Movies of War

Mar 7, 2026 11:07am PT ‘Heel’ Review: Why Did Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough Sign on for This Contrived Debacle? A 19-year-old British punk sociopath gets kidnapped and chained in a basement for "rehabilitation." But it's the audience that feels imprisoned. By Owen Gleiberman Plus Icon Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic @OwenGleiberman Latest ‘The Bride!’ Review: Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale Are Magnetic Monsters in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Lumbering Punk Horror Trip 3 days ago ‘Hoppers’ Review: The Delightful New Pixar Film Is an Out-of-the-Box Critter Comedy That’s Like ‘Bambi’ on Crack 5 days ago ‘Scream 7’ Review: Neve Campbell Returns for a Back-to-Basics Sequel That’s a Little Too Basic 1 week ago See All Courtesy of Magnolia Pictures The original title of “Heel” was “Good Boy.” The new title is probably more accurate, though an even more accurate title might be “Painfully Annoying Punk Idiot.” I jest (a bit), since the title of “Heel” is actually a verb. The film wants to tell the story of a budding hooligan who needs to be brought to heel. That said, does anyone seriously want to see a movie about a 19-year-old British sociopath who gets chained up in a basement so that the weird upper-middle-class couple who’ve kidnapped him can modify his behavior? “Heel” is like “A Clockwork Orange” remade as the year’s worst Sundance movie. Related Stories 'KPop Demon Hunters,' Guillermo del Toro’s 'Frankenstein' Joining Criterion Collection (EXCLUSIVE) 'Lanterns' Trailer: Green Lanterns Hal Jordan and John Stewart Solve a Small-Town Murder in HBO's DC Series The opening sequence is actually promising. It depicts, in rapidly edited documentary-like montage, a reckless night out on the town by Tommy (Anson Boon) and his friends. They’re hopped-up club kids, and Tommy is their snarling, curly-haired, sexually coercive wastrel ringleader, living in the moment, pouring drinks down his throat, snorting coke and popping pills, dancing and carousing and puking and rutting in the bathroom, pushing himself to a higher and higher high, until he winds up collapsed on the sidewalk — a ritual, we gather, that has happened many times before. Only this time his crumpled body is gathered up by a mysterious stranger. Popular on Variety When Tommy wakes up, he’s in the basement of a stately stone house somewhere in the British countryside. He’s got a metal collar around his neck, and it’s chained to the ceiling. The film has barely gotten started, and already it’s cut to the second half of “A Clockwork Orange”: Can this monster delinquent be rehabilitated? Theoretically, that’s an interesting question, except that the way this happens is so garishly contrived that we can only go with the movie by putting any plea for reality on permanent hold. Who are the people who have kidnapped Tommy? Chris (Stephen Graham) is a mild chap in a toupee who goes about his mission with a puckish vengeance disguised as gentility. His wife, Kathryn (Andrea Riseborough), is so neurasthenic she’s like a ghost. (She has suffered some trauma that isn’t colored in.) The two have a cherubic preteen son they call Sunshine (Kit Rakusen). And why, exactly, are they doing what they’re doing? We have no idea. Trying to make a bad person into a good person is not, in itself, a terrible notion, but the conceit of “Heel” — that Tommy is locked in a dungeon, being treated like a dog, because that’s what it will take to change him — is like a toxic right-wing fantasy that the film somehow reconfigures into an implausible liberal “family” allegory. Ah, plausibility! How unhip to gripe about the absence of it. Yet watching “Heel,” I found it impossible to suspend my disbelief for two seconds. The entire movie, directed by the Polish filmmaker Jan Komasa (“Corpus Christie”) from a script by Bartek Bartosik and Naqqash Khalid, is just a grimy monotonous conceit. It’s been thought out thematically but not in terms of recognizable human behavior. It’s like a film-student short stretched out to an agonizing 110 minutes. Anson Boon, a charismatic actor who did an okay job of playing Johnny Rotten in Danny Boyle’s TV miniseries “Pistol” (though he never conjured Rotten’s homicidal gleam), infuses Tommy with a loutish energy that in the early scenes, at least, makes him a convincing candidate for either prison or the contemporary equivalent of shock therapy. And yet the character is exhaustingly obnoxious. As a filmmaker, Komasa doesn’t dramatize — he uses one-note traits to clobber the audience. Stephen Graham’s Chris is as quiet and circumspect as Tommy is abrasive. He tries to train Tommy by showing him motivational tapes, and by subjecting him to Tommy’s own depraved TikToks. He then rigs up an elaborate system of gutters on the ceiling so that Tommy, in his metal leash, can wander around the house, a sign that he’s been housebroken. Tommy has to grow and change, since there wouldn’t be a movie otherwise. In the process, he gets less annoying but also less interesting, because “Heel” sentimentalizes his transformation. Komasa seems to have missed the key irony of “A Clockwork Orange”: that the behavior modification of Alex is as brutalizing as his original state of punk anarchy. In “Heel,” Tommy’s evolution is singularly unconvincing — by the end, he’s practically ready to be the suitor in a Jane Austen drama. But that’s all of a piece with a movie so false it puts the audience in the doghouse. Jump to Comments ‘Heel’ Review: Why Did Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough Sign on for This Contrived Debacle? Reviewed at Park Ave. Screening Room, New York, Feb. 25, 2026. Running time: 110 MIN. Production: A Magnolia Pictures release of a Skopia Film — Recorded Picture Company production, in co-production with Venatu Capital, Canal+ Poland, TVN Warner Bros. Discovery Documentary and Feature Film Studios, in association with Hanway Films, Desmar, Screen Yorkshire, UK Global Screen Fund. Producers: Jeremy Thomas, Ewa Piaskowska, Jerzy Skolimowski. Executive producers: Caroline Cooper Charles, Naomi Depres, Michèle Marshall, Lukasz Poniński, Peter Watson. Crew: Director: Jan Komasa. Screenplay: Bartek Bartosik, Naqqash Khalid. Camera: Michael Dymek. Editor: Agnieszka Glińska. Music: Abel Koprzeniowski. With: Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough, Anson Boon, Kit Rakusen, Monika Frajczyk, Savannah Steyn, Mila Janowska. ‘Yo (Love is a Rebellious Bird)’ Review: A Moving Documentary Memorial Through a Decade of Puppets and Miniatures ‘Soumsoum, the Night of the Stars’ Review: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Latest Is a Desert Parable That Loses Its Way ‘My Wife Cries’ Review: A Wry Relationship Drama Whose Delights Don’t Always Cohere ‘The Garden We Dreamed’ Review: Powerful Mexican Migrant Drama Finds Moments of Serenity Amid Adversity ‘Bridgerton’ Season 4 Part 2 Puts the Lusty Romance Between Benedict and Sophie Back Into Focus: TV Review ‘A Child of My Own’ Review: Stylized Drama and Documentary Scrap Over the Truth In an Unhappy Maternity Tale JavaScript is required to load the comments. Loading comments...