Resident Evil Won: Video Games Finally Got Serious

There is a version of this conversation where we spend another decade apologising for video game adaptations — *Mortal Kombat*, the original *Resident Evil* franchise, every Paul W.S. Anderson instinct dressed up as studio confidence — and nobody learns anything. That version was cancelled. Zach Cregger, the director who made *Barbarian* feel like a trap snapping shut in slow motion, has apparently decided that the genre deserved better architecture, and the result is the kind of film that makes critics reach for phrases like "invents new possibilities" with complete sincerity.

The argument from GQ is not subtle: *Resident Evil* is the best video game adaptation ever made. That is a claim worth sitting with, because the bar has historically been set somewhere between embarrassing and aggressively mediocre. What Cregger understood — and what most directors handed these properties do not — is that the source material is not the obstacle. The source material is the point. The survival horror logic of the games, the claustrophobia, the specific dread of limited resources and unlimited threat, translates to cinema precisely when someone treats it as architecture instead of brand licensing.

Meanwhile, Anton Corbijn has assembled Helen Mirren and Alden Ehrenreich for *A Talent for Murder*, a Patricia Highsmith thriller that premiered at TIFF and is getting the kind of reviews that remind you why actor pairings matter as much as the source text. Mirren and Ehrenreich playing characters in opposition inside a Highsmith framework is, frankly, a construction that should not require explanation. Corbijn made *Control*. He made *The American*. He knows what a beautiful trap looks like from the inside.

And then there is the Robin Williams situation, which is not a film story but has become one. Zelda Williams, who directed *Lisa Frankenstein*, renewed her plea for fans to stop generating AI videos of her father. "Leave him out of your delusional bulls--t and let him rest." The sentence does not require a byline to understand the weight behind it. What it reveals, without meaning to, is that cinema's newest crisis is not the box office or the streaming wars or even the indie funding gap that San Sebastian execs spent a morning worrying about. It is that the technology now exists to manufacture performances from the dead, and the industry has not yet decided whether to treat that as a legal problem or a moral one.

It is both. That is the verdict. Make it land.