Movies & TV movie reviews Now You See Me: Now You Don’t Is All Flash and Little Substance The Four Horsemen franchise’s third installment dresses up old tricks as something newish and mostly entertaining By Natalie Zutter | Published on November 17, 2025 Comment 0 Share New Share Nine years ago, I quoted Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige in my review of Now You See Me 2, as the magic heists franchise was solidly acting out the first two steps as described by Michael Caine: First they established The Pledge, or introducing something seemingly ordinary—a fun adventure starring Robin Hood-esque magicians. Then they executed The Turn, making the ordinary extraordinary—more elaborate tricks and raising the question of whether they’re actually wizards. After disappearing for the better part of a decade, the Four Horsemen finally get to act out the third part, The Prestige, by reappearing in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t… but it’s unclear what exactly they’re proving by coming back. In 2013, the Four Horsemen were a fledgling team of illusionists empowered by the secret magicians cabal Eye to steal banker and benefactor Arthur Tressler’s (Caine again) fortune. Among their motives was to rectify how his insurance company mistreated victims of Hurricane Katrina; for that and other twist reasons, the heist was personal. In 2025, the baddies are crypto bros and a blood diamond Nazi heiress—timely, yes, but also wincingly on-the-nose. (One wonders why the writers reached back to World War II for their villain’s context instead of more modern events.) But this movie also opens with deepfake holograms of the Horsemen, who have disbanded since their last great heist. The Gen Z magicians behind the digital curtain are this quasi-legacy sequel’s new cast: impressionist Bosco Leroy (Dominic Sessa), parkour-ing pickpocket June McClure (Ariana Greenblatt), and Charlie (Justice Smith), tech wizard who secretly wants to take the stage. After their stunt with the aforementioned crypto bro, they gain the attention of J. Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg, having fun returning as the cocky genius), who has himself been drawn out of retirement by the Eye for the motherlode of all heists. In contrast to the tiny microchip in Now You See Me 2, the latest target is the Heart Diamond—but also its owner, Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike), a South African diamond magnate who is offering up her family heirloom to the highest bidder, a.k.a. the richest arms dealer. As Atlas assembles a new Four Horsemen with himself and Bosco squabbling over who’s the leader, it becomes a bigger family reunion as the rest of the former Horsemen join up with their hypnotism, card-throwing, and escape know-how. The elder Horsemen teach the colts some tried-and-true stage magic, while the kiddos prove they have some clever tricks up their own sleeves. It’s fine? It’s fun! But the movie suffers from too much self-awareness; it performs with such hyper-focus on the fact that it’s being watched that it’s more about showing off than about successfully pulling off the trick. The second-act set piece is not as clever as the film thinks it is, more of a detour to a French version of the Winchester Mystery House than anything else. It illustrates how there are simply too many cooks (seven, by that point) to achieve anything more than a couple of punny bits in various trick rooms, though one in particular is fun, especially if you had “Inception fight scene homage” on your Now You See Me bingo card. Not surprisingly, the newbies get more opportunities to show off their group dynamic as well as their individual skillsets, while the old guard gets to resolve some interpersonal issues from the last two movies and the past decade. For a movie co-written by three men, there are some heavy-handed attempts at filling in the blanks regarding the Four Horsemen’s “two girls, one role” between Henley Reeves (Isla Fisher) and Lula May (Lizzie Caplan). With Fisher having had to miss the sequel because of a real-life pregnancy, Henley calls out how her pregnancy forced her to opt out of some of the group’s riskier stunts; there’s almost a point there about a gendered double standard, but it’s gone again like a flick of flash paper. The runner of Lula struggling to catch up with all of the heist’s details and context is wonderfully skewering thanks to Caplan’s delivery; but the other ongoing jokes about the three female magicians starting their own girl group bring us back to the same problem of these women not existing on their own merits.  Meanwhile, Jack Wilder (Dave Franco) and Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson) perform their same old tricks without the fun of Now You See Me 2, in which they traded roles and trained each other on their specialties. And while the younger set’s apathy is understandable—wondering why they should care about a world that doesn’t care about them—the trio has a surprising lack of tension. They tell us that they’re found family, but we don’t really see it in action because there’s so much else going on. Image: Katalin Vermes/Lionsgate There’s been a lot of talk about the moviemakers’ tension with using as many practical effects as possible for their tricks, so that the stage magic can’t just be attributed to movie magic. There are certainly winning moments here that play upon expectations—both the characters’ and the audience’s—to create narrative improbabilities, like a conveniently waiting helicopter as escape route. But then these smaller tricks get thrown back out of balance by the franchise’s need to up the ante with shooting locations. To wit, the final showdown ends up in Abu Dhabi for nothing more than plot reasons (and to show off a cool racecar). Yet the setting is mere spectacle when compared to the Horsemen’s flair for tricking villains into seeing what they want to see. And let me add that Pike is a high point in this film for sheer campiness—her shifting accent, her hatred of (ironically) the camp of magic, her use of tricks against the Horsemen—which makes it all the more fun to see her get taken down. These movies love their complicated magical lineage and secret heirs, and so too do they love their last-minute reveals of masterminds more comfortable with controlling the behind-the-scenes yet able to step into the spotlight when the moment is exquisitely theatrical. It’s no coincidence that in the absence of Mark Ruffalo’s Dylan Shrike—the way in which they write him off-screen is eye-rollingly obvious that it’s just an excuse to save him for the next movie—the movie employs both narrative tricks to much less shocking effect. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is intended as a hinge point in the franchise, a proof-of-concept that the Horsemen have evolved into something closer to the Avengers, in which four (or more!) magicians at a time can occupy the roles on a rotating basis. And that’s exciting, Horsemen as a career aspiration—or even just a short-term gig before moving on to other performances and/or retirement. The fact that the OG Horsemen leave suburban security or high-paying gigs in order to reunite for old times’ sake shows what a hold that time in their lives has on them. It also leaves the door open for one or more to return for the already-greenlit fourth movie. Horsemen, assemble! There’s a recurring (unintentional?) bit in which Veronika barks “Bring me my heart!”—with at least the audience, if not also her, aware of the irony. She’s so desperate to reclaim this Heart Diamond, intended not for the empty cavity in her own chest but for a vault beneath the Arabian Desert. Yet she still begs, threatens, and bargains for a heart that we all know has nothing to do with love. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t is like that Heart Diamond: it dazzles, but when the sparkles clear from your eyes, there’s nothing left.[end-mark] The post <i>Now You See Me: Now You Don’t</i> Is All Flash and Little Substance appeared first on Reactor.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The Supreme Court will hear a case with massive implications for the government’s ability to limit asylum claims at the southern border. The justices agreed Monday to weigh whether migrants who show up on the Mexican side of the border must be allowed to apply for asylum. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, an alien who “arrives in the United States” can apply for asylum. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that even migrants who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border qualify as arriving in the U.S. That interpretation of the law “deprives the Executive Branch of a critical tool for addressing border surges and for preventing overcrowding at ports of entry along the border,” the administration argued in its July petition. “Before this litigation, border officials had repeatedly addressed migrant surges by standing at the border and preventing aliens without valid travel documents from entering,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the petition. “The decision below declares that practice unlawful, on the theory that aliens stopped on the Mexican side of the border have a statutory right to apply for asylum in the United States and to be inspected by federal immigration officers.” Several members of Congress wrote in an amicus brief that the Ninth Circuit “usurped the policymaking authority of the political branches.” “The Ninth Circuit’s decision below effectively seized that exclusively political power by creating an entitlement to seek asylum for potentially millions of aliens whom Congress never authorized such relief,” they argued. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation The post Supreme Court to Consider If Migrants Must Cross Border to Seek Asylum appeared first on The Daily Signal.

NEW: Epstein Files Exposes Dems on 'Brooklyn's Barack,' Pritzker Family

Pseudo economics savant Paul Krugman just can’t give up trying to sell the snake oil of Bidenomics as being the unsung hero of the economy that the supposedly dumb plebeians just couldn’t appreciate. Seriously, bro. Just take the “L” and move on. Krugman plastered another piece of rambling gobbledygook on his Substack page November 16 trying to draw parallels between the Trump and Biden economies. Unlike Trump, snooted Krugman, there was a “surprisingly strong case for Bidenomics.” Oh, but wait! He took it a step further: He referred to the inflationary disaster President Joe Biden inflicted on the economy with his outrageous spending policies as the “[t]he triumph that nobody appreciated.” He’s been engaging in this kind of stupidity throughout the Biden administration, constantly trying to gloss over the fact that he got his "transitory" inflation calls spectacularly wrong. As early as 2023 — while inflation was still running hot, Krugman was bleating that the Biden economy was “remarkably successful, even if nobody will believe it.”  My goodness. It’s like watching Jim Carrey’s character Fletcher Reede from Liar Liar (1997) trying desperately to go unconscious by beating himself to a bloody pulp.  What new, profound new evidence did Krugman use to support his wobbly argument? Well, nothing he hasn’t already blurted out in the past, such as his out-of-context ballyhooing over GDP growth. “The U.S. economy also vastly outperformed other advanced economies. Chart 3 shows real GDP since the eve of the pandemic in the U.S. and the euro area, both expressed as indexes with the fourth quarter of 2019 set equal to 100. U.S. outperformance has been huge.” But what Krugman conveniently left out was that much of this growth was artificial stimulus brought on by the government drastically spiking its debt.  In 2023 alone, economist Brian Wesbury analyzed that about half of the 3.1 percent GDP growth came from government spending. Fellow economist Daniel Lacalle wrote in a November 17, 2024, column that “An unsustainable increase in government spending and federal debt bloated the official GDP, making gross domestic income significantly weaker than headline GDP.” Did Krugman bother mentioning any of this? Of course not. He’s too busy kissing Biden’s toes. Krugman even had the temerity to claim that “global forces” such as supply chain disruptions, “not U.S. policy, were the main drivers of the Covid inflation spike.” Yeah, okay Krugman. The MIT Sloan School of Management admitted in July 2024 that “some policymakers — up to and including President Joe Biden — blamed shortages in the supply chain. But a new study shows that federal spending was the cause — significantly so.” Senior MIT Senior Lecturer of Finance Mark Kritzman, one of the authors of the research, added: “Our research shows mathematically that the overwhelming driver of that burst of inflation in 2022 was federal spending, not the supply chain.” Also, economist John Cochrane stated unequivocally in an interview for the Stanford University Graduate School of Business that “inflation mostly came from the government’s $5 trillion in COVID and post-COVID deficits.” The government, said Cochrane, “essentially sent people $5 trillion with no plans to pay the money back. People tried to spend it, driving up prices. The Fed eventually raising interest rates made inflation come down a bit faster than it would have otherwise, but it was going to go away on its own anyway. There is no magic momentum to inflation. Stop pushing, and it stops.”  Oops! And yet Krugman in his new piece actually accused President Donald Trump’s administration of “lying.” Projection much?  It’s quite a marvel to see when a Nobel prize winner such as Krugman is so determined to nuke his career into oblivion by perpetually acting like the consummate class clown. No one can or should take him seriously on anything. 

A criminal illegal alien is expected to be deported more than a decade after his deportation order, but CNN's coverage of the case buries the violent details of his past. The Department of Homeland Security set the record straight as the criminal illegal alien is set to finally be removed Monday. According to the DHS, Russian-born Roman Antatolevich Surovtsev was arrested on August 1 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 'It’s alarming that CNN can ALWAYS be counted on to run cover for VIOLENT FELONS. Imagine if they showed the same care for American citizens.'He is expected to be deported Monday in compliance with a final order of removal issued by an immigration judge in November 2014. CNN described Surovtsev as a "stateless person" given the fact that he fled the USSR and surrendered his citizenship. The 2014 deportation order also revoked his green card, the sole condition for his remaining in the United States.RELATED: 'Climbing into the ceiling tiles': DHS immigration raids hit Charlotte, where 1 in 6 residents are foreign-born Photo by Ryan Murphy/Getty ImagesHe has since routinely checked in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement until his arrest in August.CNN, however, added a very different spin to the story, touting Surovtsev as a "loving dad" and a different person after a life of crime. Only after more than a dozen paragraphs and a long litany of heart-wrenching familial anecdotes does CNN hint at Surovtsev's violent past: "In 2003, at 19 years old, Surovtsev began serving a 13-year sentence after helping some friends commit an armed carjacking of a motorcycle."And this is only the tip of the iceberg.Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin noted that Surovtsev has a "history of violence" with a rap sheet including "assault with a deadly weapon, multiple counts of burglary, multiple counts of carjacking, carjacking with a firearm, trespassing onto private property, multiple counts of taking a vehicle without owner consent, possession of a hypodermic needle/syringe, receiving stolen property, multiple counts of conspiracy to commit a crime."In a statement on X, the Department of Homeland Security added that Surovtsev committed many of those offenses as an adult and accused CNN of covering for criminals: "It’s alarming that CNN can ALWAYS be counted on to run cover for VIOLENT FELONS. Imagine if they showed the same care for American citizens."Surovtsev will reportedly be boarding a plane Monday to Ukraine along with 82 other deportees, according to a statement obtained by CNN. “On Monday, the U.S. government plans to deport 83 people to Ukraine, where they will be conscripted into the army and likely killed. Ukraine is a police state where the population lives under martial law,” Surovtsev’s attorneys, Eric Lee and Chris Godshall-Bennett, said in an emailed statement."Under President Trump and Secretary Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.," the Department of Homeland Security added. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

President Trump recently made a comment on H-1B visas during an interview in the Oval Office with Laura Ingraham on Fox News — and his base is not happy.“There’s never going to be a country like what we have right now,” Trump told Ingraham, who asked, “And does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration? Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.”“Well, I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent,” Trump responded.“We have plenty of talented people here,” Ingraham argued, to which Trump shockingly replied, “No, you don’t. No, you don’t.”“You don’t have talented people here?” Ingraham asked.“No, you don’t ... you don’t have certain talents and ... people have to learn,” he replied, before digging his heels in further.“President Trump received and is continuing to receive a tremendous amount of blowback from this, including from people in his own base,” says BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler, who is shocked by Trump’s comments and points out that one of Charlie Kirk’s last messages to the American people was on the same topic.However, Kirk had a much different take than the president.“This is the social compact breaking down,” Kirk wrote in a post on X, adding, “We need urgency to restore it:1 - Mass deportations2 - Stop the H-1B scam3 - Dramatically reduce LEGAL Immigration4 - End chain migration and the Visa Lottery5 - Build 10 million homes for Americans6 - Crush the College Cartel.”The post was accompanied by a graph depicting the percentage of 30-year-olds who are both married and homeowners between 1950 to 2025. The number dropped from over 50% to below 15%.The post went viral, because according to Wheeler, “President Trump’s base understands and feels very betrayed by the government officials who have, for a generation now, imported foreigners and given those foreigners our jobs, given those foreigners our welfare benefits, given those foreigners our homes, given those foreigners access to our food and our education and our health care system.”“No one, I think, is arguing against certain genius visas. If there are certain positions that are incredibly hard to fill, that take incredibly talented, exceptional people, and we need to recruit from all around the world for that, OK, we can make exceptions to that,” Wheeler says.“But it should be the exception, not the rule,” she continues. “The H-1B visa scam is a scam because it’s become the rule. Companies across the country first look for H-1B visa applicants to hire because they can take advantage of them. They can pay them less. They can demand more.”“When our resources are used by foreigners,” she adds, “Well, American citizens suffer.”Want more from Liz Wheeler?To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

President Donald Trump appeared to change his mind about the Epstein files and told Republicans he supported their release after hinting at opposing it.He expressed his wishes in a post on Truth Social Sunday where he repeated his claim that the controversy regarding the files was a "hoax" perpetrated by the Democrats to distract the public from Trump's victories.'Let’s start talking about the Republican Party’s Record Setting Achievements, and not fall into the Epstein "TRAP," which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us.' "House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party, including our recent Victory on the Democrat 'Shutdown,'" he posted.He pointed out that the Justice Dept. had already turned over documents related to Epstein and made them publicly available."The House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to, I DON’T CARE!" he added.The vote to release the files in the U.S. House may take place on Tuesday after Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona was finally seated and became the last name necessary to pass the congressional motion. Democrats had suggested that the president was opposed to the release because of some kind of complicity or knowledge of Epstein's crimes, which Trump has denied."Donald Trump keeps crying ‘hoax’ when pressed on releasing the Epstein files," wrote Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California. "But the American people deserve to know what evidence a convicted child sex trafficker had that he said could 'take down' Trump."RELATED: CNN anchor visibly upset when analyst says outrage over Epstein files has not hurt Trump at all "Some 'members' of the Republican Party are being 'used,' and we can’t let that happen," the president concluded. "Let’s start talking about the Republican Party’s Record Setting Achievements, and not fall into the Epstein 'TRAP,' which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us."A judge had previously said there were names in the files that would change the lives of well-known people if they were released to the public. Many of those have been allowed to fight the release of their identities through the legal process. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Jack Dorsey is bringing the nostalgia back, just a few seconds at a time.Dorsey co-founded Twitter in 2007 and served as its inaugural CEO for a year until returning to the position for a six-year stint in its seemingly darkest years between 2015 and 2021.Now, through his nonprofit called and Other Stuff, Dorsey is bringing one of the internet's most beloved applications back from the dead.'Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things ...'"So basically, I'm like, can we do something that’s kind of nostalgic?" said Evan Henshaw-Plath, Dorsey's pick to spearhead the revival. The New Zealander comes from Dorsey's nonprofit team, where he is known as Rabble, and has outlined aspirations to bring the internet vibe back to its Web 2.0 time period — roughly 2004-2010 or thereabouts.Dorsey and Henshaw-Plath are rebooting Vine, the six-second video app that predominantly served viewers short, user-generated comedy clips. The format is a clear inspiration for modern apps like TikTok and formats like YouTube's Shorts and Instagram's Reels. Dorsey and company are focused on keeping the nostalgic feel, however, and unlike the other apps, will keep a six-second time limit while also taking a stance on content. What that means, according to Yahoo, is that the platform will reject AI-generated videos using special filters meant to prevent them from being posted. RELATED: Social media matrix destroys free will; Dorsey admits ‘we are being programmed’i loved vine. i found it pre-launch, pushed the company to buy it (i wasn’t ceo at the time), and they did great. but over time https://t.co/HNsCMGtS04 (tiktok) took off, and and the founders left, leaving vine directionless. when i came back as ceo we decided to shut it down…— jack (@jack) April 11, 2024The new app, called diVine, will revive 10,000 archived Vine posts, after the new team was able to extract a "good percentage" of some of the most popular videos. Former Vine users are able to claim their old videos, so long as they can prove access to previously connected social media accounts that were on their former Vine profiles. Alternatively, the users can request that their old videos be taken down."The reason I funded the nonprofit and Other Stuff is to allow creative engineers like Rabble to show what's possible in this new world," Dorsey said, per Yahoo.This will be done by "using permissionless protocols which can't be shut down based on the whim of a corporate owner," he added.Henshaw-Plath commented on returning to simpler internet times — as silly as it sounds — when a person's content feed only consisted of accounts he follows, with real, user-generated content."Can we do something that takes us back, that lets us see those old things, but also lets us see an era of social media where you could either have control of your algorithms, or you could choose who you follow, and it's just your feed, and where you know that it's a real person that recorded the video?" he asked.RELATED: Twitter announces the demise of video-sharing app Vine, internet weeps (2016) According to Tech Crunch, Vine was acquired by Twitter in 2012 for $30 million before eventually shutting down in 2016. The app sparked careers for personalities like Logan Paul, Andrew “King Bach” Bachelor, and John Richard Whitfield, aka DC Young Fly. Bachelor and Whitfield captured the genre that was most popular on the platform: eccentric young performers who published unique comedy.DiVine is currently in a beta stage and is available only to existing users of the messenger app Nostr.X owner Elon Musk announced in August that he was trying acquire access to Vine's archive so that users could post the videos on his platform."We recently found the Vine video archive (thought it had been deleted) and are working on restoring user access, so you can post them if you want," Musk wrote.However, it seems the billionaire may have been beaten to the punch by longtime rival Dorsey.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Don’t try to solve housing shortages or worker frustrations by having fewer Americans.

Mary Katharine Ham Zings Andrew Tate for Calling All Women Scum (He Doesn't Want a Single One!) and ROFL