Weekly

Clayface, Klara and a Husband Made of Wicker

This week in movies and TV: Clayface, Klara and the Sun, Wildwood and Wicker all open in theaters, Masterplan tops Prime Video, plus the new releases coming next and what everyone is talking about online.

Friday, October 23, 2026 · By MoviesPack

Four movies open in American theaters today, and every one of them is about a person who was built. A movie star gets his face rebuilt out of something that won't stay put. A robot is sold to a family as a friend for their sick daughter. A lonely fisherwoman pays a craftsman to weave her a husband. And the fourth, a family fantasy from the stop-motion studio Laika, was itself built by hand, one puppet and one frame at a time.

Nobody planned this. Release calendars are decided by box-office math, not themes. But it's hard not to read something into a weekend where Hollywood keeps asking the same question in four different genres: if you could make a person to order, what would you get, and would it love you back? The answers range from body horror to a fairy tale, and that range is the best thing about the week.

Before that, a quick look back. Last week I warned that Whalefall's early 7.6 was built on seventeen votes. It's now at 6.6 on nearly ninety. The pattern holds: early scores are the opinion of the people who wanted the movie most. Read every number below with that in mind.

The one that won't hold its shape

Clayface (2026)

DC's next swing is a horror movie, and that's the most interesting decision anyone at the studio has made in a while. Matt Hagen climbs out of the Gotham streets to become a Hollywood leading man, until a crime boss leaves him disfigured. Desperate, he signs up for an experimental treatment that gives him his face back. It also starts dissolving his grip on what's real, and the comeback curdles into revenge. The setup is pure Universal monster, a vain man and a cure that costs more than the disease, and the person steering it explains why it might actually work. Clayface is directed by James Watkins, who made Eden Lake and the 2024 remake of Speak No Evil. Watkins is good at one thing above all: making you watch someone's composure crack in real time. That's exactly the job here. Tom Rhys Harries plays Hagen, with Naomi Ackie and Eddie Marsan in support, and nobody in the cast is a superhero-movie regular. That's a feature. It's the most popular of today's openers in our database, with a 7.4 on about fifty votes since its Los Angeles premiere, a real enough sample to say the early crowd isn't just being polite. r/movies gave it its own spoiler discussion thread on top of the weekly megathread, which is the forum's way of saying people have things to argue about. If the movie lands for you, the right double bill isn't a comic book film at all. It's The Fly, the gold standard for a man undone by his own body, or A Different Man, which asks what a new face does to the person wearing it. Batman fans who want Gotham's version of this character should go straight to Batman: The Animated Series, whose two-part Clayface story is still the reference point.

The one that's sold as a friend

Klara and the Sun (2026)

Last week I said the word "hope" in this movie's description was doing a lot of quiet, devastating work. Here's the part I didn't dwell on: the director is Taika Waititi. Yes, the Thor: Ragnarok guy. He's adapting Kazuo Ishiguro, the most restrained writer alive, a man whose novels are sad precisely because nobody in them raises their voice. The premise is simple. Klara is an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered robot companion, chosen from a shop to keep a sick teenager company. She watches the family closely, the way a machine would, and slowly comes to understand how much grief is in that house. Jenna Ortega plays Klara, which is inspired casting for a character who has to be unreadable and warm at once. Amy Adams plays the mother. Waititi has done this kind of tonal tightrope before. Jojo Rabbit was a comedy about a Hitler Youth kid that ended up being about a mother's love, and it worked better than it had any right to. Whether his instinct for a joke helps or wrecks something as fragile as Ishiguro is the real question. There are only three votes on the board, so nobody can tell you yet. If you've read the book, you already know whether you're going. If you want the companion piece first, Never Let Me Go is the other great Ishiguro adaptation, and you can check where to watch Klara and the Sun once it leaves theaters. For the colder, scarier version of a made-to-order companion, Ex Machina still has teeth.

The one built by hand

Wildwood (2026)

Here's the premise in a breath. A girl named Prue and her classmate Curtis are drawn into an enchanted forest, where they need to rescue Prue's kidnapped baby brother from a mysterious woman named Alexandra. Carey Mulligan and Mahershala Ali are in the voice cast, Travis Knight directs, and it runs 140 minutes, which is enormous for stop-motion. I wrote about the crow sequence last week, so here's the new detail. Knight told interviewers this week that Wildwood took sixteen years to reach the screen. Sixteen years is longer than most of its target audience has been alive. It sits at an 8.9 on a tiny sample, so ignore the number and trust the studio: Laika made Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, and it has never made a lazy film. In a week full of characters who were manufactured, this is the one movie where you can see the fingerprints, and that's the point.

Also out, briefly

The strangest of the four is Wicker, and I mean that as a compliment. Olivia Colman plays a seaside fisherwoman, mocked by her neighbors for being smelly and single, who finally has enough and commissions a basket weaver (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband out of wicker. Alexander Skarsgård plays the husband. The town does not take it well. After a festival run that started at Sundance in January, Wicker finally reaches US theaters today, and it's either the sweetest or the most unhinged romance of the year. With that cast, I'd bet on both. If you hear "wicker" and think of something much darker, that's the 1973 Wicker Man, and no, this isn't that.

Also opening today is A Talent for Murder, which our database still lists under its working title, Switzerland. Helen Mirren plays Patricia Highsmith, and a young man (Alden Ehrenreich) travels from New York to her Swiss home to talk her into one last Tom Ripley novel. His persuasion slowly turns into something more sinister, which is exactly what Highsmith would have written. Put it next to The Talented Mr. Ripley for a perfect pairing, and check where to watch it if it's not near you.

John Turturro is The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, an aging thief whose trade has been ruined by credit cards, who lifts the wrong USB stick from the wrong crime family. Giancarlo Esposito co-stars. It's in New York and Los Angeles today and opens wider on October 30, so keep it on your list.

The one you can watch tonight

The most popular new movie in our database isn't in theaters at all. Masterplan dropped on Prime Video on October 16. Stanley Tucci plays a legendary thief who wants the Mona Lisa and recruits two young strangers to help, then reveals that they're siblings and he's their father. It's a heist movie that's really a dysfunctional-family comedy, sitting at 6.9 on nearly 140 votes. Tucci being suave in Europe is a genre unto itself. For the classic version of the art heist, The Thomas Crown Affair is still the smoothest.

Netflix's pick of the week is The Storm, a Swedish comedy about a 45th birthday dinner on a remote farm that goes very wrong when a storm traps everyone inside and the polite masks start slipping. It stars Gustaf Skarsgård, which means two Skarsgård brothers have new releases the same week, one of them made of wicker. If you liked the dinner-party-from-hell energy of Triangle of Sadness or Force Majeure, this is your next stream.

What's worth your couch time

TMDB's on-the-air list is the usual wall of procedurals and talk shows, but a few things stand out. VisionQuest is still Disney+'s big event, and its TMDB score has come down from a 9.1 to about 8.8 as more people watch, which is still very high. Meanwhile MobLand is back on the air with Tom Hardy's crime family, and Stallone's Tulsa King is running alongside it, so it's a strong month for anyone who likes gangsters with bad tempers. And anime fans have a new obsession in Dragon Ball Super: Beerus, a new series named after the franchise's cat-like God of Destruction, sitting at a remarkable 9.7 on TMDB less than two weeks in. Start with Dragon Ball Super if you need the background.

On r/television, the biggest news was about the future. Mike Flanagan's Carrie got a second season at Prime Video. HBO's Harry Potter series is reportedly costing around $25 million an episode, which puts it in final-season Game of Thrones territory (you can rank the GOT eras while you wait for the boy wizard). And IT: Welcome to Derry season two will be set in 1935 with a gang of bank robbers, pitched by its showrunner as a gangster picture through Pennywise's eyes. That's a great hook.

Coming next

Next Friday, October 30, belongs to Liam Neeson. In The Mongoose, a falsely accused war hero leads police on a cross-country car chase broadcast live on television, with his old Special Forces unit helping and the public rooting for him. Marisa Tomei and Ving Rhames co-star. Neeson's late-career run has been uneven since Taken, but a televised chase is a good, simple engine, and simple is where he's best.

The week after is stacked. On November 5, Ramayana: Rise of a Legend opens in the US, Nitesh Tiwari's adaptation of the Hindu epic with Ranbir Kapoor and Yash, at more than three hours long. On November 6, Martin McDonagh returns with Wild Horse Nine, sending two CIA agents to Easter Island just before the 1973 Chilean coup, with Sam Rockwell, John Malkovich and Steve Buscemi in the cast. McDonagh made In Bruges and The Banshees of Inisherin, and a dark comedy about spies with Rockwell is about as safe a bet as this season gets. The same day brings an animated The Cat in the Hat with Bill Hader as the Cat, plus a new Looney Tunes short in front of it, and the wide release of Godzilla Minus Zero. Director Takashi Yamazaki said this week that the sequel draws on Aliens and Terminator 2, which is the right pair of models for a sequel that has to go bigger without losing its nerve.

What everyone's talking about

This week's r/movies megathread bundled all four of today's openers, with Clayface and Wildwood earning separate discussion threads. But much of the forum's energy went elsewhere. Tom Skerritt died at 93, and the tributes kept coming back to Alien, where he played the captain of the Nostromo, and Top Gun. Amazon is reportedly running final screen tests for the next James Bond, with Jack Lowden, Callum Turner and Josh O'Connor among the names, and the casting arguments write themselves.

The money stories were louder. Star Wars: Starfighter has reportedly already cost $226.5 million to shoot, more than The Force Awakens over the same stretch. Elon Musk is reportedly putting $1 billion into Skydance. And Sony is pulling out of the 4K Blu-ray player business, which hit physical-media collectors hard. On a lighter note, Dune turned five, the first image of Dwayne Johnson as the Chicken Man in Benny Safdie's Lizard Music made the rounds, and Halloweentown 5 is in the works at Disney. And Resident Evil, Zach Cregger's take, hits digital on November 3 for anyone who skipped it in theaters.

Television nostalgia filled the rest: people praised the Scrubs revival's second season, and a thread on The Sopranos argued it rewards rewatching more than almost any show ever made. Hard to disagree. If you'd rather skip the discourse, our Discover tool will pick something for you in about ten seconds.

The bottom line

Going out? See Clayface if you want to be unsettled, and Wildwood if you want to be amazed by something made by hand. Klara and the Sun is the gamble of the week, and Wicker is the one you'll still be describing to friends on Monday. Staying in, Masterplan is an easy, charming night with Stanley Tucci. Next week, Liam Neeson drives very fast on live TV.

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