‘Misty Green’ Review – Chris Rock’s Critique Of Hollywood [TIFF 2026]

Chris Rock clearly has a lot on his mind with Misty Green. Stepping back into the director’s chair, he takes the familiar Hollywood story of the fallen star and gives it a particularly messy twist: what happens when the person who once had the career everyone dreams of has somehow managed to lose almost all of it? Rosalind Eleazar plays Misty, an Emmy-winning actress whose career has stalled, whose drug use has spiraled, and whose personal life has become about as stable as her professional one. When the widow of her deceased sugar daddy (at the very least it’s implied he was) gives her one week to vacate the beachfront apartment she’s been living in, Misty suddenly has seven days to figure out what comes next. She reconnects with people from her past, searches for a way back into Hollywood, and finds herself sabotaging whatever progress she manages to make.

Rock has plenty to say about fame, aging, race, homelessness, addiction, and the entertainment industry’s ability to discard people once they are no longer useful, specifically Black actors. The problem is that Misty Green doesn’t always know which of those things it wants to say first. Fortunately, Rosalind Eleazar knows exactly what she is doing. She is sublime, and that is putting it lightly. Misty is a damaged, magnetic, selfish, funny, frustrating, and frequently a person who is her own worst enemy, and Eleazar never seems tempted to sand down those rough edges for the sake of audience sympathy—think Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems. There is desperation lurking beneath Misty’s swagger, particularly in the way she talks about the career she once had. She remembers exactly who she was, and the tragedy is that she seems incapable of accepting who she has become.

That’s a difficult character to play because the film needs us to remain interested in Misty even when Misty herself is making it increasingly difficult to like her. Eleazar finds the balance; her confidence often feels like performance in the truest sense of the word, a protective layer covering someone who knows that the world has stopped looking at her the way it once did.

What the screenplay never quite figures out, unfortunately, is what Misty actually misses. We spend nearly two hours following this woman around Los Angeles, but the movie never fully convinces us that acting itself is what she desperately wants back. Her desire to return to Hollywood frequently seems motivated by money and the lifestyle attached to her former success rather than by any genuine artistic hunger. That’s potentially an interesting distinction; perhaps Misty doesn’t miss acting so much as she misses being Misty Green, the person Hollywood once told her she was. But the screenplay doesn’t dig deeply enough into that idea. For a movie ostensibly about a Black actress trying to reclaim her place in an industry that has already decided she is disposable, that’s a surprisingly significant omission.

Rock, however, continues to show growth as a filmmaker. Despite my qualms, I have to admit I am fascinated by what he is doing here on an artistic level. One of the pleasures of Misty Green is how specifically he captures Los Angeles. This isn’t merely generic Hollywood, complete with palm trees and expensive cars. His Los Angeles is glamorous, ugly, ridiculous, predatory, and occasionally beautiful, often within the same scene. There is a clear love-hate relationship with the entertainment industry here, and Rock seems particularly amused by the bizarre ecosystem of people Misty encounters while attempting to reconstruct her life.

The problem is that his confidence in the world doesn’t always extend to the story inhabiting it. Rock has so many ideas, characters, jokes, observations, and little pieces of Hollywood absurdity that the movie sometimes feels like it is afraid to leave anything out. You can sense the filmmaker having a great time looking around this world, but I just wish he had been a little more ruthless about deciding what belonged in Misty’s story.

There are some genuinely funny sequences, though; Anna Kendrick gets several of the film’s biggest laughs as Misty’s best friend, a woman who has developed the particular survival skill of tolerating Misty’s increasingly outrageous behavior while pursuing financial ambitions of her own. Chris Rock’s Jordan Green, meanwhile, is a struggling director attempting to mount a remake of Dreamgirls, which gives Rock plenty of opportunities to poke fun at the peculiar machinery of Hollywood filmmaking.

The comedy works best when it grows naturally out of character. Unfortunately, Kendrick’s character eventually begins to feel less like an essential part of Misty’s journey and more like someone the movie checks in with because it has run out of places to go. That problem repeats itself throughout Misty Green: an amusing character appears, delivers some good material, and then the film wanders away before we’ve had much reason to care about them.

Adam Driver gets perhaps the most deliciously ridiculous supporting role as Zach, one of Misty’s former co-stars who has reinvented himself in the world of high-end prostitution. Driver throws himself into the material with exactly the right amount of shamelessness even if he does feel underutilized and underbaked. But Zach also embodies the movie’s structural problem. There are simply too many interesting weirdos wandering through Misty’s life. Her seven-day countdown gradually begins to feel less like a dramatic engine and more like an excuse to introduce us to another eccentric corner of Los Angeles.

Daniel Kaluuya is equally memorable as Misty’s brother, Jordan, who suffers from schizophrenia. There is something wonderfully unpredictable about Kaluuya’s performance because you never quite know what he is going to do next, and that instability fits neatly into the increasingly chaotic circumstances surrounding Misty. Kaluuya can make even the most exaggerated behavior feel dangerous because he gives the character an internal logic that the screenplay doesn’t always provide.

As with other supporting players, however, we have another example of a character who seems capable of opening up an entire second movie. His relationship with Misty raises questions about family, responsibility, addiction, and the difficulty of caring for another person when you can barely manage to care for yourself. Those are rich ideas, but Misty Green often seems more interested in having Jordan disrupt Misty’s life than in exploring what their relationship actually means.

And that is the great frustration of the movie. There are fascinating subjects everywhere you look, but Rock clearly wants to talk about what happens to aging Black actresses in Hollywood. He wants to examine racism, addiction, homelessness, exploitation, fame, and the particularly cruel economics of an industry that can spend years convincing people they are valuable before abruptly deciding they aren’t. Any one of those subjects could sustain a movie. Put them all together and you have the makings of a very sharp Hollywood satire.

Yet the satire rarely cuts quite as deeply as it should because the film recognizes the problems. It points directly at them, but recognizing a problem isn’t the same thing as examining it. Too often, Misty’s own selfishness and self-destruction become the most convenient explanation for everything happening to her. That’s dramatically useful, but it also lets the movie off the hook. If Misty is responsible for her downfall, then we don’t have to sit too long with the larger systems that helped make that downfall possible.

This is why the lack of focus becomes increasingly frustrating. Misty should be the gravitational center of the film, but there are extended stretches in which the people orbiting her become more interesting than she is. Some are funny. Some are bizarre. Some are played by terrific actors. But too many feel as though they exist because Rock couldn’t resist another good character rather than because the story genuinely needed them.

There is something admirable about that indulgence, too. I’d rather watch a filmmaker with too many ideas than one with none. Misty Green feels alive precisely because Rock keeps throwing things at the screen. But eventually you start wishing someone had stepped in and asked the most important question a film like this needs to answer: does this belong to Misty?

The ending is where that lack of discipline hurts the most. After spending seven days watching Misty confront the consequences of the life she’s built for herself, the movie seems to be approaching some kind of reckoning. We expect a revelation, or at least a clearer understanding of what she wants. Instead, the emotional resolution arrives with such speed that it feels almost apologetic. There simply isn’t enough groundwork to suggest that Misty has undergone the kind of internal transformation the ending requires.

This is a shame because Eleazar has given us a character worth following. I don’t need Misty to become a better person. In fact, one of the film’s strengths is that it doesn’t reduce her to a redemption machine. But I do need to understand her. What does she actually want? Does she want to act again? Does she want her money back? Does she want the attention? Does she want to be young again? Does she simply want the world to look at her the way it used to?

The movie comes tantalizingly close to answering those questions and then gets distracted by another joke. Still, there is something admirable about Rock refusing to make a sanitized fallen-star story in which a troubled woman learns one “Important Lesson” and walks triumphantly back into the spotlight. Misty is difficult. Sometimes she’s exhausting. Sometimes she’s downright unpleasant. And Eleazar makes her fascinating anyway. The supporting cast supplies plenty of energy, while Rock’s affection for Los Angeles and Hollywood gives the movie a sense of personality that prevents its familiar ingredients from becoming entirely stale.

Ultimately, Misty Green feels like a movie that needed one more pass—not because it lacks ambition, but because it has almost too much of it. Chris Rock has the beginnings of a very interesting Hollywood satire, and Rosalind Eleazar gives a terrific performance as a woman desperately trying to convince herself that she still has control over her life. But the film keeps getting seduced by its own characters, jokes, and observations.

Misty Green was a disappointment overall. I admired it in places where I wasn’t entirely convinced by it. But I kept wishing Rock would stop for a moment and ask what the movie was actually about beneath all that wonderfully messy material. The answer seems to be somewhere between a portrait of a woman who cannot accept her own irrelevance and a satire about an industry that manufactures irrelevance in the first place. Those are both worthwhile movies, but Misty Green never quite decides which one it wants to be.

Misty Green held its World Premiere as part of the Gala Presentations section at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. The film will debut in select theaters on October 9, 2026, courtesy of A24. 

Director: Chris Rock

Screenwriter: Chris Rock

Rated: R

Runtime: 103m

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