Weekly

Robert Pattinson Catches a Predator, Netflix Chases the Unabomber

This week in movies and TV: Primetime turns To Catch a Predator into a period piece, Netflix drops a Unabomber drama, Maika Monroe plays a very wrong governess, and the new releases worth your weekend.

Friday, September 25, 2026 · By MoviesPack

Every so often the release calendar develops a theme without anyone planning it, and this week's is hard to miss. The two biggest new films are both about real men from American television and American newspapers. One is about a host who turned catching criminals into a ratings format. The other is about a criminal who turned newspapers into his delivery system. Even the week's one piece of pure fiction is about a stranger who isn't who she says she is.

It's a week about watching people who shouldn't be trusted, and about what it does to us that we can't look away. Fitting, then, that the rest of the internet spent the week arguing about who gets to own Letterboxd.

The two true stories

Primetime (2026)

Primetime opens in theaters today after festival stops at Fantastic Fest and Beyond Fest, and it is the most interesting idea on the calendar. The setup: it's 2006, and Chris Hansen is building the show that will make him famous, a hidden-camera sting where men arrive at a house expecting a minor and find a TV host with a clipboard instead. Robert Pattinson leads a cast that includes Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo and, of all people, Phoebe Bridgers. What makes this worth your time is the question underneath it. To Catch a Predator was enormously popular and deeply uncomfortable at the same time, a public service that also worked as prime-time entertainment, and nobody at the network seemed very interested in where one ended and the other began. The director, Lance Oppenheim, comes from documentary, which is exactly the background you'd want for a film about the ethics of pointing a camera at people. A movie that just celebrated Hansen would be pointless. A movie that asks what the audience at home was getting out of it could be sharp. Pattinson is also on a run of choosing projects that nobody else would touch. From Good Time onward he has gravitated toward men who are a little too sure of themselves, and a TV host who believes he's making history is right in that lane. The TMDB score is a 6.6 from only a dozen votes, so it tells you nothing yet. If the film's media-hunger angle is what hooks you, Nightcrawler and Network are the two great movies about television eating itself, and the Primetime ratings page will fill in as the opening weekend crowd arrives.

Unabomber (2026)

Netflix counterprograms with Unabomber, out today. It tracks Ted Kaczynski from gifted Harvard student to the most wanted man in America, with a detour through the psychological experiments he was subjected to as an undergraduate and the FBI manhunt that eventually closed in on him decades later. Jacob Tremblay, Russell Crowe and Shailene Woodley lead it, and Janus Metz (who made Borg vs McEnroe) directs. My worry here is the obvious one. The Kaczynski story has been told well already, most recently by the 2017 limited series Manhunt, which built a whole season around the linguistics that cracked the case. What this film has that the series mostly didn't is the Harvard material, the idea that the monster had an origin that runs through an Ivy League lab. That's a real angle, but it's also the kind of angle that can drift into explaining away a man who killed three people. Whether it lands depends on how clear-eyed it stays. It's streaming now, so you can find out tonight: where to watch Unabomber has the details. If it leaves you wanting a procedural that never lets the killer become a character, Zodiac is still the gold standard.

The one that's lying to you

Victorian Psycho (2026)

The week's purest pleasure might be the one with the least baggage. Victorian Psycho also premiered at Fantastic Fest and opens today. Maika Monroe plays Winifred Notty, a young governess who arrives at a remote Gothic manor, and the household slowly begins to suspect she isn't who she claims to be. The title tells you more than the premise does. Monroe has quietly become one of the best faces in modern horror. Since It Follows she has specialized in women whom nobody believes, and it's a smart reversal to cast her as the person the house should be afraid of. With Thomasin McKenzie, Ruth Wilson and Jason Isaacs around her, the cast is far better than the lurid title suggests. If the candlelit, corseted end of horror is your thing, Crimson Peak and The Others are the obvious companions.

Also out, already on your couch

The Love Hypothesis (2026)

Last week I flagged it as coming. Now The Love Hypothesis is the most popular new release in our database this week, and by a wide margin. It arrived on Prime Video on Wednesday: a biology PhD student and a notoriously difficult young professor fake a relationship, and both of their tidy theories about love stop holding up. Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman star, and Claire Scanlon directs, which matters because she made Set It Up, one of the few streaming romcoms of the last decade that people actually rewatch. It sits at an 8.1 from 82 votes, which for a romcom this early is a real signal that fans of the book are happy. Where to watch it is simple: Prime Video, tonight. The rest of the week is smaller. One Last Shot hit digital on Tuesday and is the third of Scott Adkins and director James Nunn's lean action films, this time with a Navy SEAL trying to stop mercenaries, led by an old comrade gone bad, from knocking out the country's missile defense. Dolph Lundgren is in it, which is either a selling point or a warning, depending on your household. And Heart of the Beast, the plane-crash survival film with the soldier and his dog that I mentioned last week, is now out and holding a 7.7 from early viewers, better than I expected. If you skipped Resident Evil last weekend, it's still the one studio horror film worth leaving the house for.

What's worth your couch time

Lanterns and MobLand are neck and neck at the top of the scripted TV chart, and I've given up being surprised by the first one. MobLand, the Brosnan and Mirren show, continues to feel like the kind of expensive, glowering crime drama HBO used to own. Slow Horses remains the best show on Apple TV that nobody in your office has watched, and American Horror Story is back in rotation for spooky season whether you asked or not.

The nicest little moment on Reddit this week was someone confessing they'd dodged Ted Lasso for years out of pure stubbornness, finally caved, and admitted they'd been completely wrong. If you're one of the holdouts, that's your permission.

Coming next

October 2 is still the big date. Iñárritu's Digger, with Tom Cruise as the most powerful man in the world, and Michael Showalter's Verity, with Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, open the same day, and that's a genuinely good weekend for adults who want to go to the movies.

October 9 continues this week's theme in the most direct way possible. Aaron Sorkin returns to Facebook with The Social Reckoning, following whistleblower Frances Haugen as she works with a Wall Street Journal reporter to expose what the company knew. Jeremy Strong, Mikey Madison and Jeremy Allen White star. Sorkin writing about Facebook a second time, sixteen years after The Social Network, is the kind of sequel nobody formally asked for and everybody will see. Rob Savage's Other Mommy lands the same day, and on r/horror people spent the week pointing out the Coraline echo in its premise. A week later comes the Street Fighter reboot, set in 1993 with Ryu, Ken and Chun-Li, and Georgia Oakley's Sense and Sensibility with Daisy Edgar-Jones.

One correction to last week. Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love, his first film since Burning, isn't actually out yet in the US. It plays the New York Film Festival this weekend, reaches theaters October 23, and lands on Netflix November 6. Worth the wait; Lee has never made a bad film.

What everyone's talking about

Primetime owned r/movies this week. It got its own official discussion thread on top of the weekly megathread, and one of the most-shared links was a breakdown of what the film invents and what it takes from the actual broadcasts. That's usually the sign of a real-events movie people are taking seriously: the arguments move from "was it good" to "did it happen."

The theme kept going. A trailer dropped for Alex Gibney's documentary Musk, and the Elizabeth Holmes documentary picked up an R rating. The busiest industry story, though, was Letterboxd being put up for sale, with A24, Sony and The New York Times all reported among the interested bidders and the opening price floated at $300 million. Film fans reacted the way you'd expect when the one social network they actually like might get a new owner. The Paramount and Warner Bros. merger also hit another wall, with a judge letting opponents challenge the antitrust settlement.

On r/television the mood was lighter than last week's merger-paperwork gloom. The Black Doves season two trailer arrived, Beast in Me got renewed, and even Lee Child admitted he isn't sure how Prime Video will film the grisly story lined up for Reacher's fifth season. Over on r/horror, Resident Evil still had the busiest discussion thread, and the most relatable post of the week was a fan who loved Weapons and Barbarian asking what to watch next. Our Discover tool exists precisely for that question.

The bottom line

If you go out once, make it Primetime. It's the rare real-life story that seems more interested in the audience than the hero. If you stay home, it's a choice between Unabomber on Netflix and The Love Hypothesis on Prime Video, which is about as clean a split between two moods as a week can offer. And save the energy for October 2. The fall movie season finally starts for real.

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