Chris Rock’s ‘Misty Green’ Splits Critics Over Its Hollywood Satire — but Nobody’s Arguing About Rosalind Eleazar

The reviews for Chris Rock’s return to the director’s chair are in, and they agree on exactly one thing: Rosalind Eleazar is the whole movie. Misty Green opens in theaters Friday, Oct. 9, and critics are split down the middle on whether Rock’s Hollywood satire actually works — but nobody, not one reviewer, is arguing about the woman at its center.

LOS ANGELES — Written, directed by and co-starring Rock, Misty Green is his first effort behind the camera since 2014’s Top Five, Far Out noted in its review, and it arrives through A24 at a moment when Hollywood is clearly enjoying interrogating itself. The 103-minute, R-rated film (language, drug use and sexual references, per the New York Post) follows Misty, played by the 38-year-old Eleazar, a once-successful TV actress whose career has stalled and who now has to scramble for work — auditioning again for the first time in years, fielding a comeback offer tied to a Dreamgirls remake, and weighing a far seedier proposition involving Saudi money and a one-night arrangement in Dubai.

The reviews that dropped this week read like two different movies. The New York Post’s review frames it as a brutal, genuinely pessimistic Hollywood vivisection — the rare industry satire where a prestige-musical comeback and a pay-to-play Middle East gig are presented as the two equally bleak options on the table. The Post’s critic went in braced for another film about the drawbacks of fame after last year’s Jay Kelly, and came out calling Rock’s film darker, sharper and far more interesting — even if it doesn’t fully come together, with a stunner of a performance from Eleazar doing the heaviest lifting.

Others were less forgiving. The Playlist graded the TIFF premiere a C, calling the film messy and arguing Rock centers himself in a way that nearly undercuts the project. AwardsWatch gave it a C+ and found it muddled, a morality tale with real insight that never coheres. Far Out landed at 2.5 out of 5, calling Eleazar a “revelatory performance” inside a dated satire. Screen Rant went further, calling the dramedy uninspired and arguing it fails its superb lead. RogerEbert.com, though, called Eleazar “stellar in every second,” crediting her with giving Misty a depth the screenplay only gestures at.

That’s the throughline across every verdict: Eleazar. The Wrap titled its TIFF review “Chris Rock Finds a Star in Rosalind Eleazar,” and wrote that Rock struck gold with a lead performance that papers over the film’s messier instincts — a view nearly every critic who has seen the film has landed in. AwardsWatch marveled at her singing, from a slow piano cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” at a cocktail lounge to a wrenching arrangement of “One Night Only” for the Dreamgirls audition. Screen Rant argued she single-handedly redeems an otherwise flawed film, capturing the desperation of an actress trying to keep her head above water. The Post’s critic summed it up bluntly: she plays the role with equal parts charm and contempt, and she’s the reason the movie holds your attention.

The supporting cast is stacked, even if reviews disagree on what Rock does with it. Adam Driver plays Zach, a drug-addicted filmmaker with movies that never get made and a lucrative sideline running actresses to Dubai for wealthy patrons. Daniel Kaluuya plays Misty’s brother — Jay in some reviews, Jordan in others — whose bipolar disorder and run-ins with the law give the film its emotional counterweight; RogerEbert.com and Screen Rant both singled out Kaluuya as scene-stealing in limited screen time. Anna Kendrick plays Misty’s best friend, Topher Grace is her long-suffering agent Randy, and Rock himself appears as a film director who might have a role for her. The New York Film Festival’s synopsis identifies Kaluuya as the brother and Driver as a former colleague, with Kendrick, Grace, Anthony Anderson, Amy Landecker and Rich Sommer rounding out the ensemble.

The film premiered at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival in a coveted Saturday night slot at Roy Thompson Hall, and Eleazar was honored at the festival’s TIFF Tribute Awards alongside Helen Mirren, Penélope Cruz and Isabelle Huppert — “extraordinary company,” as she told the Los Angeles Times with a warm smile. Rock, for his part, has been talking about the choice to step back from the lead role: on The Tonight Show, he explained he recognized how strong Eleazar’s performance was while watching the dailies, and that he wanted her, not him, to carry the film. Eleazar, who flew to Los Angeles rather than audition over Zoom, reportedly won the room in about 40 minutes.

And then there’s the timing of it all. As the film opened, Parade highlighted a candid interview in which Eleazar — on the verge of what could be the biggest moment of her acting career — admitted she has wondered whether acting was the right path at all. “There are definitely times that I’ve questioned it,” she told the Los Angeles Times, Parade reported. She said she related to Misty’s cycle of rejection and recovery: “Being an actor is hard. I could totally relate to Misty’s journey and the setbacks and the constant picking yourself back up after multiple rejections and just going again.” She added that it can be easy to harden yourself toward an unforgiving industry — while remaining emotionally open enough to do the work.

It’s an unusually raw admission to make in the middle of a breakthrough, and it lands differently because of what the film is about. Eleazar is familiar to American audiences as Louisa Guy on Apple TV’s Slow Horses; Misty Green is her first lead in a film. The role asks her to play a woman who is arguably more talented than the industry she’s begging to rejoin — and the reviews, even the mixed ones, keep arriving at the same conclusion about the woman playing her.

Whether the satire itself works is something audiences will decide starting Friday. Rock’s script takes big swings — at agents, producers, the prestige-industrial complex, and the economics that make a Dubai trip pay better and take less time than a red carpet — and reviewers can’t agree whether those swings connect or just flail. What they can agree on is simpler: the woman in the middle of it. If Eleazar isn’t in the awards conversation by January, more than a few of these critics will consider it an industry failure — which would be, you have to admit, a very on-theme outcome for this particular movie.

For more on this fall’s box-office picture, see our weekend box-office breakdown and our coverage of Jesse Eisenberg’s NYFF premiere.