The new movie “I Love Boosters” asks us to root for thieves who steal designer clothes sans regret. Next month’s “Carolina Caroline” follows a pair of adorable, lovestruck thugs who swindle strangers for cash.

Whatever happened to actual “good guys”?

‘When he looked into the eyes of the 101st division, he took the time to ask their names, to shoot the breeze about fly fishing and their girlfriends.’

Look no further than “Pressure,” a new World War II saga based on incredible true events.

Extraordinary heroes

Honor. Loyalty. Courage. Heroism. The ability to make a tough decision and stand by it, no matter what. No victim complexes or complaints about rough childhoods. Just extraordinary heroes taking history into their hands.

It’s one reason we still can’t get enough of World War II films. Those qualities are front and center in this well-told tale. And it helps that the premise behind “Pressure” will strike audiences as unfamiliar, even shocking.

Rain day

The most consequential battle of World War II almost got rained out, a story that proves a snug fit for America’s 250th birthday.

Brendan Fraser stars as Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander ready to storm the beaches of Normandy and liberate northwest Europe. That risky plan required an assist from Mother Nature.

Would the forecast allow for a massive amphibious assault? Or should the Allied powers wait a few days, even weeks, jeopardizing the element of surprise in the process?

Andrew Scott of “Fleabag” fame plays James Stagg, the meteorologist brought in to advise Gen. Eisenhower on the best path forward. He predicts that conditions will turn D-Day into a disaster. Is he right, or does the existing weather expert (Chris Messina) have the right forecast?

Earned respect

Fraser, the “Whale” alum who once again changed his physique to play “Ike,” told Align why he admires the man who not only helped win the war but later became a two-term U.S. president.

“He was an excellent communicator; he was a diplomat of sorts,” Fraser said. “He conducted military operations over dinner tables. Apparently he was very funny and charming at them. ... That’s a form of communication too.”

There was a method to his unorthodox ways, the Oscar winner said.

“He did all this because he cared intensely about the troops’ well-being,” Fraser said. That extended to bonding with the men facing daunting odds of survival, especially in the D-Day invasion.

“When he looked into the eyes of the 101st division, he took the time to ask their names, to shoot the breeze about fly fishing and their girlfriends. He was respected because he earned it. ... It was almost like a secret weapon in the operation,” the actor noted. “They wanted to please him, and they knew what they were up against.”

Root/Cause

Historic battle

Director Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” captured the early stages of the Normandy invasion without flinching. It’s one of the goriest war sequences ever shot, showing how soldiers ran toward a wall of bullets that took hundreds of lives in a flash.

“Pressure” doesn’t attempt to out-do Spielberg’s version, but the film shows how the beaches were quickly stained a deep red color.

“It was no secret that they were going into a bare-knuckle fight with a chainsaw,” Fraser said of that historic battle.

The project gave Fraser, now gearing up to shoot another “Mummy” film with co-star Rachel Weisz, an appreciation for Ike’s role in history.

“He was the type of leader who did not want to punish his foe, his enemy. ... He didn’t let him off the hook, either. ... He partnered with them, neutered them that way, and made them accountable,” he said.

Little-known perspective

Fraser’s co-star, Irish actress Kerry Condon, gets a less splashy but still consequential role in the war drama. She plays Captain Kay Summersby, Gen. Eisenhower’s loyal aide.

“She brought the emotional intelligence when the men were struggling,” the actress said of her role, including a critical subplot involving Stagg’s pregnant wife. Summersby would later move to the U.S. and become captain in the Women’s Army Corps.

Many moviegoers may not have realized the role weather played in the D-Day invasion. Count Condon among that group.

“It was shocking to think it was one person who changed the course of history. ... That’s why I wanted to do [the film]. It’s a very interesting perspective on World War II.”

Liberal critics hate 'The Wizard of the Kremlin' — that's how I knew it was worth a watch

Remember around 2018 or so, when reviews on Rotten Tomatoes suddenly became suspicious?

Like movies that hit all the left-wing, DEI talking points would get 98% Fresh ratings from the critics, but then when regular people started weighing in, the audience meter would drop precipitously?

Paul Dano’s Baranov is fascinating. He’s the opposite of a typical Russian movie character. He’s sensitive, intelligent, creative, and socially aristocratic.

Or when a movie like "Sound of Freedom" came out and all the critics panned it because it was produced by a non-Hollywood Christian studio. But then, everyone who saw it loved it?

Generally, I still consult Rotten Tomatoes. But in any situation where a film can be seen as “political” or might touch on a controversial subject, I become skeptical.

Such was the case with "The Wizard of the Kremlin." It was already getting roasted months before its release. Apparently, our brave American critics wanted to virtue signal their personal animosity toward Putin.

Because of this, I became interested in the film. If the critics hate it, it’s probably good.

Getty Images

Vive le cinéma!

Another aspect of the film I was excited about: It was made by French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. Not that the French are so independent-minded, but Hollywood filmmakers are literally incapable of addressing international politics above a sixth-grade level.

The French though. They’ve been through some stuff. They’re not afraid to talk about international affairs in a serious, adult manner.

Another thing that recommended the movie: the casting of Jude Law as Putin and Paul Dano as Baranov, his close personal adviser. (Baranov is a fictional character, almost everyone else is real.)

When I heard this, I thought: “Oh my goodness, this movie is going to be brilliant.”

Another good sign: The film was adapted from an acclaimed French novel by the same name. So the story was already established. The film just had to follow it.

Story of my life

The movie begins in the present, with an American journalist traveling to Russia to interview Baranov (Paul Dano) about his former role in the Putin administration.

Through this interview, Baranov tells the story of his life, which begins in the '80s and moves through the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the emergence of Putin.

The film’s portrayal of life at the end of the Soviet Union was super interesting, in part because we rarely see this in films.

The avant-garde theater scene in Moscow in the late 1980s? Could you even picture that? I couldn’t. Until I saw it.

All the Russian interiors were super interesting. And the clothes. And the nightclubs. The supporting actors all looked very Russian. The whole thing was fun to look at. This was the end of the dowdy Soviet Union and the beginning of the reign of the gangster oligarchs.

No rush

It took 40 minutes for Putin to appear. This built suspense. You’re sitting there enjoying Paul Dano as Baranov, and then you remember Jude Law is still to come. Jude Law as Putin!

Meanwhile, Paul Dano’s Baranov is already fascinating. He’s the opposite of a typical Russian movie character. He’s sensitive, intelligent, creative, and socially aristocratic (his father and grandfather were high-level Communist Party members).

He speaks in a soft, unhurried voice. But with his big, wide, puffy face, he still looks totally Russian!

The whole “you’re in Russia” conceit was great. I don’t know if this was actually filmed in Russia, but it sure felt like Russia. (I noticed in the credits there were a few mentions of Latvia. So maybe they shot some of it there.)

Putin on the Ritz

So finally, 40 minutes in, we get our first look at Putin. In the beginning, it’s Baranov and his boss (they both work for Russian TV) who are recruiting the reluctant KGB agent.

They think Russia needs a new style of leader, someone young and energetic. They’ll help him. They’ll guide him. They’ll make sure he wins.

But Putin isn’t receptive. He’s happy where he is.

But once he gets a sniff of power, Putin rises quickly. Only Baranov is able to remain in his good graces, due to his low-key, soft-spoken manner.

Jude Law as Putin was hilarious. I laughed to myself when he first appeared. Not that it was intentionally funny. It was just a relief, and a little bit shocking, to finally see him.

It was actually a very good rendition. It was not politicized. Jude Law did the Putin scowl and facial and body expressions. It was really good. I was kind of blown away.

Smart art

Honestly, I was blown away by the whole movie. It was funny, moving, smart. It did have moments where plot points had to be explained to the audience, forcing characters to make little speeches of exposition. But that always happens when you adapt from a book.

There were also some historical/political plot points that I would maybe question. But this movie is designed for a European/American audience and has to adhere generally to our Western understanding of Putin and his crew. Because of this, Putin is ultimately “the bad guy.”

But he’s definitely a fully fleshed-out character in the film. When they show him hanging out with his old KGB buddies, you get a sense of the man behind the scenes.

"The Wizard of the Kremlin": Itwas the most intelligent movie I’ve seen in years. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Highly recommend.

A version of this review originally appeared on the Substack Travels to Distant Cities.

The 3 biggest lies justifying massive AI data centers DEBUNKED

Right now, massive AI data centers are gobbling up rural land, uprooting the farms and ranches that could guarantee America’s food sovereignty.

This Big Tech land-grab is often rationalized with a number of defenses: beating China in the AI race, creating rural jobs and economic growth, and advancing technology and national security.

But Daniel Horowitz insists that we’re being lied to.

“We're being told that we need to gobble up all of our land — by the way, often with foreign investors — because somehow that is the only way to excel at artificial intelligence,” he says.

But “the surest way of achieving this dystopian nightmare of this techno-feudalism, where we own nothing, is to take the scarcest and most precious resource of land from its decentralized control of American households, homesteaders, ranchers, farmers, small businesses, and centralizing it behind the global tech moguls.”

On this episode of “Conservative Review,” Horowitz, alongside CEO of Fractal Web and AI software expert Michael Cation, dismantles the AI data center advocates' three biggest arguments.

- YouTube

1. The China argument

According to the data center advocates, America must build massive, hyperscale data centers — and sacrifice rural land and power for them — to achieve AI dominance and beat China in the global race.

But Horowitz calls this a “false choice.”

They argue that this is “the only way of achieving dominance in AI, when in fact, you're actually going to go backwards and misallocate resources away from what is an auspicious use of AI,” he says.

Further, in trying so hard to build these hyperscale data centers to beat China in the AI race, America is rezoning and handing over huge amounts of rural farmland and power infrastructure to massive corporate developers — many of them foreign-owned. Horowitz points to President Trump recently floating the idea of allowing China to invest $1 trillion in U.S. land and factories.

“We need that to beat China, but then somehow we're just going to have China own more American infrastructure and land at a time where I thought we all wanted to ban that,” he says, calling it “hypocrisy.”

2. The rural jobs/economic growth argument

Another argument claims that building giant data centers in rural areas will bring thousands of construction and operational jobs, generate big tax revenue, attract more businesses, and deliver much-needed economic growth and prosperity to struggling small towns.

Horowitz condemns this argument as a scam, claiming that these massive centers will only deliver mostly temporary, low-quality construction work performed by imported or illegal labor, destroy productive farmland, spike local crime, and provide almost no lasting economic benefit to actual residents.

“Laramie County Planning Commission is planning an 800-unit man camp that could house up to 5,600 workers, which is more than most towns in Wyoming, and we all know who monopolizes those jobs: a bunch of illegal aliens,” he says.

Citing an article from Wyoming’s Cowboy State Daily outlet, he reads, “Man camps in similar locations have led to an increase in property crime, DUIs, drug crimes, and violent crimes.”

3. The advancing technology and national security argument

Another argument perpetuated by the data center advocates contends that massive, hyperscale data centers are essential for advancing cutting-edge AI technology and protecting national security because only these giant centralized facilities can provide the enormous computing power, massive data processing, and rapid innovation needed to stay ahead of rivals like China in critical areas like defense, intelligence, and technological superiority.

Again, Horowitz throws the red flag. He and Cation dispute this claim by arguing that giant centralized data centers are actually a national security liability and the wrong path for real technological progress.

“AI is not all about cloud-based LLMs for data centers. … With edge computing, you could actually do so much more on local servers, local devices,” says Horowitz.

He points to Israel’s Iron Dome as an example. It’s a highly effective defense system that relies on localized edge computing — fast, on-site AI processing in distributed batteries — rather than depending on giant, vulnerable centralized data centers.

If it did rely on massive data centers, it would “a huge security” risk, especially in Israel's ongoing war with Iran, he argues.

Cation, an expert in computing infrastructure, drives home the national security point with this powerful rebuttal: “In the defense world … large data centers [are] called high-value targets. … The thing that can’t be destroyed are distributed systems.”

Together, they argue that the real future of secure and effective AI lies in edge computing, narrow AI, and fractal computing — decentralized systems that are faster, cheaper, more resilient, and far less vulnerable than massive, centralized data centers.

To hear more, watch the episode above.

Russell Brand’s 'How to Become a Christian': A superficial, self-serving memoir of conversion

When Russell Brand published his 2007 memoir, "My Booky Wook," I bought it with no particular expectations. The lanky provocateur from Essex was already famous for his drug-addled, debauched adventures as a stand-up comic and onetime MTV host — a job he lost after showing up the day after 9/11 dressed as Osama bin Laden. I suspected this latest venture might be no more than a shoddy attempt to cash in on this notoriety.

I was wrong. "My Booky Wook" was engaging, witty, and painfully self-aware. Brand could write.

The unbuttoned shirts and Jim Morrison-like leather pants mask a keen intelligence and shrewd rhetorical instincts.

Born identity

And Brand can still write, in the strict sense. The sentences in his new book, "How to Become a Christian in Seven Days," are sometimes funny, often eloquent, and occasionally beautiful. The man has range. He has cadence. He has, by any measure, talent.

He also has a problem with the truth, as his subsequent New Age-inflected leftist activism has demonstrated. Now that he's taken a turn for the traditional, Brand still shows the same affinity for self-serving fabulation — and the same instinct for monetizing his "countercultural" views.

I am a Catholic. I take conversion seriously, which is precisely why I take this one so unseriously. I never agreed with Brand's anti-capitalism shtick, the Che Guevara cosplay, the Bernie Sanders lovefests — but I always thought he meant it. That was the charm. Like Jon Stewart, he used humor to make political points. Unlike the erstwhile "Daily Show" host, Brand showed real humility while doing so, presenting himself less as an authority than as a fellow truth-seeker.

It's precisely humility, ironically enough, that is missing from Brand's public embrace of Christianity.

Brand management

Part of it, certainly, is the convenient timing. In September 2023, a Channel 4 "Dispatches" documentary and a Sunday Times investigation surfaced allegations of rape and sexual assault against Brand. A few months later, Bear Grylls — yes, that Bear Grylls — baptized him in the Thames. Recently, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Brand admitted on the record to sleeping with a 16-year-old when he was 30, calling himself an "exploiter of women." I watched the interview. He delivered the lines as eloquently as ever, but the remorse seemed rehearsed rather than felt.

Now comes the book. One hundred thirty-four pages. Thirty-three dollars. A man who once wrote a manifesto called "Revolution" about the predations of capitalism is selling salvation by the page at roughly a quarter a sheet.

The prose tells you what kind of conversion this is. Brand opens with a passage about how the title is "figurative" because seven days might take longer, then immediately explains that in the Bible, "days" don't really mean days because the earth's rotation, et cetera, et cetera and concludes: "This book has already paid for itself in cosmological bullion — 'Now I know what a day is!'"

That is, to be fair, a funny line. It is also the entire book. He cracks a gag, dresses it in Scripture, and bills you for the privilege. Later, he writes that he is "attempting to reinterpret the Bible," catches himself, and adds: "Phew, for a minute I thought I was an out-of-control egomaniac trying to rewrite the Bible and charge you for the privilege." The self-awareness is the alibi. He names the con and proceeds with it.

MEGA/GC Images via Getty Images

Selling salvation

None of this is to say genuine conversion is impossible for the famous, the rich, or the disgraced. Augustine was a libertine before he was a saint. Dorothy Day had a common-law husband and an abortion behind her when she found Catholicism. Conversion is exactly the sort of thing that happens to people whose lives have spiraled. That is half of the point of the doctrine.

What separates those stories from this one is the absence of a sales pitch. Augustine wrote his "Confessions" 15 years after his baptism, in Latin, for an audience of fellow bishops, and he spent most of it agonizing over a pear he stole as a boy. Day lived a life of voluntary poverty and poured any money she made from "The Long Loneliness" back into her work for the poor. Neither of them timed their repentance to a court docket.

Any considering this purchase should realize that Brand, perhaps more than many celebrities, is a shrewd manipulator of the media. The unbuttoned shirts and Jim Morrison-like leather pants disguise a keen intelligence and shrewd rhetorical instincts; this is a man who has survived two decades in the crosshairs of the British tabloids (which, it must be said, operate with a brutality that makes their American counterparts look like Ladies' Home Journal). Brand is a warrior, someone capable of weathering the most brutal of storms.

Property of Jesus

He’s also capable of reading the room. In this case, the room is a world besotted with American evangelicalism, which tends to focus on dramatic tales of redemption more than on the day-by-day grind of repentance.

That this type of Christianity is so forthright about embracing the broken is its glory, but it can also be its blind spot. Brand has bet, with considerable shrewdness, that this audience will buy the book without interrogating the allegations behind it.

Every person is owed his day in court, presumed innocent until proven guilty. I am not here to litigate the allegations, but to question the suddenness of the transformation. People who knew Brand well have described him as sociopathic. That is plausible. If Brand's come-to-Jesus moment is no more than a way to leverage other people's decency for personal gain, the word would certainly apply.

In the meantime, the best we can do for Brand is pray, as we would for any fellow sinner. It's not for us to judge the authenticity of his conversion; that's between him and God. But we should be wary of supporting his attempts — whether cynical or simply misguided — to profit from it.

Foreign workers are replacing Americans — now it’s happening in medicine

For years, Daniel Horowitz has been sounding the alarm about the deliberate replacement of American workers with foreigners. From H-1B visas to the OPT program for foreign graduates, the conservative commentator has been exposing the policies that keep Americans — especially young graduates — barred from high-paying tech, software engineering, and other STEM jobs.

Now the same pattern is hitting medicine.

Right now, many highly qualified American medical graduates are losing residency spots to foreign medical graduates.

On a recent episode of “Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz,” Horowitz and Houston ENT specialist Dr. Mary Talley Bowden dove into the startling statistics and offered a clear solution to the issue harming would-be American doctors.

Horowitz bemoans the reality that taxpayer dollars via Medicare are going toward programs that won’t even guarantee American students a residency placement. “We’re basically funding our replacement,” he says.

Dr. Bowden points to the shocking numbers from the residency match.

“6,600 foreign medical students got residency spots, and meanwhile … over 1,300 U.S. medical students did not get a spot,” she says, arguing that Americans are “getting the leftovers at that point.”

But it’s not just residencies — Americans are also being shut out of medical schools. “We are rejecting about 30,000 American students a year from medical school,” Dr. Bowden adds.

The solution, she says, is straightforward: Fill residency spots with American graduates first, then offer any remaining positions to foreign graduates. “We could just say, ‘Hey, everybody in the U.S. has to match first, and then we can do a match for the foreign residents,’” she tells Horowitz, who strongly agrees.

“No foreigner should be admitted into a medical school or residency program until every qualified American has a spot,” he says.

To hear more, watch the full episode above.

'Project Hail Mary' offers old-fashioned sci-fi wonder

There is a particular pleasure in watching a film that understands its own premise so completely that it never needs to raise its voice.

“Project Hail Mary” is that kind of film. It is about the end of the world, or rather the quiet prevention of it, and it proceeds not with spectacle but with curiosity. You lean in. It also shows that Hollywood can still make films that put storytelling first.

Clarity is one of the rarest virtues in modern filmmaking, too often filled with giant robot explosions and woke speechifying.

The story, based on Andy Weir's novel, follows Ryland Grace, played with a careful, disarming humanity by Ryan Gosling. He wakes alone on a spacecraft, far from Earth, with no memory of who he is or why he is there. The film reveals its answers slowly, trusting the audience to keep up. It is a confidence rarely seen in big studio science fiction, which tends to mistake noise for intelligence.

Quiet wonder

Grace is not a hero in the usual sense. He is a schoolteacher, a man more comfortable explaining than commanding. The film is built on problem-solving, on the steady accumulation of knowledge, on the small victories of understanding how things work. It recalls the best passages of Weir's “The Martian,” where survival depends on smart people overcoming impossible odds.

What distinguishes “Project Hail Mary” from “The Martian” is companionship. Without giving too much away, Grace does not remain alone. The relationship that develops is one of the most unusual and affecting in recent science fiction.

It is built not on corny sentiment but on shared necessity. Two radically different minds find a way to communicate. The scenes have a kind of quiet wonder that science fiction used to trade in more often, before it became preoccupied with destruction. It’s not really a spoiler because it’s in the trailer, but Grace befriends a spider-like rock alien who is also trying to save his planet. They must learn to communicate and work together.

Hail competence

Gosling understands the tone. He avoids the temptation to play the material for easy laughs or grand emotion. Instead, he lets the humor arise from confusion and discovery. There are moments of genuine comedy, but they grow out of character rather than being cheap jokes. You believe him as a man who is scared, then curious, then determined.

The direction, handled with precision and restraint by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, resists the urge to turn every crisis into a set piece. Space here is not a battlefield; it’s a problem to be solved. The visuals are clean and intelligible. You always know where you are, what is happening, and why it matters. This may sound like faint praise, but it is not. Clarity is one of the rarest virtues in modern filmmaking, too often filled with giant robot explosions and woke speechifying.

There is also an undercurrent in the film that feels old-fashioned. It takes seriously the idea that competence is a moral good. That cooperation, even across impossible boundaries, is preferable to conflict. These are not fashionable ideas, but the film does not argue for them. It simply demonstrates them.

If the film has a weakness, it lies in its structure. The gradual revelation of Grace’s past, while effective, occasionally interrupts the forward motion of the central story. Some of the Earthbound sequences feel less vivid than the material in space. They serve the plot, but they lack the same sense of discovery.

Tristan Fewings/Getty Images

Rare success

Still, the film succeeds where it matters most. It creates a world, poses a question, and then answers it honestly. It respects its audience. It believes that people will follow an idea if it is presented clearly enough.

I left the theater thinking not about explosions or villains, but about communication. About the fragile, stubborn act of trying to understand something that does not speak your language. That is a rare thing for a film to leave you with. It is rarer still for a film of this scale to have a competent, straight white male who is the hero and isn’t lectured about leftist ideology. What a novel idea. And the fact that this movie has been a runaway success at the box office and with audiences proves there’s been a longing for movies like this.

“Project Hail Mary” is not loud. It does not need to be. It knows what it is about, and it trusts that to be enough. In the end, saving the world with heroism and smarts will resonate more than bloated CGI.

Netflix 'Manosphere' doc: Virtuous voyeurism and dull TV

There was a time when Louis Theroux was the best documentary-maker alive. Not the most famous, not the flashiest — the best. He had a gift for making dangerous people feel comfortable enough to hang themselves with their own words.

His technique was deceptively simple: show up, look confused, ask the obvious question nobody else dared ask, and let the awkward silences do the heavy lifting.

Theroux spends much of the film asking genuinely dangerous, profit-driven men why they do not try being nicer.

The results were extraordinary. He immersed himself in the Westboro Baptist Church and revealed something more than fire-and-brimstone rhetoric — that hatred has a morning routine, eats cereal, and goes to bed at a reasonable hour.

He walked into San Quentin and found the prison’s strict social architecture more fascinating than horrifying. He sat with alcoholics dying in a hospital liver ward and captured something devastating without once reaching for a violin. He starred in a porn film fully clothed, somehow maintaining both his dignity and his curiosity.

His early work was morally serious without being moralistic — an almost impossible balance that he struck repeatedly.

That Theroux is gone.

Concern troll

In his place stands something considerably less interesting: a concerned therapist in training with a camera crew, packaging society’s oddballs for an audience that already knows what it thinks of them.

His latest Netflix outing, "Inside the Manosphere," is the clearest evidence yet. Theroux plunges into the world of online alpha-male influencers — Harrison Sullivan, Justin Waller, Myron Gaines, Sneako — tracking their revenue streams, their rhetoric, and their relentless contempt for women.

Miami apartments. Spanish nightclubs. Podcast sets where female guests are humiliated for content.

Sullivan funnels Telegram followers to OnlyFans accounts for kickbacks while publicly mocking the creators. Waller hawks Andrew Tate’s $49-a-month “university.” Gaines, a man of genuine venom, performs dominance for the camera like someone who has mistaken cruelty for confidence.

The material is genuinely ripe. These men are running sophisticated grift operations dressed up as philosophy, monetizing male loneliness and directing the resulting rage at all women. They deserve scrutiny.

The problem is that Theroux no longer scrutinizes. He pathologizes.

Practiced horror

Every interaction becomes a therapeutic probe. Every exchange is framed as evidence of something “disturbing.” The wide-eyed incredulity — once a genuine performance of curiosity — now reads as practiced horror for a largely left-leaning platform.

When Sullivan admits bluntly that he would never have found an audience doing wholesome content — “If I’d just done good things, I would never have blown up” — it is the most honest moment in the film.

Theroux treats it as a tragedy. It is simply capitalism.

Sullivan knows exactly what he is doing.

The real story is not that these men are broken. It is that they have correctly identified a lucrative market of young men who feel abandoned by mainstream culture — and are bleeding them dry. That is the documentary.

Theroux keeps making a different one — a morality play in which he is cast as the bewildered voice of reason.

Ian Maule/Getty Images

Prepackaged pandering

The irony is that his presence amplifies the very thing he deplores. Sullivan’s mother, in a sharp moment the film almost buries, asks the obvious question: If you find this so reprehensible, why are you publicizing it?

Theroux spends much of the film asking genuinely dangerous, profit-driven men why they do not try being nicer — roughly as effective as asking Putin to send Zelenskyy a fruit basket.

He is outmatched by people who have spent years controlling their image, and he does not seem to notice. These are seasoned sharks who have fielded far worse and treat the beanpole Brit like a speed bump on the way to their next revenue stream.

What made the early work so extraordinary was Theroux’s apparent absence of agenda. He let meth addicts, dementia patients, Scientologists, and porn stars speak for themselves and trusted audiences to draw their own conclusions. He did not editorialize.

The manosphere documentary editorializes constantly — each segment arriving labeled, prejudged, prepackaged for viewers who tuned in already convinced.

This is what woke documentary-making looks like at its most comfortable: confirming what the audience believes in a way that seems like investigation.

It is virtuous voyeurism — and painfully dull television.

The manosphere — equal parts genuine grievance and cynical exploitation — is a real and fascinating phenomenon. The young men being farmed for subscription fees and manufactured resentment deserve actual examination, not a wagging finger and a worried look.

Theroux was once the person who could have done that.

Watch "Drinking to Oblivion." Watch "The Most Hated Family in America." Watch a man doing the hardest thing in journalism — entering without a verdict and finding something real on the other side.

Sadly, that man traded his instincts for a Netflix brief and never looked back.

He got paid. The audience got a lecture.

Dreary 'Saturday Night Live: UK' is dead on arrival

It took less than a minute. Not for the show to find its rhythm — that never arrived — but for viewers to reach for the remote.

A more generous critic would say "Saturday Night Live: UK" stumbled out of the gate. Someone actually grounded in reality would say it arrived DOA, was resuscitated by optimism, flatlined again during the opening credits, and spent the rest of its run time as evidence that nobody in the commissioning process had ever actually watched British television.

The live format, in particular, punishes British reserve. The Brits, much like the Irish, don't do collective euphoria on command.

The opening sketch — a Downing Street caricature so limp that it needed medical attention — felt like it was written by people who had heard of the place the way most people have heard of Uzbekistan: aware that it exists, entirely unclear on the details. Keir Starmer reduced to a bed-wetting schoolboy: accurate enough, but executed with all the surgical precision of a drunk toddler.

Satire requires stones. This was neutered at conception

Fey's lemon

The host was former "SNL" head writer Tina Fey — parachuted in to anchor the spin-off in the history of television's most durable comedy franchise.

Rather than evoking "Saturday Night Live," however, her appearance called to mind "30 Rock" — Fey’s own sitcom about a sketch comedy show flailing within an absurdly corporatized NBC.

She stood there less like a master of ceremonies than like a faintly embarrassed consultant, as if tasked with explaining why this seemingly gratuitous product was actually a masterstroke of synergy and brand extension. You could almost hear the Jack Donaghy pitch behind it: familiar logo, international rollout, scalable format. Somewhere between the greenlighting and the greenroom, the only premise that mattered — making people laugh — had been quietly lost.

The audience noticed immediately. They always do. Forty seconds. One minute. Five, if you were feeling charitable. The reactions weren't angry. They were worse. They were bored. There is no harsher verdict for comedy than indifference.

Stupid and sublime

It wasn’t always this way, of course. "Saturday Night Live" was once genuinely great. Not good. Not fine. Great. Belushi, Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy — dangerous, deranged, alive. Bill Murray doing a sort of dollar-store Sinatra. Chris Farley destroying every piece of furniture within reach. Phil Hartman doing impressions so precise that the subjects should have taken it personally. They probably did.

These were performers who understood that live television was a dare, not a format, and they took it every single week. Comedy that felt like it could go wrong at any moment, and sometimes did, and was better for it. Sharp, stupid, sublime in equal measure.

Those days are long gone — the show swallowed by Trump derangement syndrome and the passive-aggressive ritual of swiping at conservatives until the writers' room mistook a political position for a punch line.

In its prime, it was still political, but at least it was anchored in something real — American culture, fast, furious, and occasionally brilliant. If today's "SNL" is but a degraded facsimile of the show in its prime, this transatlantic fiasco is a facsimile of that facsimile: edges blurred, ink fading, soul entirely absent.

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Fawlty hour

The failure here is structural, not superficial. British comedy is built on irony, understatement, and a very specific species of darkness. "Fawlty Towers." "Brass Eye." "The Office." "I'm Alan Partridge." Comedy that watches you squirm and enjoys it. Comedy that finds the precise point of maximum discomfort and builds a home there. Comedy forged in restraint and bad weather, in class anxiety and institutional distrust, in the particularly British conviction that authority is always, at some level, ridiculous. You cannot import that.

If British comedy runs on slow-burning cringe and the precise calibration of discomfort, the "SNL" format runs on volume — loud, broad, relentlessly American, built around celebrity cameos and political impressions that reset with each news cycle and evaporate by Sunday morning.

Hiring Lorne Michaels doesn't transplant the institution any more than putting a McDonald's in a country farmhouse makes it rural. The live format, in particular, punishes British reserve. The Brits, much like the Irish, don't do collective euphoria on command. They do collective embarrassment, the kind that makes you leave the room on someone else's behalf, change your name, and book a one-way ticket to the aforementioned Uzbekistan.

Nothing much

Crucially, nobody asked for this. Nobody petitioned. Nobody wrote in. Sky's decision to commission eight episodes before a single one had even aired suggests the company was already nervous — hedging against failure by pretending it was a plan.

The deeper problem is one of fundamental incompatibility — a cultural mismatch so obvious that it's almost impressive that no one in the commissioning process named it aloud. Or perhaps they did and were overruled by someone with a spreadsheet. Comedy, at its best, feels dangerous. This felt focus-grouped. Safe. Sanitized. A show that promised the sun, moon, and stars but instead delivered, with full confidence and considerable expense, a urine-scented underpass.

Of course, the next episode could be great. Revelatory. The best television in years. But judging by the first, almost anything else would have been better. Including nothing. Nothing would have been better. Nothing, at least, doesn't waste your Saturday night.

Is the GOP’s hyper-fixation on the SAVE Act allowing a much darker threat to fester?

The SAVE Act, which would require individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections, is currently stalled in the Senate. Republicans, led by President Trump and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), are adamant on pushing it through, as it prevents noncitizen voting.

But is the GOP so hyper-fixated on passing it that it’s glossing over an even bigger threat?

According to Blaze Media’s Daniel Horowitz, the answer is yes.

“All you hear going into this new week is ‘the Save Act, the Save Act.’ Do you see what minutia that is when you look at the magnitude of what we're facing just with Islamic immigration?” he asks.

On this episode of “Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz,” the no-nonsense conservative analyst breaks down why the SAVE Act is actually a distraction from more pressing immigration issues.

“We basically let in ... several million people that believe in at least civilization jihad, don't like America, cultivate a climate where you have several hundred thousand people that downright support terrorism as a form of fulfilling their jihad,” says Horowitz.

In light of this looming threat, the SAVE Act is “so small potatoes,” he argues, calling it “an idolatrous bill“ that ignores the real problem.

“It's illegals being counted in the census, noncitizens being counted in the census, bringing in mass waves of people that become citizens and legally vote Democrat. That is a much bigger issue than the actual illegal voting,” Horowitz declares.

“Having Hezbollah, Hamas, Shabab, and Al-Qaeda-supporting Muslims in the millions in this country is a much bigger deal than the freaking SAVE Act,” he continues.

But stricter vetting isn’t the answer, he says.

Citing his interview with former Muslim Danny Burmawi, Horowitz contends that Islam is “not a religion” so much as it’s “a state” with its own “system of governance.”

Unlike in the Middle East, where governments often have to limit or modify strict Islamic practices to keep the state functional and avoid total dysfunction, Muslim immigrants in the West are free to express support for jihad and terrorism.

“We're trying to run our state, and they're able to actually implement a full unfettered, unadulterated Islamic state within the confines of our state. And that's how you have a greater concentration of jihad now in the West than you have even in the East,” says Horowitz.

Instead of focusing on the SAVE Act, he argues that the GOP’s attention should be fixated on “[shutting] off the new flow” of Muslim migrants and denaturalizing and deporting those here legally who support foreign terrorists.

“The Constitution is not a suicide pact,” he declares. “States are going to have to say no to mass migration — illegal and legal.”

To hear more of Horowitz’s in-depth breakdown, watch the full episode above.

Is your baby formula safe? Florida finds heavy metals in 16 of 24 top brands

Most parents who purchase baby formula trust that if the product is on the supermarket shelf, it must be safe for their child, but according to findings from the Healthy Florida First initiative, many of the top formula brands tested positive for heavy metals.

The state-led program, spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis (R), first lady Casey DeSantis, and Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo through the Florida Department of Health, aims to build a healthier Florida through independent testing and publication of contaminants in everyday foods.

On a recent episode of “Conservative Review with Daniel Horowitz,” Horowitz interviewed Casey DeSantis about what Florida’s health initiative uncovered about 24 top-selling baby formulas and what parents can do to ensure that their children are receiving the best nutrition.

A Consumer Reports investigation released in March 2025 found potentially harmful levels of heavy metals, including arsenic and lead, in some of the 41 baby formulas tested. Around the same time, HHS and the FDA announced Operation Stork Speed, which increased testing for heavy metals and contaminants, reviewed nutrient standards, and strengthened oversight of infant formula safety.

Despite this initiative, DeSantis says that according to infant formula testing conducted by Florida’s Department of Health, “there hasn’t been much change at all.”

“And honestly, since we had our results coming out, I haven't heard anything from some of these baby formula manufacturers. And so it's like at what point in time is enough enough?” she says, calling metal toxicity in baby formula “unconscionable and unacceptable.”

Out of the 24 baby formulas tested, Florida’s Department of Health found that 16 contained one or more heavy metals exceeding current safety standards.

“Could you give us a summary of those shocking findings?” asks Horowitz.

“Sixteen out of the 24 had high levels of mercury. Two had lead. These are problematic heavy metals, right? They don't just leave the body. They're there for a while,” says DeSantis, “and our surgeon general said, you know, when you're exposed to this early in life in these quantities over the course of a year or two, your risk of getting cancer goes up exponentially.”

“I would encourage moms and dads and grandparents to go to exposingfoodtoxins.com because there you can see specifically which ones are better than others,” she adds.

“Don't tell me it's the manufacturing process and there's nothing that we can do, because certainly there are some manufacturers that are doing it better. So we should, as consumers, push to drive change because that's the right thing to do on behalf of families.”

To hear more of the conversation, watch the full interview above.