– What to Watch –
by Bob Mondello | NPR | October 2, 2025
An action star makes his Oscar bid in a skull-cracking biopic, and a pop star makes her album publicity bid with a music video reveal. Elsewhere, cinemas host a trio of triumphant returns — the re-release of an epic fantasy that’s among the biggest box office hits ever; the emergence from retirement of one of the great actors of our age; and the freshly resurfaced pronouncements of a long-dead dystopian author with much to say about the world we find ourselves in today.
Here’s what you’ll find in theaters this weekend.
Orwell: 2+2=5
In limited theaters Friday
“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world,” intones actor Damian Lewis, who gives voice to the writings of British author George Orwell in Raoul Peck’s urgent documentary. Every word in the film was written by Orwell, and Peck illustrates them with unabashed fury, images filling the screen to illuminate the doublethink that Orwell called “newspeak” — official language used to alter reality and to manipulate. The filmmaker, who has previously made striking films about James Baldwin and Karl Marx, uses archival footage, news reports, and clips from a startling array of films, including several screen iterations of Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, to offer both a portrait of the author and an overview of a century’s worth of geopolitics.
Beginning with the tenets of totalitarianism the novel put forth — “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength” — the film superimposes real-world governmental pronouncements about “peacekeeping operations” over images of a burning bombed city, “vocational training center” over a concentration camp, “legal use of force” over police brutality. The 2024 re-election of Donald Trump is the film’s evident inflection point, with an emphasis on the President’s continued denial that he’d lost the previous election. The filmmaker juxtaposes footage of violence at the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the capitol and a MAGA-hatted man urging that there be “heads on pikes,” as President Trump’s voice intones “they were peaceful people … the love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Peck details how Orwell’s police service in 1920s Burma (now Myanmar) sparked his awareness of “unjustifiable tyranny” and informed his view of repressive social hierarchies, oppressive politics, and official obfuscation. The filmmaker isn’t subtle, but then, neither was his subject, and the film’s points could hardly seem more prescient than they do in this moment.
Read the rest of the original article at NPR