a handful of attacking Apache warriors. Misery.

A boy named Russell (Etienne Kellici) escapes the carnage to fetch help from a nearby military post. Lt. Trent Gephardt (Sam Worthington) and Sgt. Riordan (Michael Rooker) arrive the next morning with some men to comb through the ashes. They turn up Frances (Sienna Miller) and her daughter Diamond (Isabelle Fuhrman) – they hid in a crawlspace as their home burned and family members died – only slightly worse for the wear. They all schlep back to the military camp and settle in, and before you can get out the final syllables of “grieving widow,” we get the feeling that manifest destiny may have plans for romance between Trent and Frances, since they’re the most attractive people around these here parts. Meanwhile, Russell joins up with some jerks who set out to collect Indian scalps for bounties. We also get a glimpse or three into the Apache camp, where the elder Pionsenay (Owen Crow Shoe) doesn’t think Taklishim’s (Tatanka Means) murderous raids on White encampments are particularly wise; “their sons will hunt you,” Pionsenay says, which means, of course, violence begets more violence. 

We don’t see Costner’s face until an hour into the movie, which is shocking, but at least he’s introduced to us via a heroic low-angle idolizer of a shot. He plays Hayes Ellison, a horse trader or somethin’ (we get the feeling it’s more somethin’ than horse trading, although we don’t really find out by the end of the movie, since there’s a lot more movies coming) who clops into the Wyoming Territory and is instantly propositioned by the hottest young woman in town, Marigold (Abbey Lee). Yes, she’s a lady of the night, but still, when Costner directs himself, he’s gonna be positively pheremonal. Marigold is friends with Ellen (Jena Malone), who we met in an earlier scene (yes, this movie has been chopped up on a butcher’s block) putting a few wads of buckshot into an old creep, who somehow survived to send his greezy sons out on a revenge mission. Marigold babysits for Ellen, whose husband is a fancy book-learnin’ type who doesn’t seem particularly suited for Wild West survival. So it goes?

Two hours into the film, we meet even more new characters. A caravan of covered-wagon pioneers led by Matthew Van Weyden (Luke Wilson) kicks up dust on the Santa Fe Trail in Kansas. Among them is a posh-ass couple of Englanders, Juliette (Ella Hunt) and Hugh (Tom Payne), who don’t like to get dirty or pull their weight, and treat the others like servants. Matthew polices a couple of louts who leer at Juliette when she’s bathing, and ponders what he and Owen (Will Patton) should do about the two Indians up on the ridge eyeballing their group. Where this squad fits into the larger story is yet to be revealed. You gassed yet? I imagine some of these scattered subplots will converge into one big Secret Wars megaplot after a bit, if you’re still inclined to dig into the saddle and ride it out through the next nine hours or so. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Horizon is essentially Costner’s Once Upon a Time in the West, although I’d bet that Leone classic has more to say about westward expansion in three hours than Costner does in 12. I’d also like to shout out Costner’s previous directorial effort, 2003’s Open Range, which was essentially his Unforgiven, but it’s so good, you’ll forgive it for any of its derivative thematic elements.

Performance Worth Watching: I’m going to pluck Sienna Miller from this sprawling cast, since she pushes through some of this hefty, oppressive, workmanlike fodder to show the occasional flash of charisma. You’ll believe her emotional performance before you’ll believe she could keep her hair so clean and golden in a tent in the dirt in the mid-19th century.

Memorable Dialogue: “I won’t sing for your victory today.” – Pionsenay response to the Apache raids 

Sex and Skin: Brief lady toplessness; an ice-cold sex scene featuring Costner.

Our Take: The problem here is glaringly, screamingly obvious: Horizon feels like episodic television. There’s no dramatic arc to Chapter 1. It spends literal hours setting up the board to make significant plays later. Nobody wants to watch this now and forget everything about it before the second film debuts, whenever that will be, and then repeat that two more times. Key word being “forget,” which, yes, is an indictment of splintered attention spans being fed more media than they can handle, but is also an indictment of Costner and co-scripter Jon Baird’s material, which struggles to set an emotional hook for these characters. 

The only visible arc here belongs to young Russell, who finds himself in the eye of the storm of the climactic sequence – such as it is – which, yes, is another awful massacre. It’s a no-shit-sherlock moral conundrum he’s in: The bounty hunters tell him it’s OK to kill Apache because they killed his parents. But he’s also learning that one person’s terrible ideology doesn’t represent a people. He’s far too young to be witnessing such brutality, yet the final sequence loses some of its dramatic power because so much of what preceded it was a muddled snooze that featured him significantly in four or five scenes, and didn’t lend diligence to his character development. That’s a common problem throughout the film.

Thematically, Horizon is shaping up to be Costner’s attempt to reckon with the nation’s sins. This, the film implies, is what colonialism wrought, and Chapter 1 teases the wrangling of Civil War repercussions in future movies. It’s not a terrible idea by any means, and is the subtext of many classic Westerns. The director has a terrific eye for gorgeous John Ford vistas, and he loves loves loves the ambience of firelit faces. His action sequences are shot and edited with necessary urgency. Visually, the film is thoughtfully, classically gorgeous. And the score is so old-fashioned in its deployment of pushy strings and pianos, I’m not sure if its endearingly retro or just annoying.

The biggest hurdle is the writing and editing. Good moments mingle with terrible moments, but too many moments are blah, unmemorable filler. The film is haphazardly cut, resulting in awkward pacing; characters disappear for what feels like hours at a time. Official diagnosis: Too Many Characters. By the time Luke Wilson turns up in this thing, all you can do is sigh, because our interest in Russell and Ellen and Hayes must be set aside for yet another subplot doomed to be underserved until lord-knows-when. It’s too easy to dump on Costner for his past ego-epics, e.g., Dances with Wolves, Wyatt Earp, Waterworld, The Postman – wow, there’s a lot of them – and Horizon takes it a step further: An attempt to establish the Kevin Costner Wild West Extended Universe. It’s rough sledding so far, and makes him look less like the accomplished filmmaker we know him to be, and more like he doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Our Call: As someone of a certain vintage with an appreciation for classical Westerns, I was game for Horizon, and am tempted to say be patient and see if it makes sense after Costner finishes telling the entire story. But man, is he asking a lot of us. So SKIP IT for now and let the experts determine if the whole magilla is worth a future binge.

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