Reviews are rolling in for A24’s new movie Primetime, which is debuting at the Venice Film Festival today.
Robert Pattinson stars in the Lance Oppenheim-directed movie about the controversial U.S. show To Catch a Predator, fronted by Chris Hansen, and how it ended badly.
The true-crime program, part of Dateline NBC, chronicled Hansen’s efforts to out suspected child predators, with the help of law enforcement and a team of decoys pretending to be minors online.
The early notices are largely positive for the dark drama with Pattinson (and the rest of the cast), in particular, coming in for high praise.
“Primetime is a film about the way populism fuels moral decadence — but in such a subtle way that its proponents don’t realize it,” writes Deadline’s Damon Wise. “It’s an intense and sometimes dizzyingly meta journey,” he says, before adding about its protagonist: “Delivering a performance that the director describes as a mixture of Jerry Maguire and Count Dracula, Robert Pattinson may finally be entering the Christian Bale period of his career, assuming the Academy responds to such dark material (and they didn’t take to 2014’s Nightcrawler, perhaps the closest recent comparison).”
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The Playlist sparked to the film, writing: “Robert Pattinson is monomaniacal, magnetic and completely unhinged in Lance Oppenheim’s terrific drama…Pattinson gives one of his most locked-in performances”.
Nicholas Barber, writing for the BBC, is another fan, calling Pattinson “extraordinary” and predicts the film is “sure to be an Oscar contender – although it may be a controversial one.”
Little White Lies is another outlet to praise the protagonist: “Hollywood’s première purveyor of ‘Freaky Guy’ performers, Robert Pattinson, wears Chris Hansen’s skin like a suit, affecting his selachian stare and unimpeachable insistence he’s on a mission to “cleanse the world of an ancient evil”. (If it wins him a Primetime Emmy along the way, so be it.) He’s sharper than ever; while it’s his larger-than-life performances that people tend to love about Pattinson, his uncanny taken on Hansen is a career high.”
Awards Watch found things to like about the movie but also had some reservations, giving it a B score: “Primetime is perhaps most revealing when it declines to reveal anything. It recreates the machinery of “To Catch a Predator” with considerable skill, but leaves its moral machinery largely untouched. The result is an entertaining and often sharply observed thriller about a television show that turned justice into spectacle — without quite deciding whether that was its achievement, its crime, or simply the way television works.”
Indiewire was another B score, writing: “Robert Pattinson is a freaky freak from frame one of Lance Oppenheim’s reality-TV thriller Primetime, in which the English actor stars as beleaguered American TV host Chris Hansen of To Catch A Predator fame. That means there’s nowhere to go and almost no arc from beginning to end, but that doesn’t make the results of this scuzzy satire any less bleakly invigorating. Pattinson has made oddballs, nutcases, and psychosexually damaged neurotics his calling card in his recent years.”
Screen International was mixed on the film, calling it “visually striking” but “dramatically contrived”.
Variety praises the film’s “terrific ensemble, including Pattinson, Merrit Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Alex Winter and Phoebe Bridgers” and calls the film an “edgy, exploratory thesis on the dark ambitions and darker motivations of To Catch a Predator‘s Chris Hansen”.
Next Best Picture gives the film 7/10 and highlights Robert Pattinson’s chances to make the cut in the Best Actor category, but also the performance of his co-star Skylar Gisondo: “Audiences are treated to yet another great 2026 Robert Pattinson performance, but the true standout here is Skylar Gisondo.”
