Director Chris Rock Explores Late-Stage Capitalism Hollywood via a Struggling Actress
DIRECTED BY CHRIS ROCK/2026
Most of us have seen deeply cynical movies about Hollywood- some much better than this. Chris Rock wrote, directed, and has a supporting role in Misty Green, an oppressively inert-feeling film about an actress named Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar) who’s had just enough success to enable her way into an empty life of faux-glamorous substance abuse and problematic sexual relationships. With the TV series that made her momentarily famous getting further and further away in the rear view mirror, her need for cash becomes more and more prescient. Will she land a part in a remake of Dreamgirls? She’s not a bad singer…. Or, will she take a big-money offer from a high-rolling sleaze-ball played by Adam Driver to fly to Dubai to have sex with a wealthy sheikh? She certainly doesn’t want to do that. In the meantime, her bipolar brother (Daniel Kaluuya) is flailing through life and liable to harm her career, such as it is, with his shenanigans.
Besides Driver and Kaluuya, Rock has wrangled an impressive supporting cast that also includes Anna Kendrick and Topher Grace. Yet, Misty Green is a slog in need of a hook. It’s as though Rock is always priming us for comedy relief, but withholding it. At one point he begins to go into a comedy diatribe, but even that dissipates before it gets going. Besides the fact that the lead character is Black, another difference between this and other cynical Hollywood exposés is that Misty Green comes to us during one of Hollywood’s most flailing periods. In this current moment of late-stage capitalism, not much is actually being made in the City of Dreams anymore. Misty Green depicts the hollow and vapid denizens of a once-powerful town fighting for scraps. But even that takeaway is overselling this movie. Not lousy enough to be fascinating nor good enough to generate further discourse or buzz, Misty Green finds itself- and anyone who opts to sit through it- mired in movie purgatory upon arrival.
