MOVIES: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026, Bassam Tariq)

For a time in the late 2010s/early 2020s, Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali were hired to direct and star in a Blade movie for Marvel. They eventually both left the project before it fell apart entirely, but they have re-united to make this movie, which gives Ali the chance to show off some of the martial arts training he went through for Blade.

Ali plays Latif, a hitman who works for a security company run by Mike (Laith Nakli). As the movie opens, Latif's wife has just died suddenly, leaving him a single father of three children, including an infant daughter. When his wife's breast milk runs out, Latif learns that the baby cannot digest formula, and he spends much of the movie driving around Houston, searching desperately for a source of breast milk.

That task has to be juggled with his continuing assignments from Mike, the latest of which involves Mike's dimwit nephew, Hatty (Abubakr Ali). Hatty runs a Muslim porn site, which has made him the target of a local cult leader/pastor (John Cho), who believes that Hatty's operation is a cover for human trafficking. Mike orders Latif to kill the pastor. 

Complicating matters even further, the death of his wife has triggered a serious crisis of faith for Latif, who is (or at least has been until now) a devout Muslim, and he turns to his imam (Giancarlo Esposito) for spiritual guidance.

The performances are solid; there's lovely supporting work from Adia (just the one name) as Fatiha, Latif's teenage daughter who is beginning to piece together what her father really does for a living.

The movie is, aside from its fight scenes, largely calm and quiet, with lots of conversations about faith and what it demands of us; those conversations come from multiple perspectives, including some brief appearances from the Mormon missionaries who live in Latif's apartment building. 

It's an odd combination of elements in what is, after all, an action movie at heart with fight scenes (very nicely staged) that include the obligatory hero-vs.-small army climactic battle, and it feels like it shouldn't work -- a Muslim hitman's frantic search for breast milk?!? -- but it does. An impressive achievement.