In his Sundance 2026 review, First Showing.net’s Alex Billington called THE WEIGHT “one of the best films from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival – an instant favorite that’ll probably remain somewhere on my Top 20 list by the end of the year.”
The first trailer for director Padraic McKinley’s film dropped today.
When Samuel (Ethan Hawke) is torn from his daughter and sent to a brutal prison, Warden Clancy (Russell Crowe) offers him a high-stakes proposition: smuggle gold out of a remote mine with a dangerous crew of prisoners and he’ll win his freedom.
Pete Hammond of Deadline writes, “Matteo Cocco’s superbly atmospheric and moody cinematography fills the bill perfectly, as do all the period production elements, as well as the excellent music score from Shelby and Latham Gaines. All the actors deliver here, with standouts including Amelio and Jones (the rare female character in this type of story). Crowe is again playing the villain of the piece, and coming right on the heels of his Nazi commandant Hermann Göring in Nuremberg, he manages to make Clancy three-dimensionally slimy in his few scenes. As for Hawke, it must be catnip to get to play a guy like Murphy. This is undoubtedly a role Paul Newman would have coveted in his prime — a little “Luke” a little “Roy Bean,” a little “John Russell.” Hawke makes it his own in a solid portrayal of a man driven to do extreme things for the chance of seeing his daughter again. That aspect gives the role a strong emotional hook that has us rooting for the man to make it out alive.
See the film in theaters on September 18th.
