OUTCOME. Jonah Hill’s second scripted feature — following Mid90s (2018), the documentary Stutz (2022) and number of music videos and episodes of television — might be seen as a response to the erosion of his public image after the leaking of some controlling, sexist text messages to his former girlfriend. Obviously, I can’t say that with any real authority, but the conflict at the center of its narrative (a much-beloved public figure caught on the cresting wave of a potential scandal), much less the milieu in which it takes place (Hollywood), bears too much similarity not to contextualize it. There’s an elephant in the room and it is a very chatty room. Furthermore, casting Keanu Reeves, one of our best-liked, seemingly personally unassailable stars, as a critical and commercial darling with a troubled relationship to his own fame, is hard to read as anything but transference writ large. Even absent the apparent parallels to the director’s (and co-writer, with Ezra Woods) own life, Outcome is a pointedly topical, inside-baseball kind of look at fame in the digital age, and one that would aspire to be cynical and earnest in equal measure. That’s a delicate balance for the most seasoned of cinematic storytellers, and one that appears to be at least a little beyond Hill’s grasp.
We meet Reef Hawk (Reeves) as a tuxedoed 6-year-old song-and-dance man making his debut on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Cutting to the present, Reef is a multiple Oscar winner and box-office sure thing, but also an isolated man at the tail end of a five-year hiatus from acting. Seemingly steadfast in sobriety, he idles around his hippie-chic beachside bungalow, with high school best friends Xander (Matt Bomer) and Kyle (Cameron Diaz) as his chorus and sounding board. As he prepares to re-enter public life, his crisis attorney Ira (Hill, with massive veneers, a gray beard and garbage-couture fashion sense) bells Reef with news of an impending career-ender. The nature of the material in question is unknown, even to Ira, but he counsels Reef to undertake a journey of amends, to compile a list of people who might hate him and redress their potential grievances. Blindsided, wounded and naive, Reef nonetheless does as he is instructed, which leads to a quasi-Westian (and I mean Nathaniel) journey into the heart of Hollywood darkness, where even his apologies are to be rendered as fodder for a greedy audience.
Stylistically, Outcome is almost as conflicted and self-involved as it is narratively, awash in sterile, gilded lighting and carefully framed glamour shots. There are hints of the seediness underlying the sheen of the celebrity lifestyle, but the resultant unease and tension feel more incidental than intentional. And the tenor of Reef’s relationships — with his intimates, his mother, his ex-girlfriend — caught somewhere between self-awareness and imposed obliviousness, seems to strive for an effect that never quite lands.
The movie is decidedly well-shot, and Hill’s control of scenes, his kinship with his cast, yields moments of narrative maturity that belie his relative inexperience behind the camera. But the scattershot application of satire and disproportionate comic tone cut against the lasting effect of the piece. Which is a shame because Reeves gives a performance here that is unlike anything we may have ever seen from him. As an ageless 50-something caught in the shore-pound of his own fame, he plays Reef with an interiority and sensitivity that transcend the movie’s executions of its intentions. R. 123M. APPLE TV, PEACOCK.
APEX. Director Baltasar Kormákur (Contraband, 2012; Everest, 2015) knows how to deliver a finely crafted image, especially in the age of the drone. He is also clearly a lover and student of the action genre. He may or may not be a great storyteller. For better or worse, Apex doesn’t necessarily need a great, beating narrative heart to work, which it does, but it could certainly be more than it is.
Opening with a truly breathtaking mountaineering sequence on Norway’s Troll Wall (the director playing very much to his strengths), the movie shifts briefly into probably preventable tragedy, the effects of which Sasha (Charlize Theron) would presumably live with in perpetuity.
Five months later, Sasha is charging solo into a part of the Australian outback where, as a park ranger ominously intones, people often go permanently missing. Processing her grief (as I suppose people whom a friend called “mountain-river nerds” so often will) by backcountry kayaking, she is soon caught in the midst of a deadly game (her antagonist calls it a ritual).
As is always the case, Kormákur’s work here is laden with references to some of the landmark adventure-thrillers of the 1990s, which I am all for. And in Theron, the movie boasts one of the truly great action stars of our time, a wizened but ageless stalwart who’s game for anything nature or the enemy can throw at her. By those merits, Apex probably achieves everything we should expect it to: It is suspenseful, pacey, redolent with stunt work and impossible photography. But the menace inherent in its central conflict is never palpable as I would like it to be, and that works against the sheer enjoyment of its old-school wilderness survival picture. R. 95M. NETFLIX.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes, visit catheaters.com and minortheatre.com.
This article appears in Summer of Fun 2026.