Jerid Guarino

Movie Review: Leave the World Behind (2023) – Or At Least Leave Netflix Behind ⭐½ out of 5 stars Let me just say up front: if this film were a can of emergency rations, I’d leave it in the bunker. Leave the World Behind tries real hard to be profound — but comes off more like a 2-hour TED Talk delivered by someone with a master's degree in Woke Studies and a minor in Overacting. The story? Some well-off city folks, including our favorite "former president turned audiobook narrator," rent a house to escape society… only to have society show up anyway, in the form of cyberattacks, Tesla pileups, and the apocalypse filtered through a Whole Foods lens. It’s like if The Purge was written by someone afraid of gluten. Julia Roberts plays the anxious mom with all the instincts of a broken smoke detector — going off at the wrong time and mostly just for show. Ethan Hawke — bless his confused little armpit hair — spends the film looking like a man who just found out bacon was banned. The kids? Somewhere between TikTok-addled and emotionally bankrupt. The son literally obsesses over downloading Friends while the world is collapsing. Honestly, that was the most believable part. And then there’s Mahershala Ali’s character — the homeowner who shows up mid-crisis. Somehow, the family sees him as suspicious, even though he’s better dressed, more rational, and clearly smarter than anyone else on screen. Naturally, this is used to teach us a valuable lesson… which the film beats into your face like a vegan with a recycling pamphlet. The real “threat” in the film? Not the mystery attacks, not the government — it’s uncertainty. In other words, this is a horror movie for people who need a trigger warning before reading Little House on the Prairie. Instead of building tension through real consequences, the movie simmers in the soft panic of people who realize their Wi-Fi might be down indefinitely. It's what happens when you give coastal anxiety a production budget. The cinematography is decent, and the score's haunting — but you could play Beethoven over a dumpster fire and it’d still be garbage. To be fair, Leave the World Behind does give you one valuable takeaway: if this is how the elites respond to crisis, maybe it’s time we start teaching our kids how to change a tire instead of how to cry on camera. Final thought? The only thing more unrealistic than the plot was the idea that any of these characters had ever touched a gun, grown a garden, or used a map. Survival? Please. I’ve seen houseplants with more grit. Bottom line: If you like your end-of-the-world stories flavored with guilt, solar panels, and armpit-level paranoia, this might be your thing. Otherwise, save your time — and your ammo

I was really disappointed. I waited forever for this thing to come out. It did not deliver. Go back and watch Armand Assante / HBO's Gotti. Far superior film. I was really disappointed in JT's performance in this. When you try too hard to do the Italian-American / New York accent it comes off as really phony and almost embarrassing. The story and the performance just don't compare to the 1996 HBO Armand Assante film with the same name. The fact that they named it the same thing is also disappointing. Any positive votes are because it's riding the curtails of the Original 1996 HBO film.