UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Two Very Good Movies, One Not So Bad, and One Stinker

The Best Line of Dialogue in the Spring 2026 Television Season.

In my last column, I had a whole bunch of stuff about the spring TV shows.  Here is  an addendum to that.

In “Dead Ringer,” the 17^th show of season 8 of The Rookie, written by Alexi Hawley & Brynn Malone, Monica Stevens, the smart, wicked, cool attorney who has outwitted law enforcement for 19 episodes since 2022, is finally in a truly hard place.  The police and FBI and for all I know the CIA finally have the goods on her.  She knows a lot about a lot of criminals and the lawyers are willing to let her go if she turns stool pigeon on the baddies.  She knows if she does she will likely be killed.

But Monica has not survived this long by being stupid.  She gives the law everything she knows.  But she has also arranged to get out of town, far out of town.  She knows if she does not do it quickly people with guns will come after her.  So she has a private plane waiting at LAX, but she makes one stop to see one of the good guys, Wesley, whom she knew in law school.  She has a quick chat, then gets into her Uber.

The female Uber drives her to near LAX then turns down a side road and stops.  The driver turns and points a gun at Monica.  Monica is cool, but she knows what is coming.  The line given by the writers is a perfect fit for Monica, and beautifully delivered by Bridget Regan.  She says, “Not in the face.”

We do not see the shot, but later see Monica’s body, shot in the heart.

Talk About Your Degree of Difficulty.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026.  Written by Aline Brosh McKenna, based on characters created by Lauren Weisberger.  119 minutes)

Most sequels come very quickly after the success of the first film. The makers of the sequel want to take advantage of the good feeling audiences had just a year or two ago.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is here twenty years after the first film.  And it is only the first sequel, not the twentieth. 

The first thing that strikes you about 2 is that the tone is very different. 1 was more of a lightweight, if edgy, comedy.  The book by Weisberger was basically a satire on Anna Wintour, the bitchy editor in-chief of the high fashion magazine Vogue.  Renamed Miranda Priestly for the film, she was played (do I have to bother to say brilliantly?) by Meryl Streep.  The film was mostly about a newcomer to the staff of Runway whom Miranda treats like shit, which is how she treats all of her underlings. The newcomer was Andy, played by Anne Hathaway, who was 24 at the time and more than held her own with Streep.

So McKenna cannot just rinse and repeat.  If the focus of 1 was the Miranda-Andy relationship, the focus here is more on the changes that have taken place in the publishing business over the last twenty years, as seen through the eyes of these characters and how they have changed over the last two decades.

Andy has now had a career in journalism away from Miranda but is brought on to help Miranda’s reputation after she makes a public faux pas. Much of the detail of the story is Miranda realizing she is in a tough spot and has to go along with Andy’s ideas.  Neat trick, since she does not recognize Andy when she first shows up at the Runway office.  There is a suggestion, but only a suggestion, that Miranda’s mental facilities are slipping.  Streep of course can play the character so we think she is slipping and then realize she is still sharp.

Hathaway, who does not look more than a day or two over 24, is very convincing as the older Andy.  So are Emily Blunt (Emily, although that character has not changed as much as the others) and Stanley Tucci (Nigel).  I watched the original film a night or two before I saw this one, and I was struck how precise both the writing and acting are in both films.  Both films are directed by David Frankel and some of that consistency is his doing (yes, I do say nice things about directors when they do not screw up).

There is of course more spectacle about high fashion than you really need, but that was true of the earlier film.  There seems to be more here, but this one is not that much longer than 1.

The story ends up with Miranda outwitting the people trying to take her empire away from here, but with Andy’s help she wins.  The script gives Hathaway a great montage of phone calls.  We do not know who she is talking to, but when we find out, it is enormously satisfying.

The Most Charming Movie in Years…Well, Months.

The Sheep Detectives (2026. Screenplay by Craig Mazin, Screen Story by Craig Mazin, based on the novel Three Bags Full by Leonie Swan. 109 minutes)

You don’t get a lot of charm in movies these days.  With overbudget spectacle, musical or otherwise, or big explosions, or big, BIG action scenes, there is not enough room for charm. Although you will note I added “months” to my snarky subhead. A few columns ago I reviewed The Choral, which has its charms and you can read about here.  But beyond that, we do not get a lot of charm in movies these days.

The Sheep Detectives is loaded with charm, done with a great degree of difficulty of a different kind than The Devil Wears Prada 2.  The story is the sort of thing that Agatha Christie might have dreamed up, but only with humans.

We are in a small village in rural England (I thought for a while we were in New Zealand but it’s Merry Old). George Hardy is a local sheepherder.  He has named all of his sheep, which turns out to be convenient for the movie.  Every evening, he reads from his collection of mystery novels, which also turns out to be very convenient.  Then, on this night, he is murdered.  The sheep are upset and begin to talk about it among themselves.  The sheep talk?!  Yes, but only among themselves.  And in the movie tradition of people talking in a foreign language, they are talking English so we can understand them.  Since George has read them so many mystery stories, the sheep decide they can figure out whodunit.

So they go to work.  Sometimes they guess right, sometimes they do not.  But they do not really speak English, so how can they communicate with the local, slightly dumb, policeman who is investigating the case?  Needless to say, there are a lot of suspects.  Not as many as Angela Lansbury had to deal with in the murder capitol of America, Cabot Cove, but a bunch.  They are all played by human actors.

Now here is the flaw in the film. The sheep are beautiful creations by the effects crowd.  Their physical textures are so great you want to shear them and make sweaters out of them.  Better yet, the FX people make their faces incredibly expressive. The sheep are a magical job of anthropomorphism (you can look that up if you do not know what it means).

The sheep do not steal the show; they are the show.  There are live action actors, who do not hold their own with the sheep.  One of the humans is played by Emma Thompson.  I have been a fan of Thompson’s for forty some years now, and this is the first time I have been disappointed by one of her performances.  The director of the live action actors is Kyle Balda, and most of the actors are not among His Majesty’s first team, but Balda could have done better.

What also helps give the sheep their impact is the voice cast.  The producers spent more money on the voice cast than the live action cast.  It includes, but is not limited to: Julia Louis-Dreyfus (with a voice so different from her work on Seinfeld and Veep I did not recognize it when I heard it), Patrick Stewart, Bryan Cranston, Regina Hall, and others.

The Worst Script Since If I Had Legs I Would Kick You.

Fantasy Life (2026.  Written by Matthew Shear. 91 minutes)

OK, if you don’t remember what I said about Legs you can read my review here.

The story here had possibilities. Sam, a thirtyish schlub, just cannot get his stuff together.  His psychiatrist arranges for him to babysit the three young daughters of a relative (most of the people in this film seem related to each other).  The children’s mother is Dianne, an actress in her fifties who is not getting much work.  We do not meet Dianne until the second part of the film, and by then they already know each other.

Excuse me, your guy and your woman do not even get a meet-cute? But Shear, who also directs and plays Sam, has already gotten off on the wrong foot in the first part of the movie.  Sam is babysitting the three girls, but Shear has not given the girls any characterization to play. 

This is a flaw in the script that is repeated with Sam, who is just a schulb and has no other defining characteristics.  And repeated with Dianne.  Other than the fact that she can’t get any gigs, we get to know nothing about her.  Where is Joe Mankiewicz to write Dianne like he wrote Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950)? Or the Billy Wilder (with others) who wrote Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard the same year?

So while Dianne’s husband David is off doing musical gigs, Dianne and Sam sort of become friends, although the writing in those scenes is unfocused.  When Sam and Dianne kiss, we have no idea where that comes from.  As far as we can tell from the scene, they do not do the nasty.

Later at a big family reunion, Dianne and David get into an argument in front of everybody and Dianne says she and Sam did have sex.  Huh?  We had no indication of that. Is Dianne telling the truth? If so, why?  If not, why?

So Sam is out of a job, but eventually gets at least some of his stuff together.  He and Dianne meet for coffee. Shear has Dianne say she does not know why she said it, since it was not true. 

Now if you cannot write a better version of that scene, give up screenwriting. Look at the final Redford/Streisand scene in The Way We Were (1973).  Look at the final scene between Tenoch and Julio in Y Tu Mamá También (2001). Or any other scene like those.

Ian McKellen is Another Grumpy Old Man.

The Christophers (2025. Written by Ed Solomon. 100 minutes)

This is not a film you would expect from Ed Solomon.  His previous credits include the Bill and Ted movies and television show, the first Men in Black film (1997) and the 2000 movie Charlie’s Angels. The Christophers feels like something Harold Pinter might have written.

The film gets off to a quick start.  Before the credits we see Sallie and Barnaby Sklar, the adult children of the famous but reclusive artist Julian Sklar, hire Lori, an artist, to complete a series of paintings of a young man named Christopher that Julian has not finished.  There is a quick discussion of how legal or illegal this might be.

So Lori goes to meet Julian, played by McKellen as if he were a first cousin to McKellen’s character in the 2023 film The Critic.  (If you want to read my review of that one, you can do so here.)   They are both grumpy old men, but Julian is a little less grumpy, and funnier.

So we get about an hour of Julian and Lori exchanging zingers.  Lori is played well by Michaela Coel, who smartly underplays, which works beautifully against McKellen’s over-the top approach.  All that is fun for a while, but the film is not going anywhere during that hour and in fact gets rather tiresome.

Finally a plot-like substance emerges and the movie picks up the pace.  The problem is that it now has to move too fast. For example, Lori tracks down the older Christopher, but we just get a line or two from him.  We really want to know more about him.  There is also a red-headed woman who shows up a couple of times, but we have no idea who she is nor where she got the box she gives to Lori.

If this script had been turned in in my screenwriting class, I would have said it was an OK. first draft, but needed work to get a better balance between the first and second part.