Primetime

A24's *Primetime* is Lance Oppenheim's narrative feature debut — and it announces a filmmaker with a genuinely singular eye. Critics are nearly unanimous that Robert Pattinson's lead performance is the film's engine: a transformation so complete it drew immediate awards talk out of Venice, playing a television host whose on-camera righteousness and off-camera ambition have stopped resembling each other. Around him sits an ensemble critics keep singling out beyond the star — a quietly superb supporting turn from Merritt Wever, a breakout performance from Skyler Gisondo that several reviewers call the film's moral center, and a strikingly assured first acting role for musician Phoebe Bridgers.

The film's most defining trait is its look and attack. Shot with deliberately saturated, almost pastel 2000s-broadcast colors across multiple formats, it has the texture of an arthouse horror movie wearing a network-TV smile — critics describe a work of operatic, almost physical aggression that rails against the hypocrisies of mid-2000s tabloid television. Reviewers agree on the craft and the audacity even when they split on the result: the same stylistic maximalism some find exhilarating and darkly funny, others find exhausting.

That split is real, and it's about approach rather than quality of execution. Most critics' reservations concern tone and construction rather than the performances — the drama is accused of contrivance by some, and the frenetic editing and relentless stylization leave a portion of viewers (including some general audiences) feeling flattened or disoriented rather than gripped. The film is not a sober investigative drama about its true story; it's a lurid, thesis-driven portrait of ambition, complicity and the line between justice and spectacle, and critics broadly agree it should be approached on those terms.