The Uprising (2026, Greengrass)

"A Paul Greengrass movie is a lot like finding yourself stuck next to a talkative history professor on a plane. Well-meaning, passionate, and rambling, you listen to him because the stories he tells are immediate and earnestly felt, despite the likelihood they’re grossly exaggerated. The Uprising fits squarely into this modus operandi: it dramatizes a pivotal inflection point in British history, is informed by quasi-journalistic rigor and a Hollywood veteran’s penchant for bombast, and incites reflection on the current moment’s inequities despite the fact that it stops short of full-on agitprop. It’s the farthest into history Greengrass has retreated, and while his time machine has a few rusted bolts, it suggests that backwards is a potentially fruitful direction for him to go as his career reaches its threshold between autumn and winter.

The latest in his long string of action dramas seeking to set the past in the amber of a permanent present tense, The Uprising finds Greengrass placing his shaky sights on 14th century England to tackle the famous Peasants’ Revolt — and maybe kinda sorta squeeze in a Robin Hood origin story. (Ask the folks at Focus Features about it and you’ll get one answer; ask British distributor Entertainment Film Distributors and you’ll get another — fortunately, it doesn’t matter much: the tie-in is nothing more than a last-minute button.) Shoehorned set dressing for franchise potential aside, it proves you can teach an old dog new tricks. Greengrass has learned from The Lost Bus’s pointless round-and-round wheel-spinning — The Uprising is urgent and cuts straight to the quick."

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