MOVIES: The Social Reckoning (2026, Aaron Sorkin)

A "companion piece" -- not, everyone involved insists, a sequel -- to The Social Network. Sorkin, who wrote both movies, adds director to his list of duties this time, replacing David Fincher.

Our central characters are Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). In 2019, Haugen was a member of Facebook's "civic integrity" team, responsible for user safety issues. She discovered that Facebook's policies had been altered to increase user time on the site and company revenue, despite the company's executives knowing that the changes they were making were prioritizing disinformation and rage bait over truth and the emotional well-being of their users. She begins providing company documents and information about those policies to Horwitz, eventually leading to the publication of the "Facebook Files," a long series of articles that won Horwitz the Pulitzer Prize.

The Huagen/Horwitz story alternates with scenes set in 2021, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) is being prepped for a Congressional hearing by a team headed up by crisis management specialist Raya (Wunmi Mosaku); Zuckerberg is challenged most bluntly in these prep sessions by former colleague Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr), whose history of challenging Zuckerberg has led to a personal and professional estrangement between the two men.

This is the hardest kind of movie to say much about, because it's neither good nor bad to an extreme that is memorable, or that inspires any thoughtful commentary. It's fine, and I never felt that it was trying to be anything more.

The most direct point of comparison between Social Network and Social Reckoning is the portrayals of the one character they share, Zuckerberg. In Social Network, he's played by Jesse Eisenberg, who doesn't particularly look or sound like Zuckerberg, but who gives us a thrilling performance; a character emerges from the work, and we feel like we're being given some insight into who Zuckerberg is and how he things. By contrast, Strong has been styled to look very much like Zuckerberg, and duplicated his familiar vocal and physical tips. It's a skillful impersonation, but it's not much more than that, and we don't get any understanding of who Zuckerberg is beyond the superficial recreation of his social awkwardness.

The best performance in the movie is from Portia Doubleday, who is at the center of the prologue. She's a former friend of Haugen, and she's been radicalized by the white supremacist groups that have been fed to her by Facebook; we watch as she has a confrontation with the police, which she tapes and later posts to her own feed. After such a strong start, it's even more disappointing when the rest of the movie turns out to be a blandly competent march through events that just aren't very cinematic. It would take a better writer than Sorkin, I fear -- and I am generally a fan of Sorkin's work -- to make the movie's many long explanations of internal statistics dramatically compelling.