New Movies in Theaters This Week: Onslaught, By Any Means and Fall 2: Deadpoint
Social Entertainment · September 4, 2026 · 9 min read
A genetically engineered super soldier movie from A24, a civil rights era crime thriller built on a real 1966 murder, and a sequel to the film about two women stuck on a tower. They opened within two days of each other, they have almost nothing in common, and one of them is a much bigger swing than its marketing suggests.
The first weekend of September is traditionally where studios put films they are not sure about. It is the dead zone after the summer and before the festival titles arrive, the weekend nobody schedules a tentpole into. That makes it a genuinely interesting week to look at, because the films that do open are usually there for a reason: a modest budget that only needs a modest number, a distributor testing an audience, or a filmmaker who was never going to get a July slot in the first place.
All three of this week's releases fit one of those descriptions. Two opened wide on Friday 4 September, and one jumped the queue by two days.
How this is ordered
The numbers below are booking order, not a quality ranking. They answer one question: if you are seeing exactly one of these, which one, and if you are seeing all three, in what order do they play best against each other. Critical scores are quoted where they exist, but every one of these films is a few days old and the counts are still small enough to move, which is worth remembering before you treat a percentage as a verdict.
1Onslaught
A sniper, a trailer park, and three things from a facility that should not exist.
An Army sniper living in a trailer park has to keep her daughter alive when a squad of genetically engineered super soldiers escapes a secret military programme and comes through the desert. That is the whole pitch, and at 92 minutes the film does not pretend it is anything more. Adria Arjona plays Celeste. Dan Stevens plays Dr Hans Kammler, the man responsible for the programme, and Michael Biehn is in it, which for a film about unkillable soldiers hunting a woman through the American southwest is a casting choice doing deliberate work.
It is directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett, the pair behind You're Next and The Guest, and shot in Albuquerque, New Mexico between November 2024 and January 2025. The rest of the cast reads like a Wingard cast: Reginald VelJohnson as a neighbour called Josiah, Drew Starkey as one of the soldiers, Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric as a man named Kovacks, and the UFC fighter Alex Pereira as a masked one credited only as The Butcher.
Here is the thing the trailers mostly kept quiet. At Comic-Con in July, Wingard confirmed the film takes place in the same universe as The Guest, and in the same town, and that he thinks of it as the capstone of a trilogy running from You're Next through The Guest to this. The secret programme that produced the soldiers is the same category of thing that produced David in The Guest. You do not need to have seen either film for Onslaught to work, and nothing about the plot depends on it. But if you have, the film is quietly doing something more interesting than its logline, and the masked squad it puts on screen is a genuinely good addition to a lineage this blog has written about before.
Reviews have been warm rather than ecstatic, and worth reading carefully. Early notices ran hot, in the low eighties on Rotten Tomatoes, on a count small enough to fit on one screen. As the full wave landed the score settled to 59% from 74 critics, with a Metacritic average of 60 from 24. Read the two numbers together and you get an accurate picture: a film with real admirers, a tight 92 minutes, and a consistent complaint that it stops just as it works out what it is.
It is also the only one of this week's three that is trying to be a piece of craft rather than a piece of product. That is why it goes first.
Mississippi, 1966. A young Black FBI agent is sent to investigate a wave of killings aimed at civil rights leaders, and is partnered with a Colombo family hitman the Bureau has on its books as an informant. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays the agent, Wayne Strider. Mark Wahlberg plays Gregory Scarpa. The film runs 107 minutes and was released by Paramount.
Scarpa was a real person, and so was the arrangement. He was a capo who spent decades as an FBI informant, and the historical claim that he was used in Mississippi during the civil rights investigations is the seed the film grows from. The script started life as a 2018 Black List entry titled CI-34, written by Sascha Penn, which is roughly what the Bureau would have called a confidential informant on a file.
The murder at the centre of it is not invented either. Giancarlo Esposito plays Vernon Dahmer, who was president of the Forrest County NAACP and spent the 1960s registering Black voters. On 10 January 1966 the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan firebombed his house. He got his family out and returned fire to cover them, and died of his burns and smoke inhalation. Fourteen men were indicted. Sam Bowers, the Klan Imperial Wizard believed to have ordered it, went through four federal trials that ended in mistrial and was not convicted of the murder until 1998, thirty-two years later.
That history is why the film is worth taking seriously even where it is not entirely successful. It is directed by Elegance Bratton, whose first narrative feature was the autobiographical Marine boot camp drama The Inspection, shot by Ante Cheng and scored by Terence Blanchard. Principal photography ran in Atlanta from 15 April to 17 June 2025. Abdul-Mateen came aboard in February 2025, replacing Sterling K. Brown after a scheduling conflict.
Critics have landed on a clear split, and it is the same split in almost every review: Abdul-Mateen is doing careful, interior work, and Wahlberg is playing a much broader Brooklyn archetype some reviewers found miscast. The film currently sits at 69% on Rotten Tomatoes from 16 critics and 56 on Metacritic from 8, which are small counts and will move. The recurring word is formulaic, usually followed by an admission that it earns its ending anyway.
Go into it expecting a studio crime thriller built on real atrocity rather than a historical drama, and it is the most substantial thing opening this week. It is second here only because it asks more of you than Onslaught does.
Jax Hunter, sister of the woman who died in the first film, joins a friend on a plank walk across Mount Kwan in Thailand. A rockslide traps them roughly four thousand feet up. Harriet Slater plays Jax and Arsema Thomas plays Luce, with Tom Brittney and a returning Grace Caroline Currey. It opened on Wednesday 2 September through Lionsgate, two days ahead of the other two, and runs just under a hundred minutes.
The sequel changes hands behind the camera. Fall was directed by Scott Mann; Deadpoint is directed by Michael and Peter Spierig, the brothers behind Daybreakers, Predestination and Jigsaw, from a script by Mann and his original co-writer Jonathan Frank. So the people who invented the formula wrote it, and a different pair shot it.
The first film is the reason to care. It cost about three million dollars and made around twenty-two million worldwide, and it got its height by building the top of the tower on a real mountain in California's Shadow Mountains so the actors were never more than a hundred feet up. It also has one of the strangest post-production stories of the decade: Lionsgate needed a PG-13, which meant removing more than thirty instances of profanity, and rather than reshoot, the production used a company called Flawless to digitally alter the actors' faces and redub the lines. Flawless is now credited as a production company on the sequel.
Deadpoint has had the softest reception of the three, at 52% on Rotten Tomatoes from 21 critics and 53 on Metacritic. The reviews agree with each other to an unusual degree. The vertigo still works, the location is real and shot on location in Thailand rather than faked, and the film is at its best when nobody is talking. Where it loses people is the attempt to rebuild the first film's emotional beats: the grief, the revelation, the reckoning between two women on a ledge. Roger Ebert's site used the word repetition. Screen Rant called the thrills dizzying and the melodrama a drop-off.
None of which makes it a bad night out. If what you want is ninety minutes of not looking down, this delivers exactly that and nothing else, which is a legitimate thing for a film to be. Watch the original first if you have not; it is the better film and this one leans on it.
Onslaught: the best-made film of the three, and the one with a secret. 92 minutes, A24, and the third corner of a trilogy nobody announced until July.
By Any Means: the one with something at stake. Uneven, but Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is doing the year's most underrated work in it and the history it is built on is real.
Fall 2: Deadpoint: the one that does a single thing. If that thing is what you came for, it works. If you want the first film again, it is very nearly that too.
One scheduling note worth knowing if you are planning a double bill. Onslaught and By Any Means both opened Friday, so they are the pair that will actually be showing back to back. Deadpoint has had a two-day head start and will be in fewer rooms sooner.
If none of these are your week, the app's Movies feed is filtered to recent releases by default, and you can narrow it by streaming provider and genre. For something older and scarier, our ranking of the scariest horror villains and the highest-grossing horror films are both good places to fall in.
