New movies to watch this weekend: See 'The Dog Stars' in theaters, rent 'Her Private Hell,' stream 'The Whisper Man' on Netflix

Welcome to Trust Me, I Watch Everything , a weekly guide to all the new movies out each Friday.

This week's biggest release is The Dog Stars, a Ridley Scott-directed, post-apocalyptic drama starring Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin and Guy Pearce. But the film with the most buzz has to be the hybrid live-action/animated movie Coyote vs. Acme , which almost didn't make it to screens at all.

If you'd rather stay home, you can now rent or buy Her Private Hell, the new film from Nicolas Winding Refn, or Motor City, an Alan Ritchson action vehicle.

Want to stick to a streaming service you're likely already paying for? The Whisper Man , with Adam Scott and Robert De Niro, debuts on Netflix, and Desert Warrior , the Saudi Arabian historical epic starring Anthony Mackie, makes its way to Hulu.

Why you should skip it: Ridley Scott's post-apocalyptic "thriller" — I put that in quotes for a reason — is not the action-heavy sci-fi flick that the trailers are selling. To put it simply, The Dog Stars is a shockingly derivative work that audiences have seen before, and there's just not enough variation or anything unique done with the subject matter here to recommend it.

Based on the 2012 book of the same name , The Dog Stars is set in a world ravaged by a pandemic. A widowed man (a brooding Jacob Elordi) lives a lonesome existence in a Colorado airplane hangar with his dog and a dour gunman he has befriended (Josh Brolin). When a mysterious transmission comes over the radio while he's flying his old Cessna, it sparks a hunt for the source of the sound.

It's every bit as generic as that sounds, and there unfortunately aren't any real surprises along the way. Despite admirable work from the cast, it never fully grabs you. It's so dull that I found my mind wandering to the question of why anybody would make this particular movie in 2026. There are obvious COVID parallels, but the film doesn't do anything with them. It feels dated and so familiar that it constantly begs the question: why?!

The biggest problem with it is that it lacks propulsiveness, or any sort of energy, really, until it's far too late. There's some action and excitement in the third act, which is well-staged in typical Ridley Scott fashion, though it feels at odds with the more grounded, melancholic, character-focused drama that makes up the rest of the film. The script is the biggest issue here, as the characters come off as archetypes more than real people. Scott is a strong enough director that his contributions, including some stunning aerial photography, do impress even when the rest is boring you to tears.

The Dog Stars does come to life at a certain point toward the end of its punishing 2-hour runtime — an uncanny sequence with Allison Janney has more verve than the rest of them combined — but the rest is as forgettable as movies get.

What other critics are saying : It's getting brutal reviews. TheWrap's William Bibbiani writes, "There are way too many faults in these Stars . Woof." Monica Castillo at the AV Club adds, "This messy look at the end of the world isn't Scott's darkest film, but it's one of his worst misfires."

How to watch : The Dog Stars is now playing in theaters nationwide.

Why I liked it: It's been three years since Warner Bros. decided that Coyote vs. Acme would be better for the company's bottom line if it were shelved indefinitely for a tax write-off rather than get a theatrical or even a streaming release.

Now, thanks to a smaller independent movie production company called Ketchup Entertainment — which also rescued another Looney Tunes movie that WB put on the chopping block, 2024's The Day the Earth Blew Up featuring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig — Coyote vs. Acme is triumphantly back from the dead.

The great irony of the entire ordeal, which led to tons of backlash for Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav and a groundswell of protests, online and in-person , demanding the movie be released, is that it's actually the best Looney Tunes movie ever made, by far.

The bar isn't exactly high; people my age likely have nostalgic affection for Space Jam, but it's not on the same level as Coyote vs. Acme, which feels more inspired by Who Framed Roger Rabbit? than other existing Looney Tunes hybrid live-action efforts.

After Acme products fail him one too many times in his dogged pursuit of the Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote decides to hire a billboard lawyer (hilariously played by Saturday Night Live alum Will Forte) to sue the Acme Corporation, which is revealed to have nefarious motives for their faulty line of products. And perhaps Coyote has some secret motivations of his own for wanting to go to court.

The movie, already an underdog story, takes on a new resonance amid the drama with its release. It opens with text that jokes, "based on a true story," which makes you wonder whether they added that after all the WB turmoil. As film critic Matt Singer puts it, "I will leave it to you, dear reader, to decide why a studio in the midst of a massive merger with another studio would choose not to release a highly entertaining legal thriller about a cartoonishly evil mega-corporation engaged in conspiracies to maintain monopolistic control over the economy through their shady connections with a willfully ineffectual government."

The movie's integration of the cartoons into live action is easily the best in its field since Roger Rabbit . The cartoon violence is there to make the kids laugh, as effective a strategy as it ever was, and the adults get legal courtroom-drama gags cleverly modeled after Looney Tunes-esque mayhem.

The script from unlikely scribe Samy Burch, writer of the very adult Todd Haynes film May December , engages with the characters in a way I didn't expect and even found a bit moving. Using the Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoons to tell a story about dogged perseverance in the face of systemic oppressive forces conspiring against you sounds silly, and it absolutely is. The fact that it works so well onscreen is a testament to Burch's writing. And the entire debacle with its release strategy only makes its message that much more resonant.

Coyote vs. Acme is an unlikely and unexpected delight with a lot of heart, thankfully meeting the moment of its rallying cry against executive interference in art with its meta-commentary on corporate greed.

What other critics are saying: It's immediately beloved! Los Angeles Times' Amy Nicholson writes , "Wile E. Coyote isn't asking for a handout. If anything, he's a true believer in the American Dream, willingly and literally breaking his back to put food on his table." Tim Robey at the Telegraph writes, "While the novelty factor wears off after a while, what Dave Green's film gets bang on is reconsidering the eternal enmity between Coyote and Road Runner as a form of love story — a game of endless pursuit, catch me if you can."

How to watch: Coyote vs. Acme is now playing in theaters nationwide .

Buddy: Casper Kelly, the guy famous for the viral Too Many Cooks bizarro comedy sketch and the Adult Swim Yule Log comedy-horror movies, makes his leap into the mainstream with this uniquely weird horror movie about a killer children's TV show mascot . The premise is essentially, "what if a kid's show like Barney existed and Barney himself was an evil child murderer?" There are so many wild and fun ideas here, and the commitment to the bit is astounding, with incredible production design, costumes and invented characters. I appreciated how out-there and surreal it gets, and particularly loved the mascot-centric gore. Cristin Miloti and Topher Grace star, while Keegan-Michael Key voices the titular Buddy. Get tickets .

Colony: The director of the South Korean hit Train to Busan is back with a new zombie movie that does just enough new 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 new 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! Get tickets .

Idiots: The "off-putting-to-funny" ratio is off to a deadly degree in this alleged comedy starring Dave Franco, Mason Thames and O'Shea Jackson Jr. When two unqualified bozos are hired to transfer a rich teen to rehab, their straightforward gig quickly spirals into dangerous mayhem. It's too mean-spirited, the characters simply aren't much fun to be around and the plotting is increasingly hard to believe. On the other hand, it arguably has the funniest poop joke I've seen in a movie, though it's all downhill from there. Get tickets .

Why you should skip it: Nicolas Winding Refn, the filmmaker behind the Ryan Gosling cult hit Drive, returns from a 10-year hiatus from film with all of his cinematic obsessions still firmly in tow. This has a little bit of The Neon Demon, a lot of Only God Forgives and a setting that can best be compared to Blade Runner, if it were covered in a spooky layer of mist. That sentence makes about as much sense here as it does in the movie.

The synopsis is as follows: When a mysterious mist engulfs a futuristic metropolis, unleashing a deadly and elusive entity, a troubled young woman (Sophie Thatcher) searches for her father. Her quest collides with an American GI (Charles Melton) on a harrowing odyssey to rescue his daughter from Hell. Oh, and the entity is a giallo -style killer called The Leather Man, who literally rips women apart.

The film is nonlinear and incredibly abstract, and the dueling plots don't merge in a meaningful way; they just crudely coexist. Interviews with the filmmaker suggest the film is his response to becoming a dad, a girl dad specifically. Viewed through that lens, it's halfway interesting, but still feels more like a fetishistic object. Refn movies are brutally violent, usually at the expense of women, and Her Private Hell both reckons and indulges in that. If the story weren't so all over the place, he might've been onto something.

It's an astonishing movie to look at, though, with his trademark bisexual lighting deployed throughout. A beautiful, operatic score from long-retired Italian composer Pino Donaggio — his work Telescope, from Brian De Palma's Body Double, is among my favorite bits of movie music ever — is easily the highlight. It gives the film gravitas that it doesn't really deserve.

Her Private Hell is certainly the uncompromised vision of an auteur, but it reminded me that that's not always a good thing. In the same way that David Lynch movies are masterpieces rife with meaning to some and entirely incoherent to others, Her Private Hell is ambitious and has no interest in appealing to general audiences. It's a self-pastiche that will appeal only to existing fans of Refn and his eccentricities.

What other critics are saying: It's mostly been panned, but there are fans out there! Owen Gleiberman at Variety writes, "It's obvious that all of this coheres in Refn's mind, because he wouldn't have made it otherwise. But he has become seriously deluded about what an audience wants." The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw, however, dug it, writing that it "resists interpretation, like so many of Refn's recent films, but executes a slow dervish swirl of hypnotic strangeness."

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

Why you should skip it: A compilation mixtape in search of a movie, Motor City is an almost entirely wordless action movie that assumes audiences will be happy with bare-minimum plotting as long as a song they enjoy is playing.

In 1970s Detroit, John Miller ( Alan Ritchson ) falls for a local gangster's girl and lands in prison for a crime he didn't commit. With his life ruined, Miller plots revenge against the man who took his girl away.

There's a moment early on in which the entirety of Fleetwood Mac's "The Chain," a 4-and-a-half-minute song, plays over a slow-motion action scene. It's so incredibly labored that the audience I saw it with was laughing at the movie, not with it.

Every scene is unnecessarily stretched out in similar ways, and you feel every second. It's gimmicky BS, frankly, that flattens the material into the most generic version of itself possible in an attempt to be different

What other critics are saying: Reviews are split. V ariety's Owen Gleiberman absolutely loved it , writing that it "qualifies as a true immersive cinematic experience. It's a movie almost entirely without words, but it speaks." The AV Club's Jesse Hassenger was more on my side, writing, "For movie-watchers who have wished that modern cinema was less reliant on boilerplate dialogue and tell-don't-show exposition dumps, Motor City plays like a monkey's paw curling in slow motion."

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

Hadestown: The Musical: This pro-shot version of the popular musical was filmed during a February 2025 London performance, reuniting the key Broadway cast members with West End performers. In the play, the tragic love of Orpheus and Eurydice is intertwined with the complex relationship of Hades and Persephone. Eurydice, living in poverty, is lured to the industrial underworld of Hadestown by Hades, while Orpheus, a struggling musician, ventures down below to bring her back. The selling point is the jaunty, fun, big-band New Orleans-y music throughout, alongside the lower-key folk tunes. The audience also plays a big part in the show, contributing to an atmosphere that feels more like a raucous party than a stuffy Broadway venue. But all those shots of the crowd having a blast do is remind the viewer that this movie version is limiting, and it would probably be more fun to see it in person. Rent or buy .

📺 Movies newly available on streaming services you may already have

Why you should skip it: At first glance, a throwback to the gritty '90s serial killer police procedurals à la Se7en with this starry cast looks and sounds great, but there's a reason you likely haven't heard a thing about it until it debuted unceremoniously on Netflix. It's a lifeless dud that, much like The Dog Stars reviewed above, feels too familiar and plays like a generic placeholder for something rather than a fully thought-out, fresh idea.

When his young son vanishes, a widower (Adam Scott) enlists help from his estranged father (Robert De Niro), a retired detective who put away the serial killer now linked to the case. Michelle Monaghan plays another detective.

Everybody is clearly phoning it in here, yet I still actually felt bad for the actors having to earnestly perform the uninspired clichés that make up the dialogue and exposition. Nobody's heart is in this, and it's clear from the opening scenes that "perfunctory" is the main register here. It's going-through-the-motions cinema at its snooziest.

If you want to watch a 2026 horror movie starring Adam Scott as an author with a missing and/or dead-person problem, check out Hokum instead.

What other critics are saying: Mary McNamara at the Los Angeles Times is much more forgiving, calling the film "as good as it gets" when it comes to streaming-only thrillers. "While it does not achieve the depth or brilliance of its obvious influences — The Silence of the Lambs, The Sixth Sense — it is a twisty and very welcome reminder of an age when psychological adrenaline-thumpers like Kiss the Girls and The Bone Collector drew crowds to the cineplex," she writes.

How to watch: The Whisper Man is now streaming on Netflix .

Why I liked it: When you think of 7th-century Arabia, surely your mind immediately goes to Anthony Mackie and Sharlto Copley, right?

If you're able to put aside the inherent absurdity of the casting, Desert Warrior is actually far more competent than it sounds on paper, mostly thanks to esteemed director Rupert Wyatt ( Rise of the Planet of the Apes) , who imbues the action with life and fills the movie with gorgeous desert images.

It's a $150 million Saudi-backed film, and the money is, in fact, on the screen. The poster and title may lead you to believe that Mackie is the titular desert warrior, but the movie is smarter than that and has a real plot that actually makes sense.

In the film, Princess Hind (Aiysha Hart, the real desert warrior here) defies her fate, refusing to become a concubine to the ruthless Emperor Kisra (Sir Ben Kingsley). Fleeing into the desert with her father, she is hunted by a merciless army and forced to trust a legendary bandit (Mackie) who has secrets of his own. Rising from fugitive to fearless warrior, Hind unites warring tribes for a final battle that will change history forever.

Desert Warrior makes the absolute most of on-location filming in exotic locales; it's beautifully photographed throughout, and the set pieces are all exciting and well put together. Surely many liberties have been taken in adapting this slice of history into an action film, but in the process, Saudi Arabia proves it can make a big-budget spectacle that largely stands up to the best Hollywood has to offer, largely because Hollywood doesn't even try to make historical epics anymore.

What other critics are saying: They were not as kind as myself. The AV Club's Monica Castillo writes, "While the story onscreen is dull and the performances uninspired, it's the story around Desert Warrior that solidifies it as a strange chapter in a country's self-promotional history."

How to watch: Desert Warrior is now streaming on Hulu .

Penny Lane is Dead: This Aussie gem set in 1986 follows three best friends' celebration at a beach house that turns into a blood-soaked fight for survival when a prank goes horribly wrong. It's an Evil Cousin horror flick, which should become its own genre, I've decided. Australian cinema can be a particularly cruel and unrelenting breed, and this movie certainly fits that bill. It's got a lot on its mind, from toxic masculinity to internalized misogyny, and also stages some nasty violence, but in a way that doesn't revel in it. The movie is just as sickened by the proceedings as you are. Now streaming on Shudder. That's all for this week! We'll see you next Friday.

Penny Lane is Dead: This Aussie gem set in 1986 follows three best friends' celebration at a beach house that turns into a blood-soaked fight for survival when a prank goes horribly wrong. It's an Evil Cousin horror flick, which should become its own genre, I've decided. Australian cinema can be a particularly cruel and unrelenting breed, and this movie certainly fits that bill. It's got a lot on its mind, from toxic masculinity to internalized misogyny, and also stages some nasty violence, but in a way that doesn't revel in it. The movie is just as sickened by the proceedings as you are. Now streaming on Shudder.

That's all for this week! We'll see you next Friday.

Looking for more recs? Find your next watch on the Yahoo 100 , our daily list of the most popular movies of the year. And for family-friendly picks, check out our kid-approved summer movie guide .