Published Aug 11, 2026, 11:04 AM EDT
Ryan O’Rourke is a Senior News Writer at Collider with a specific interest in all things adult animation, video game adaptations, and the work of Mike Flanagan. He is also an experienced baseball writer with over six years of articles between multiple outlets, most notably FanSided’s CubbiesCrib. Whether it’s taking in a baseball game, a new season of Futurama or Castlevania: Nocturne, or playing the latest From Software title, he is always finding ways to show his fandom. When it comes to gaming and anything that takes inspiration from it, he is deeply opinionated on what’s going on. Outside of entertainment, he’s a graduate of Eureka College with a Bachelor’s in Communication where he honed his craft as a writer. Between The IV Leader at Illinois Valley Community College and The Pegasus at Eureka, he spent the majority of his college career publishing articles on everything from politics to campus happenings and, of course, entertainment for the student body. Those principles he learned covering the 2020 election, Palestine, and so much more are brought here to Collider, where he has gleefully written on everything from the SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes to Nathan Lane baby-birding sewer boys.
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Channing Tatum has proven himself as an adept comedic actor, from the 21 Jump Street franchise to Magic Mike and Logan Lucky, but he’s often been at his best when he gets to flex his dramatic muscles. Last year’s Roofman received some light Oscar buzz for his acclaimed leading role as the titular charismatic criminal with a heart of gold, Jeffrey Manchester, who lived in the ceiling above a Toys “R” Us. Before that, he was part of a starry trio alongside Mark Ruffalo and **Steve Carell **in the Academy Award-nominated docudrama Foxcatcher, playing Mark Schultz, brother to the late Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz and fellow recruit to John du Pont’s Foxcatcher wrestling team. Now, he has another film coming to theaters in November that may finally see him get his first nomination for the coveted statuette.
In the upcoming Josephine, Tatum plays the father to the titular eight-year-old embodied by newcomer Mason Reeves in a breakout role. The story revolves around a violent crime at Golden Gate Park, which Josephine witnessed while on a run with her dad and is left forever psychologically changed by. Unsure how to process it, she begins acting out while her parents are divided in their attempts to explain it to her and help her cope with it, each wrestling with their own fears over what occurred. Making matters worse is that Josephine may be the only witness capable of putting the criminal at hand behind bars. An official trailer for the gut-wrenching drama has now been released that highlights the sudden pressure thrust upon Josephine as she’s forced to grow up faster than expected.
The footage opens with the girl and her father heading out for their routine run before cutting to the back of a police car where Josephine is waiting for officers to bring out a potential suspect. From that day on, she is constantly forced to look at and confront what happened because of the seriousness of the crime, yet after that first scene, she doesn’t speak a word to her mother, a psychiatrist, the authorities, or anybody. However, the haunted stares and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it motion for her throat say everything about what happened. Whether she likes it or not, she becomes the new center of the crime thriller as she takes the stand and is questioned about her story, while in private, the psychological effects of witnessing the crime manifest in small actions and increased tension with her parents.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Rounding out the starring trio of Josephine with Reeves and Tatum is Gemma Chan, who’s fresh off starring in Season 1 of Peacock’s megahit The Five-Star Weekend. Philip Ettinger, Syra McCarthy, and Eleanore Pienta, meanwhile, make up the rest of the main cast. The film marks the sophomore outing of writer-director Beth de Araújo, coming off her nightmarish feature debut Soft & Quiet. This outing is more personal, however, taking inspiration from her memories of an incident during an outing to the park to play with her father. Upon its premiere at Sundance earlier this year, critics widely lauded the effort, and the film came away with both the Grand Jury and Audience Awards. Collider’s Taylor Gates largely agreed, giving it a 9/10 in her review with especially high praise for Tatum and Reeves’ performances and the deft touch of Araújo in handling “a much darker, uglier aspect of girlhood.”
Josephine premieres in theaters on November 20. Check out the trailer in the player above.
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David Kaplan, Joshua Beirne-Golden, Mark H. Rapaport, Beth de Araújo, Crystine Zhang, Josh Peters, Marina Stabile, Gemma Chan, Channing Tatum