New movies to watch this weekend: See 'The Social Reckoning' in theaters, rent or buy 'Spider-Man: Brand New Day,' stream 'Animals' on Netflix

Welcome to Trust Me, I Watch Everything , a weekly guide to notable new movies opening or becoming available each Friday.

This week brings two buzzy theatrical releases: The Social Reckoning , a follow-up to The Social Network that has Jeremy Strong taking over the Mark Zuckerberg role from Jesse Eisenberg, and Other Mommy , Jessica Chastain's jump-scare-heavy horror. (If you're looking for more chills this Halloween season, consult my spine-tingling recommendations here .)

If you'd prefer a movie night at night, you can now rent or buy Spider-Man: Brand New Day — though, given it's the highest-grossing film in U.S. box office history, it stands to reason most folks have already seen it. And over on streaming, Ben Affleck is doing double duty as star and director of the kidnapping drama Animals , while John Cena and Jessica Biel try to milk an action movie out of Matchbox cars.

Why I was underwhelmed: The Social Network is one of the great films of the 2010s. Written by esteemed playwright and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, directed by auteur David Fincher and featuring an instantly iconic score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the movie depicts the dawn of a new hyper-digital era. Years later, it maintains an eerie prescience.

Given all that, it's not entirely fair to compare The Social Network to its new sequel, The Social Reckoning . But the movie's complete lack of visual style and embarrassingly generic score are, unfortunately, constant reminders that David Fincher and the Nine Inch Nails boys are nowhere to be found this time. Instead, the new movie is written and directed by Aaron Sorkin — and is a case study in the impact a talented director has on a film, even when the writer brings a lot to the table. (Oddly enough, Fincher was busy making a sequel to another beloved movie, Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, despite having no involvement with the original.)

The Social Reckoning follows Frances Haugen , a young Facebook engineer played by 2025 Best Actress Osca r winner Mikey Madison, who crosses paths with Jeff Horwitz, a Wall Street Journal reporter played by The Bear heartthrob Jeremy Allen White, and winds up blowing the whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets. Essentially, it's a journalism movie about the Facebook Files , a series of investigative reports from the Journal that revealed internal findings about the company's platforms, including indictations that Instagram had negative effects on teen mental health and how its algorithm exposed users to misinformation and extremist content.

There has been ample material to work with in the years since we last checked in with Mark Zuckerberg, who is now played by notoriously intense method actor Jeremy Strong, in an impressively strange performance that makes Zuck out to be more space alien than human and someone who prizes profits and growth over everything. The Facebook Files revelations made The Social Network an even more important movie in retrospect, and you can feel Reckoning straining for the same status. The problem is, you can't set out to write an Important Movie, and Sorkin doesn't seem willing to leave that judgment to the masses.

There's a ham-fisted quality to the way Sorkin connects characters in his movie to actual events — I didn't expect the movie to heavily involve Jan. 6, though I can see why it does — and despite its earnestness, there were chuckles at my screening when a minor character introduced early in the film reappeared to drive home a key message. Though I appreciate a movie tackling important issues like what Facebook has historically gotten away with, the treatment here is simply too pat and on-the-nose.

The biggest problem with The Social Reckoning lies outside the film: Our current reality undercuts the entire notion that there was any sort of "reckoning" for Facebook or Zuckerberg. Sure, people found out about their misdeeds, but it only had a minimal effect on Meta's bottom line , and the company is still thriving today.

The movie desperately wants a happy ending, one in which you can imagine a character punching the air in a cinematic moment of victory, a gesture that rings hollow if you are alive in the world today. The Social Reckoning looks and feels more like a cheap knockoff TV movie follow-up to The Social Network than a real, expensive movie made by the same studio that produced the original. It tells an important story, but without any of the verve that made Fincher's film stand the test of time.

What other critics are saying: Reviews are mixed. Robbie Collin at the Telegraph writes that Sorkin "has made a doggedly conventional and old-fashioned journalistic procedural." Time's Stephanie Zacharek was kinder, writing, "Frances Haugen is the conscience and the true hero of The Social Reckoning , and Sorkin knows it. He practically hands the movie over to Madison, and even in a movie filled with talking, it's her stalwart yet unassuming presence that makes it sing."

How to watch: The Social Reckoning is now playing in theaters nationwide .

Why it's a mixed bag: The creepy trailer for Other Mommy debuted ahead of Universal's big summer blockbuster The Odyssey, which means that damn near everybody became suddenly very aware of the Jessica Chastain-starring horror movie. It ended up catching unsuspecting moviegoers off guard with a pretty shocking jump scare.

A young girl forms a relationship with a sinister entity in her home that looks uncannily like her own mother — I'm seeing double! Four Jessica Chastains! — drawing her into a terrifying and increasingly dark world. The Other Mommy entity wants the girl to let her into the girl's heart, presumably to take over her body and assume human form.

If that sounds like it's ripe material for a "metaphorror" movie, a horror movie whose terrors are actually standing in for some sort of real-world trauma, you'd be correct. This attempt at realism clashes with the dark fairy tale dream — or rather, nightmare — logic that rears its head throughout.

Rob Savage directs the hell out of it, his whacked-out visual language and swirling camerawork rendering a shot of a girl rifling through a freezer interesting, and deploying a 360-degree tracking shot to put us in the POV of a girl on a tire swing. Transitions between scenes are similarly gonzo.

I actually found all the spooky stuff associated with the entity, like the way it wears people like skin suits and the uniquely chilling disintegration that occurs when it changes form, pretty effective.

The biggest problem with Other Mommy is that it's all over the place. It takes an Insidious detour for a bit, turns onto the It freeway , and its ever-expanding nightmare logic gives way to some A Nightmare on Elm Street- style side quests, which are effective but don't exactly jibe with the reality of the scenes. The rules here are just inconsistent — the entity can apparently do anything to anyone, even at a crowded party — in a way that's distracting more than it is disturbing.

I appreciated Other Mommy taking some bold swings and trying to get at very real issues regarding motherhood, but it overcomplicates things with human melodrama that feels unnecessary and underdeveloped. An expositional monologue that flatly explains the correlations between the entity and the little girl's worldview just bogs everything down.

Other Mommy works better as a series of horror set pieces than it does as a coherent treatise on the loss of identity and freedom that occurs when one chooses to become a mother. And that's fine, though I fear the movie gives away its biggest jump scare in the marketing, and it never really matches that pure shock energy again.

What other critics are saying: Reviews are not kind. Variety's Siddhant Adlakha says it's "among the most limp and ineffectual works to grace the screen this year, misfiring in every direction, including and especially its tone." Richard Lawson at the Hollywood Reporter writes, "The film is missing a sense of dreadful build-up that might help its scares sink in deeper. As is, Savage's film is an attractive but mostly vacuous collection of jumpy bits and half-baked mythology."

How to watch: Other Mommy is now playing in theaters nationwide.

The biggest release: Spider-Man: Brand New Day

Why I didn't like it: It takes about three minutes before Spider-Man is shown next to a Little Caesars box, and a couple more minutes for him to order another one. A few minutes later, he's framed next to some Bero, Tom Holland's booze-free beer, at the bodega. We get it — this is corporate-branded big business more than it is entertainment, merely a vehicle to sell more whatever. Call it Spider-Man: New Brand Day!

This is certainly an annoying thing to complain about — I remember all of Tobey Maguire's Sony-branded gear from the Sam Raimi movies, but having a Sony laptop doesn't break immersion; flashing a bright orange pizza box twice in what feels like 90 seconds does. It also really speaks to the major problem with the modern-day MCU: This movie feels as impersonal as possible, and the entire endeavor is so clearly a means to an end.

It's emblematic of another issue that plagues Marvel: Even when it's not doing blatant in-your-face product placement, it's doing tacit product placement. What is the inclusion of Frank Castle if not an in-movie ad for The Punisher, now streaming on Disney+? As someone who checked out of the MCU right around the time they pivoted to "You better watch this Disney+ show if you want the full experience," I have no idea why Jon Bernthal's very silly take on The Punisher is in this movie, other than some brand synergy play. I love the guy, but his performance reeks of "this belongs on television."

The villain, kept secret in the marketing, feels similarly shoehorned in, but clearly ties this movie to the next big Marvel release, Avengers: Payday, or whatever it's called. The entire modus operandi of the MCU is to keep viewers invested in the next thing; otherwise, the whole project crumbles.

This helps explain why Tom Holland's MCU Spider-Man, despite a decade as the character and four mainline movies , has never really felt like the star of his own show, even though Spidey is the most popular superhero in the world. In Homecoming, he's introduced as Tony Stark Jr.; in No Way Home, he literally gets sidelined so past Spider-Men (Spiders-Man?) can get some applause.

In the self-serious slog that is Brand New Day, which announces itself as such with a more melancholic Marvel Studios logo than usual, decent storytelling and stakes are nowhere to be found; things just happen arbitrarily as the movie lumbers along with zero tension. Don't confuse "it has no story" for "it has no plot" — the movie is all plot! (Here, most of it centers on everyone — even his loved ones — forgetting all about Peter Parker as he confronts a new villain.)

When the movie is actually engaging with the characters we care about, like MJ and Ned, it's far better for it. More often than not, it's off on some tangent with Frank Castle. Or teasing out the villain, who is so obvious from the jump that all the laborious build-up lacks tension, no matter how cool some of the mind-control stuff gets. By the end, it's clear Spider-Man has taken a backseat in a Spider-Man movie yet again. Call me old-fashioned, but I think Spider-Man movies should be about Spider-Man and not a backdoor pilot for something else.

What other critics are saying: It's very well-reviewed overall. Stephanie Zacharek at Time says the film, "at the very least, shows some awareness that actors, and not excessive, soul-killing special effects, are what will keep drawing us to the movies." Rolling Stone's David Fear was more on my wavelength, however, writing that "the movie keeps getting tangled in a complicated web of its own making, one that feels all too familiar after several decades of superhero cinema sucking up the cultural oxygen."

How to watch: Spider-Man: Brand New Day is available to rent or buy on Apple TV , Prime Video and other VOD platforms.

Why I liked it, with reservations: Onslaught sees filmmaker Adam Wingard returning to his roots, giving up a Godzilla vs. Kong- sized studio blockbuster budget to instead make a relatively cheap and dirty '80s-style exploitation movie throwback, complete with John Carpenter movie font for its opening titles. Wingard has teased that the movie takes place in the same town as his cult favorite The Guest, and both feature Dan Stevens in different key roles. But make no mistake: Onslaught is 100% Adria Arjona's movie.

Onslaught is a delightfully unsubtle exploitation action horror movie about a U.S. government that's controlled by Nazis, killing its own citizens and manipulating its veterans. When a rogue squad of genetically engineered super-soldiers breaks loose in the desert, a badass Army sniper (Arjona) must unleash hell to protect her young daughter. The three super-soldiers are given the slasher-movie villain treatment; they're unstoppable killing machines who act like "heat-seeking missiles" toward whatever their objective may be. Imagine The Terminator, but there are three of them!

It's a lot of fun if you're into this sort of thing, and the constantly pulsing imitation John Carpenter synth score makes it feel bigger than it actually is. The biggest issue with the movie is entirely self-imposed: It prominently features a countdown clock ticking down to a sequence that ultimately doesn't live up to expectations when time runs out.

It feels like it's missing a barnburner finale, even if the gunplay and action are otherwise satisfying enough. Had the movie not insisted upon repeatedly saying "buckle up, audience, you're not going to believe this s**t," maybe the ending would've been thrilling enough. But after all that build-up, it can't help but feel like a bit of a letdown.

There's so much going on in the periphery of this movie. Rebecca Hall's character is a hoot but underutilized, Drew Starkey's goofy subplot really made me laugh but felt misplaced and Dan Stevens's evil Nazi doctor looks like an anime villain. It's a shame that it all comes off a little too straightforward, despite these occasional wacky elements.

Onslaught is perfectly entertaining for what it is, though it feels like the movie fails on its own terms by not living up to the expectations it set up for itself. It's as if Babe Ruth stepped up to the plate, called his shot and then hit a double. You'd appreciate that he got on base, but you'd probably be a little underwhelmed.

What other critics are saying : The reviews skew positive, but there are plenty of naysayers. T he Daily Beast's Nick Schager calls it "a hodgepodge of everything genre fans adore." Jake Coyle at the AP, however, writes that, "Even though Onslaught begins with a clock that's already ticking below 12 hours, the movie takes its time leading to a bloody finale that isn't quite worth the drumbeat."

How to watch: Onslaught is available to rent or buy on Apple TV , Prime Video and other VOD platforms.

Insidious: Out of the Further : The sixth entry in this long-running franchise features some of the most memorable scare sequences in the entire series. Gemma, a young mother raising her daughter in the house where she grew up, discovers she can travel to The Further, the purgatorial realm of lost souls at the heart of the Insidious universe. When something evil comes after her, Gemma discovers an ability that changes everything: She doesn't just enter The Further; she can bring back what lives there to the real world. Once the demons realize her power, our world becomes their playground. It's a clever standalone entry that stays true to the spirit of these movies and, more importantly, delivers spooky set pieces one after another. Read my full review here . Rent or buy.

Fall 2: Deadpoint : 2022's Fall made your palms sweaty in the way all good survival horror does. The situation in which two girls are stuck 2,000 feet in the air on a radio tower is inherently terrifying, and the movie succeeds despite its cheapness and occasional bad CGI and phony green-screen effects. It largely looks convincing and made me yell out loud multiple times. If you're even mildly afraid of heights, it'll mess you up. Fall 2: Deadpoint works for the same reasons, and really pushes the limits of how silly a B-movie can get as long as it's delivering the goods. But it's brisk and has enough thrills to recommend to fans of the original and/or the genre . Read my full review here . Rent or buy.

Colony: The director of the South Korean hit Train to Busan is back with a new zombie movie that does just enough with the genre to make it feel exciting again. Trapped inside a sealed building during a deadly bioterrorist attack, a desperate group of survivors must navigate growing panic and betrayal as they fight to stay alive. The novel idea here is that the zombies are a hivemind, so when one zombie learns new information about how to attack its prey, all the zombies "update" with that intel in real time. That twist, plus the idea of an evil villain controlling the zombies and starting the outbreak itself, gives it a freshness other zombie films lack. Colony also pays homage to genre classics, from George Romero to Resident Evil and The Last of Us, while charting its own path. It's a blast! Rent or buy.

📺 Movies newly available on streaming services you may already have

Why you should just watch High and Low instead : Ben Affleck's Animals, despite not being credited as such, is absolutely a remake of Akira Kurosawa's classic High and Low, which, oddly, was already remade just last year by Spike Lee with Denzel Washington starring. Steven Soderbergh also did a miniseries a few years ago called Full Circle, loosely inspired by the 1963 Japanese favorite.

Given all that, Animals never makes a case for its existence in a world where this exact story has been told many times. When the son of an L.A. mayoral candidate is kidnapped, he and his wife have a few hours to come up with the ransom payment. With most of their money spent on his political campaign, they have to get their hands dirty and expose a side of their lives they never intended to see the light of day.

The plot unfolds exactly as you'd expect it to if you've seen the original, the Spike Lee one or the Soderbergh series — so spoiler alert, I suppose, if you've managed to avoid all of those. It turns out they kidnapped the wrong kid, and now the family's very emotional ordeal becomes more of a moral dilemma, as Affleck's character must decide whether he wants to give away all his money to save someone else's child.

The elements unique to Affleck's West Coast edition of High and Low are the specifics surrounding the kidnapped child's family. It's the son of Affleck's housekeeper and her undocumented immigrant husband who gets snatched, which poses a political liability for his mayoral candidate character.

These details are meant to complicate things and show how fake and hypocritical politicians can be, I suppose, but the movie doesn't engage with that meaningfully for very long. It's all just so flat.

Animals may entertain if you've never seen the original High and Low or any of its imitators. For the rest of us, it's an unsatisfying return to the material that brings nothing newly compelling to the table.

What other critics are saying : Reviews aren't super kind. AP's Jake Coyle writes, "Affleck is a savvy and thoughtful filmmaker who can deftly weave human stories, genre mechanics and social issues together. But Animals feels narratively underpowered and melodramatically forced." Jesse Hassenger at the Guardian writes, "This is a movie that just wants to get the job done with frictionless likability, with seemingly no one inquiring about why."

How to watch: Animals is now streaming on Netflix.

Why it's a mixed bag: Matchbox: The Movie is perhaps a foreboding sign of what's to come under David Ellison's Skydance, which produced this movie before it became the conjoined home of Paramount and Warner Bros.

It's a cynical, crass and often embarrassing attempt to turn a child's toy into a viable franchise IP à la Barbie, another Mattel production. In this case, the children's playthings are Matchbox toy cars, and the way the movie incorporates them is almost impressively lazy, especially considering how quickly all those details are dropped entirely.

After hostiles abduct former soldier Sean Walker (John Cena) to locate a nuclear warhead, the CIA suspects his involvement. Later, Walker and his childhood friends (Jessica Biel, Sam Richardson, Arturo Castro and Teyonah Parris) plot to reclaim the bomb and clear their names.

If you're wondering, "What the hell does this have to do with Matchbox?" the answer is "Not much!" The film opens with the characters as children, and the kid version of Cena's character aims to win the heart of Child Jessica Biel by … buying her the exact Matchbox car that she desperately wants.

Thankfully, her uncle, played by the wonderful Bill Camp, is there to provide ad copy, telling us the company's origins with dialogue about how the very first Matchbox car was actually a gift. Something about "a father wanting to make his daughter smile," but because of the rules of her school, he had to make the car small enough to fit in a matchbox, so he got creative.

Cut to adulthood, and when this uncle dies, these childhood friends come together and somberly place Matchbox cars on his grave. Cena, who is now some sort of mercenary, shows up and drags everyone into action set pieces.

The reason this review isn't a total evisceration and is instead more of a light pan is that they got action director Sam Hargrave, the guy behind Netflix's Extraction movies with Chris Hemsworth, to make it. The action here is actually pretty good and occasionally exciting, delivering far better thrills than your average streaming-era A-list mockbuster. It's much slicker than you'd think it would be, and the comedy between the friends works fairly well too, especially as the set pieces get bigger and crazier and the non-action heroes get to do action hero stuff.

Unfortunately, none of that masks the fact that this is just a generic globe-trotting action-adventure movie with some marketing copy sprinkled in. Anytime it strains for emotional resonance, it falls flat. It's a sad state of affairs that the easiest way to get an expensive action movie made these days is to make it sponsored content and toss it on streaming.

Matchbox: The Movie delivers where it counts, and if you're in the mood for some expensive-looking action, you can do far worse while scrolling through Apple TV's original movies catalog. It remains funny that Matchbox factors into this so little that it plays like they only retroactively called it that after the company got wind of their upcoming Generic Action Movie.

What other critics are saying: They're largely meaner than I was, but some agree it's better than you'd think. Ben Lee at the Guardian writes, "A plasticky, unenthused Cena is stuck in autopilot once again while a similarly flat Biel, bizarrely choosing this as her first film in almost a decade, makes zero effort to convincingly play anyone but herself." TheWrap's William Bibbiani writes, " Matchbox: The Movie is one of the most entertaining generic streaming action comedies, which says very little."

How to watch: Matchbox: The Movie is now streaming on Apple TV.

Oasis: Don't Look Back in Anger: I never got into Oasis and only know the hits, but that doesn't matter in the slightest here somehow. I found this to be a deeply moving and emotional experience about the transcendent joy of seeing your favorite band live and the importance of the communal concertgoing experience. Fans are in for a real treat! Now streaming on Disney+ .

V/H/S/Mixtape: The latest entry in the long-running found-footage horror anthology series is unfortunately a weaker one, especially coming off the heels of the excellent V/H/S/Halloween. The first short is notable for featuring some Jim Henson puppets, but the premise is tired and familiar. The rest are completely forgettable, except for the last short, Death Tone, directed by RZA, which features gore so nasty that I had to look away. Your mileage may vary! Now streaming on Shudder .

Disclosure Day: Disclosure Day was positioned not just as a major summer blockbuster, but as the return of the Steven Spielberg summer blockbuster, 51 years after Jaws. Audiences were unfortunately primed for disappointment, as Spielberg's latest extraterrestrial adventure is far from his greatest. Read my full review here . Now streaming on Peacock .

That's all for this week! We'll see you next Friday, when the big releases are Street Fighter, Whalefall and Sense and Sensibility .

Looking for more recs? Find your next watch on the Yahoo 100 , our daily list of the most popular movies of the year.