4th Wall Inward

Ep. 11 | The Drama — The Bravest Question of 2026. Then It Looks Away

Kristoffer Borgli has made a film about the worst thing you never did. Whether that is enough is the conversation we are having this week. The premise arrives early and without warning. Emma and Charlie are days away from their wedding. Their friends suggest a game over drinks. Everyone admits the worst thing they have ever done. Charlie confesses to bullying a classmate. Rachel confesses to something similar. Then it is Emma's turn. What she says stops the film completely. At fifteen, she planned a school shooting. She had her father's rifle. She had a plan. She chose not to go through with it only because another shooting happened nearby and a classmate died, and she felt, in her words, upstaged. That event pulled her out of her isolation. She changed. She became the person sitting across from her fiancé now. And then Charlie cannot look at her the same way. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we talk about The Drama, Borgli's A24 follow up to Dream Scenario, and the gap between what this film promises and what it delivers. Because the promise is extraordinary. The moral question at the heart of the premise is one of the most genuinely uncomfortable ideas mainstream cinema has attempted in years. Rachel and Charlie admitted to having actually harmed real people. Emma admitted to a plan she chose not to execute. Who has done worse? Who has the right to judge? The hypocrisy inside that question is precisely where the film should live. It does not live there long enough. Robert Pattinson is doing serious work as Charlie. He finds the specific smallness of a man whose conception of his future has been quietly destroyed by information he did not ask for and cannot metabolize. The paranoia, the interrogation, the self-sabotage, the affair with his colleague Misha that he pursues not out of desire but out of something closer to self-destruction. Pattinson plays all of it with the twitchy, masochistic precision that has become his signature and that suits this character almost too well. But the more the film gives Charlie, the less it gives Emma. And this is where The Drama fails most significantly. Zendaya is genuinely extraordinary in this film. There is a moment at the wedding ceremony, sitting in her dress while the world around her collapses, processing information in real time while guests wait for a celebration, where she does something with her stillness that very few actors could do. It is the best scene in the film. It is also a scene about Emma discovering what Charlie has done, not about Emma at all. This is the pattern. Emma confesses the most dangerous thing in the room and then spends the rest of the film reacting to everyone else's response to it. We never understand what it cost her to carry that secret. We never understand the fifteen-year-old who made that plan. The film is not interested in her interior life. It is interested in how her interior life lands on Charlie. The wedding collapse is everything you expect and slightly less than you hoped for. Misha tells Emma about the affair. Charlie delivers his speech and unravels publicly. Misha's boyfriend headbutts him. The ceremony implodes. Charlie ends up in their favorite diner, bloodied, in his wedding suit, ordering a cheeseburger. Emma arrives. She pretends not to know him. She asks to sit. The film ends with the suggestion of beginning again. It is a lovely ending. A genuinely moving idea about love as a choice you make repeatedly rather than a contract you signed once. But it only lands if you believe in both people equally. Emma has spent most of the film existing as a problem Charlie is trying to solve. Her forgiveness reads less like an act of love and more like an act of patience with a screenplay that forgot about her. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ [⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠] Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ [⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠] Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ [https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠] X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠ [https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠]

Ep. 10 | Marty Supreme — Josh Safdie Is Back and He Brought a Ping Pong Table

Here is the full description with the corrected opening: Josh Safdie has spent the last decade making films with his brother Benny. Good Time. Uncut Gems. A creative partnership so specific and so singular that when it was announced he would direct Marty Supreme alone, the question was inevitable: what does a Safdie film look like when there is only one of them? The answer arrived Christmas Day 2025 via A24, starring Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a shoe salesman with a dream nobody respects and the specific arrogance of a man who has decided the world is wrong about him. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we go deep on the most entertaining film of the awards season and ask the question nobody in the conversation seems to want to answer: is Marty Mauser someone we are supposed to root for, and does it matter? The premise is deceptively simple. Marty works in his uncle's shoe shop. He plays table tennis professionally at a level nobody takes seriously because table tennis is not serious. He wants to win the British Open. He steals seven hundred dollars, gets on a plane to London, and the film becomes something else entirely. A Safdie film through and through. Kinetic, chaotic, frequently hilarious, occasionally terrifying, and entirely unwilling to let you get comfortable. Chalamet is extraordinary here. He let his vision deteriorate for the role. He spent months training with professional table tennis players. He built an accent and a physicality and a specific brand of oblivious narcissism that is completely different from anything he has done before. Marty Mauser is not likeable. He is fascinating, which is harder and more interesting. The film watches him with the same mixture of affection and horror that Safdie brought to Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems, that specific Safdie gaze that finds the dignity inside the disaster. Gwyneth Paltrow as Kay Stone is a revelation. A faded actress in a loveless marriage, charmed by Marty's confidence and undone by his selfishness. Paltrow has not had a role this good in years and she knows exactly what to do with it. Odessa A'zion as Rachel, Marty's childhood friend and on-again affair, carries the film's emotional weight with a precision that the film's chaotic surface keeps trying to bury. She holds her ground every time. Darius Khondji shot the film mostly on 35mm using Arriflex cameras and vintage Panavision anamorphic lenses. The result is a 1950s New York that feels inhabited rather than reconstructed. The Lower East Side, the ping pong parlors, the London hotels, the Japanese tournament venues, all of it has a texture and a weight that digital cannot replicate. The film accumulates rather than resolves. Events pile on each other. Characters enter with tremendous vividness and exit without ceremony. This is Safdie's method and it is a deliberate one. Marty never learns. The world keeps moving. And somewhere in the middle of all that relentless forward motion, the film finds something genuinely moving about a man who cannot stop wanting something that keeps almost being his. Almost is the most interesting word in cinema. Marty Mauser lives there permanently. A24's highest grossing film of all time. Josh Safdie's best solo work. Timothée Chalamet's best performance. We think so. Come argue with us. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ [https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠] Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ [https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠] Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ [https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠] X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠ [https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠]

Ep. 9 | Sinners — Ryan Coogler Just Made the Best American Film in Years

1932. Clarksdale, Mississippi. Jim Crow. Two brothers who worked for Al Capone come home with enough money to build something of their own. A juke joint in an old sawmill. A space where the Black community of the Delta can drink, dance, and exist freely for one night. And a young blues prodigy named Sammie, whose talent is so extraordinary it does not just move the people in the room. It moves something in the darkness outside. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we talk about Sinners, Ryan Coogler's first original film, and the most fully realized piece of American cinema we have seen in years. Let us start with the record. Sixteen Academy Award nominations, the most in history. Four wins including Best Actor for Michael B. Jordan, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography for Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the first woman and the first Black person to win in that category, and Best Original Score for Ludwig Göransson. 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from over 400 critics. More than 370 million dollars at the global box office for an original film that was not a sequel, a remake, or a franchise. In a landscape where every studio bets on existing IP and audiences are told they only come out for things they already know, Sinners exists as proof that the argument was always wrong. But the numbers are not why we are here. We are here because Sinners does something that most films do not even attempt. It uses genre to say something true. The premise is a vampire horror film. The execution is something far more layered. Coogler has built the vampire mythology in Sinners not as a supernatural backdrop but as a specific metaphor: for cultural appropriation, for the extraction of Black creativity by forces that understand its power without respecting its origins, for the way religion can be weaponized to contain the very communities it claims to protect. The vampires in this film cannot enter unless invited. That is not an arbitrary rule. It is the whole argument. Michael B. Jordan playing both Smoke and Stack is one of the great dual performances in recent cinema. These are not two versions of the same person with different costumes. They are two genuinely distinct men who carry the same history differently. Smoke carries his grief inward. Stack turns his outward. Jordan finds the specific weight of each without ever letting the technical achievement of the dual performance overwhelm the humanity underneath it. This is the performance of his career. But the film's true heart is Sammie, played in a film debut by Miles Caton. Sammie is a preacher's son who plays blues guitar in a tradition his father considers sinful, which is where the film's title does its deepest work. The scene where Sammie plays and his music tears through time, pulling together West African drummers, future generations of musicians, the entire arc of what the blues becomes and everything it carries forward, is one of the great cinematic moments of the last decade. It is not a setpiece. It is a thesis. Music as ancestral memory. Music as the one thing that cannot be killed. Delroy Lindo as Delta Slim is extraordinary. Wunmi Mosaku as Annie, the healer who understands what is coming before anyone else does, is the film's moral compass and one of its most quietly devastating performances. Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O'Connell, the entire ensemble is working at a level you rarely see in genre cinema. Autumn Durald Arkapaw's cinematography, shot on Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX cameras, gives the film a physical weight that feels almost tactile. The cotton fields, the heat, the specific quality of light in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, all of it is present in a way that makes the film feel less like a period reconstruction and more like an act of recovery. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ [https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠] Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ [https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠] Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ [https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠] X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠ [https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠]

Ep. 8 | Wuthering Heights — When a Director Mistakes Desire for Depth

Emerald Fennell wanted to recreate the feeling of a teenage girl reading Wuthering Heights for the first time. That is the stated intention. It is also, perhaps, the most honest description of what the film actually achieves and where it ultimately falls short. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we go deep on the most divisive film of early 2026. Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw. Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff. Charli xcx on the soundtrack. Anachronistic costumes that belong at the Met Gala. A film that is simultaneously gorgeous, provocative, frequently entertaining and surprisingly hollow. A film that knows exactly what it wants to look like but is not always sure what it wants to say. Let us start with what nobody is disputing. Wuthering Heights is visually extraordinary. Linus Sandgren's cinematography makes the Yorkshire moors feel simultaneously historical and completely contemporary, saturated with a color palette that owes more to fashion photography than to period drama. The production design is outrageous in the best sense. Jacqueline Durran's costumes exist in a space between 18th century England and something you might see on a runway in Paris today. Fennell is one of the most confident visual stylists working in mainstream cinema, and every frame of this film announces that confidence without apology. Robbie is doing real work here. Her Catherine is restless, sensual, furious, and occasionally terrifying, a woman who understands exactly the cage she has been born into and cannot decide whether to escape it or set it on fire. It is a performance that strips away every trace of the warmth and accessibility that made Barbie a cultural event, and replaces it with something rawer and considerably more dangerous. Whether the film is worthy of that performance is the question we keep returning to. Elordi as Heathcliff is more complicated. Physically, he is exactly what the role requires: imposing, brooding, and possessed of an intensity that reads across the moors as easily as it reads across a close-up. But Heathcliff is one of the most psychologically complex characters in English literature. He is not merely a romantic lead. He is a man shaped by class violence, racial othering, and a specific kind of love that has curdled into something indistinguishable from hatred. The novel gives him an interior life of almost unbearable depth. Fennell's film gives him a series of extraordinary entrances and very little underneath them. This is the central problem. Brontë's Wuthering Heights is not a love story in any conventional sense. It is a novel about what obsession does to people, about class and race and the specific cruelty of a society that decides who counts and who does not, about love as a force that destroys rather than redeems. The novel does not want you to find Heathcliff romantic. It wants you to find him terrifying and to understand exactly why he became that way. Fennell's version wants you to find him devastating and beautiful, which is a fundamentally different project. One that the source material was never written to support. The anachronisms are the most revealing choice. Charli xcx on the soundtrack, Met Gala gowns in the Yorkshire countryside, a red acrylic floor in the Linton house. Fennell has spoken about these choices as a way of arguing that the love story transcends its period setting, that Catherine and Heathcliff are so eternal they cannot be contained by the 18th century. It is a defensible idea. The problem is that the period setting is not merely backdrop in Brontë. We came for Brontë and found Fennell. That is not the worst thing to find. It is just not the same thing. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ [https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠] Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ [ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠] Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ [⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠] X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠ [https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠]

Ep. 7 | Crime 101 — The LA Noir That Almost Became a Masterpiece

Los Angeles. A jewel thief who has never left a fingerprint. A detective who has finally found a pattern. An insurance broker standing at the edge of a decision that will change everything. And a wildcard who is about to blow the whole thing apart. This week on The Fourth Wall Inward we go deep on Crime 101, Bart Layton's adaptation of Don Winslow's novella, and ask the question that has been nagging at us since we left the theater. How does a film this well cast, this beautifully shot, and this confidently directed still leave you feeling like something slightly more was possible? Let us be clear about what the film gets right. Layton is a director who understands Los Angeles the way only a handful of filmmakers do. The coastal night photography is stunning. The moody synth score hums with the specific melancholy of a city that glamorises its own decay. The action sequences, particularly a freeway chase in the film's second act, have the kind of spatial clarity and physical weight that most contemporary action cinema has completely forgotten how to achieve. This is a film that looks and sounds extraordinary from first frame to last. Chris Hemsworth is doing something genuinely interesting as Mike Davis, a disciplined high-end thief who plans every job with the patience of a surgeon and the paranoia of someone who knows exactly what prison looks like. Playing against type, Hemsworth strips away the movie star ease and finds a man who is socially uncertain, quietly exhausted, and increasingly aware that the life he has built requires him to be alone in ways that are slowly becoming unbearable. It is not a perfect performance. You still occasionally see the star behind the character. But the attempt is real and the attempt is worth something. Mark Ruffalo is the best thing in the film. His detective Lou is a man who has been doing this so long that caring and not caring have become indistinguishable. Ruffalo plays the specific weariness of someone who is very good at a job that has cost him everything he was good at before. The scenes between Ruffalo and Hemsworth, when the film allows them to simply exist in the same space, have a tension that owes more to two actors genuinely listening to each other than to anything in the screenplay. Halle Berry as Sharon is electric in every scene she appears in. The film's most interesting choice is to place her at the intersection of the thief and the detective without making her a pawn of either. Sharon has her own calculus, her own damage, and her own quiet desperation, and Berry plays all of it simultaneously. The film gives her less to do than it should, which is perhaps its most significant structural failure. Barry Keoghan as Ormon is pure controlled chaos, a man made entirely of bad decisions and coiled menace. He does not share the film's tonal register with anyone else in the cast and he does not care. The scenes where Ormon enters the frame feel like a different movie has briefly taken over, which is both his greatest strength and the element that most disrupts the film's otherwise careful architecture. And here is where the conversation gets complicated. Crime 101 knows its influences. It has studied Heat and Thief and the entire canon of Los Angeles crime cinema with something approaching reverence. The problem is that knowing your influences is not the same as transcending them. The film's second half leans on coincidence, and its big reveals land with a shrug where they should land with devastation. The screenplay is clever without being profound. The characters are vivid without being fully excavated. What remains is a film that is genuinely excellent to watch, impeccably crafted, and populated by performances that deserve a slightly better script than the one they were given. Follow us on: YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠ [https://www.youtube.com/@4thwallinward⁠] Letterboxd:⁠ https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠ [https://boxd.it/4TjKf⁠] Substack:⁠ https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠ [https://substack.com/@thefourthwallinward⁠] X: ⁠https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠ [https://x.com/4thwallinward⁠]