TIFF ‘Misty Green’ Review: Rosalind Eleazar Gives the Performance of the Year

Twelve years after ‘Top Five,’ Rock returns with a Hollywood story that has no interest in being a takedown, and hands a British TV actress the role of her life.

Misty Green is the best film Chris Rock has made, and it belongs almost entirely to Rosalind Eleazar. Twelve years after Top Five, Rock returns as writer-director with a Los Angeles story that has no interest in being a takedown, handing a British television actress the role of her career and building an entire film around her ability to carry it. She does, and then some.

The premise is deceptively simple. Misty is an Emmy-winning actress in her late thirties whose career has collapsed under the weight of her own behavior. She was once on the cover of Cosmo, still recognized for a cult thriller series called Red Eye, still capable of stopping a room when she wants to. She is also about to be evicted, broke, and running out of people willing to take her calls.

Over the course of one very bad week, she has to find an apartment, book a job, and deal with a brother who has just been released from a psychiatric hospital with nowhere to go.

Rosalind Eleazar plays Misty, and I want to be careful here, because “star-making performance” is a phrase critics reach for roughly forty times a year and it usually means very little. This one means it. Eleazar, best known to American audiences as the grieving MI5 operative on Slow Horses, does something in this film I have rarely seen an actor pull off. She makes a genuinely difficult woman impossible to abandon.

Misty is not a misunderstood victim of a cruel industry. She is talented, yes, Emmy-winning, once on the cover of Cosmo, still capable of stopping a room. She is also abrasive, self-sabotaging, and was fired from a film years ago for punching a wardrobe woman in the face. Her agent, played with perfect slipperiness by Topher Grace, finally tells her the truth: “No one wants to work with you. You’re too difficult.”

He is right. That is what makes the film work.

Eleazar plays every contradiction at once without ever letting them cancel each other out. She has a swagger that reads as total confidence in one scene and naked self-preservation in the next, often within the same line. Her armor and her personality have fused into the same thing, and she cannot tell you where one ends. Watching her is like watching someone walk a ledge they have convinced themselves is a sidewalk.

There are two moments where the film stops being good and becomes something else entirely, and both of them involve Eleazar singing.

The first is a version of Radiohead’s “Creep” at a lounge bar in the Hollywood Roosevelt, performed at a piano to an audience that is barely listening. It is fragile and completely unguarded and it reframes everything you have watched so far. The second is “One Night Only,” sung at a Dreamgirls audition, and it carries the entire weight of the film’s hope and despair in about three minutes. If you want to understand why anyone in this town would keep betting on Misty Green despite everything, those two scenes answer it.

This is Chris Rock’s fourth feature as writer-director and his first in twelve years, since Top Five. That film was about a comic terrified he would not be funny sober. This one is quieter, sadder and considerably more assured. Rock is not pushing for jokes here. The humor arrives and he lets it land and then he lets it curdle, which is a much harder thing to control.

He also gives himself the right role, which is to say a small one.

Rock plays Jordan, a director who fired Misty years ago and is now staying in her building while casting a Dreamgirls remake. He is wary of her and he has every reason to be. He also has not written her off, and the scenes between them have a warmth that neither actor oversells.

Jordan gets some vintage Rock lines, including a bit about civil rights movies that got the biggest laugh of my screening. But the character’s real function is empathy. He is someone who has watched this industry chew through people like Misty for thirty years and has not gotten used to it.

Daniel Kaluuya’s return to the screen as Misty’s brother Jay is the film’s other great performance, and it is where Misty Green quietly becomes about something larger than show business.

Jay lives with bipolar disorder and has just been released from a psychiatric hospital with nowhere to go and no real support system waiting. Kaluuya plays him with enormous tenderness and no sentimentality. Then Jay gets pulled over twice by the same police officer, played by Anthony Anderson in a performance whose flatness is the whole point, for no reason other than being a Black man in a car. Jay loses his composure. Jay goes to prison. Bail is set at a number Misty cannot possibly reach.

What Rock is doing here is more ambitious than a Hollywood satire. Anderson’s officer and Kaluuya’s brother are two ends of the same failure, and the film sits in the space between them: a country that has not funded mental health care, has not built any mechanism for understanding it, and has trained no one to meet it, least of all the people it sends out with guns.

Misty’s career collapse and her brother’s crisis are not parallel plots. They are the same plot. Every time she gets a foot back in the door, the door needs money she has to spend somewhere else. The tragedy is not that she keeps failing. It is that she keeps choosing him, and the industry has no category for a person who does that.

The supporting bench is deep. Adam Driver is terrific as Zach, a hookup who tempts Misty toward a lucrative and degrading gig in Dubai, and Driver plays him with an unbothered awfulness that never tips into cartoon.

Anna Kendrick is warm and grounded as Misty’s closest friend. Amy Landecker is very funny as the widow. Colleen Camp turns up in a sly small role, her second A24 film this year after Club Kid.

The film is not perfect. It sprawls, and a few threads get less attention than they deserve. Topher Grace’s agent is written a shade too broadly for a movie this observant about everyone else. There are moments in the final third, as things genuinely darken, where Rock reaches for a bleakness the earlier scenes had earned more gracefully.

But I would rather watch an ambitious film overreach than a cautious one land safely.

And what stays with you is not the structure. It is Eleazar’s face, and the specific way she holds herself when a room turns on her, and the sound of her voice at that piano. Rock has built this entire film as a vehicle for an actor most American audiences do not know yet, and he built it with obvious love for the world it depicts, jaded and clear-eyed at once, the view of someone who has been inside it long enough to see both the glitter and the machinery underneath.

Misty Green is a movie about a woman who is running out of chances, made by a filmmaker who clearly believes people deserve more of them.

It is the best thing Chris Rock has directed, and Rosalind Eleazar should be in every Best Actress conversation from here until March.

Rating: ★★★★☆

That’s A Wrap | Misty Green

CREDITS

Festival Premiere: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)
Release Date: October 9, 2026
Distributor: A24
Writer-Director: Chris Rock
Cast: Rosalind Eleazar, Adam Driver, Daniel Kaluuya, Anna Kendrick, Chris Rock, Topher Grace, Alexandra Shipp, Amy Landecker, Tracie Thoms, Necar Zadegan, Rich Sommer, Colleen Camp, Anthony Anderson
Producers: Peter Rice, Chris Rock, David Worthen Brooks, Victoria Thomas
Production Companies: Macro Film Studios, Confluential Films
Rating: R
Runtime: 1 hour 44 minutes

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Joanthan P. Moustakas

Jonathan P. Moustakas founded The Cinema Group in 2020 during the challenges of the pandemic, after losing the vital ability to find community in theaters and escape through the captivating magic of cinema. Feeling profoundly cut off from the vibrant film community he cherished, he sought to create a welcoming home for dedicated cinema fans while providing engaging, daily curated content that resonates with their passions. Years later, The Cinema Group has blossomed from a small collective of loyal fans into a thriving brand that reaches millions of audiences every month across a diverse array of platforms and mediums.

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