What To Watch This Weekend: 'Pressure,' 'Backrooms,' 'Power Ballad,' 'Spider-Noir' And 'The Last Viking'

HOLLYWOOD, CA — This weekend’s watchlist dives from seaborne peril to fluorescent limbo to the loud, chaotic pulse of creative meltdown.

“Pressure” opens with a deep‑sea crisis that tightens by the minute. “Backrooms” follows with a slip into fluorescent horror, where the familiar turns hostile without warning. “Power Ballad” adds a burst of theatrical angst and creative self‑sabotage.

Rounding out the slate, “Spider‑Noir” brings shadowed grit to 1930s New York, while “The Last Viking” delivers offbeat Scandinavian chaos built on memory, mischief and buried secrets.

Ready to dive in? Scroll down for the full lineup, with deeper explorations below that unpack performances, themes and craft in greater detail.

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What To Watch This Weekend

“Pressure”

Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Chris Messina; directed by Anthony Maras

Capt. James Stagg (Andrew Scott), the real-life Scottish meteorologist tasked with delivering the most consequential forecast of World War II, arrives at Allied Headquarters in Southwick House just 72 hours before the invasion of Normandy. His job: determine the precise moment to launch the seaborne attack — a decision that could alter the course of history.

Anthony Maras, returning to features after “Hotel Mumbai,” again shapes a confined setting into a taut chamber piece. Adapted from David Haig’s West End play, “Pressure” trades battlefield spectacle for a war-room drama where Stagg’s empirical system clashes with Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (Brendan Fraser) military instinct and the entrenched orthodoxy of American forecaster Irving Krick (Chris Messina).

With two storms pushing toward the Atlantic and the invasion set for June 5, Stagg warns of disaster ahead, rattling Eisenhower at the moment he needs absolute clarity.

Scott plays Stagg with smoldering restraint, his stillness a counterweight to the bluster around him. Fraser’s Eisenhower carries the enormity of command in every silence, their scenes together charged with the strain of responsibility rather than ego.

The supporting cast around the leads delivers with steady verve. Messina bristles with confident absolutism, Damian Lewis gives Montgomery a clipped volatility, and Kerry Condon offers the lone note of calm in a room thick with tension.

Maras directs with tightening inevitability, the 72-hour countdown becoming its own crucible. Despite the film’s stage-bound limitations, “Pressure” remains a riveting portrait of conviction under fire — and the man whose forecast helped shape the fate of the free world.

“Backrooms”

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, Mark Duplass; directed by Kane Parsons

Kane Parsons adapts his viral analog-horror series and the creepypasta that inspired it into “Backrooms,” a psychological horror film built around the uncanny mundanity of an endless, fluorescent maze.

The story follows Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture-store owner who slips through a doorway in his basement and vanishes into a sprawling grid of yellowed carpet and windowless rooms. When his therapist Mary (Renate Reinsve) goes after him, the film shifts into a controlled descent through a space where hallways loop, ceiling tiles seem to breathe and something unseen stalks just beyond the light.

Parsons leans into the internet-born mythology of “no-clipping,” the term for slipping through the seams of reality like a video-game character falling through a wall. Rather than chase spectacle, he grounds the film in Clark’s unraveling and Mary’s search, using the backrooms’ shifting architecture as an expression of disorientation, memory drift and psychological strain.

Shot with a mix of clean wides and VHS-scarred textures, the film builds tension through spatial uncertainty and the hum of fluorescent lights that never quite resolve into safety. Ejiofor brings a weary vulnerability to Clark’s unraveling, while Reinsve anchors the story with a steady, searching presence.

“Backrooms” is an atmospheric and confident debut that turns digital folklore into a tightly controlled horror chamber piece.

“Power Ballad”

Paul Rudd, Nick Jonas, Havana Rose Liu, Jack Reynor; directed by John Carney

A late-night jam session between a washed-up wedding singer and a fading pop star sets off a chain reaction in John Carney’s “Power Ballad,” a musical comedy-drama about ambition, ego and the song that gets away.

When Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas) turns Rick Power’s (Paul Rudd) melody into a chart-topping hit, the theft pushes both men into a messy collision of pride, insecurity and creative ownership.

Carney returns to the terrain that defined “Once” and “Sing Street,” grounding the film in lived-in musical moments rather than spectacle. Shot in Dublin, the story leans into the friction between two artists circling each other through resentment and reluctant kinship, with songs that emerge from conflict rather than performance set pieces.

Rudd plays Rick with a bruised sincerity, a man quietly reckoning with the career he never had. Jonas gives Danny a slick bravado masking the panic of a performer watching the spotlight drift. Havana Rose Liu and Jack Reynor add steadying texture, keeping the film emotionally tethered as the rivalry deepens.

Carney shapes the film with warmth and unforced humor, letting the music carry the emotional shifts. “Power Ballad” becomes a story about reclaiming authorship delivered with the melodic ease and gentle melancholy that have become the director’s signature.

“Spider-Noir” Season 1

Nicolas Cage, Lamorne Morris, Li Jun Li, Brendan Gleeson; created by Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot

Set in a stylized 1930s New York, Prime Video's “Spider-Noir” follows Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage), a private investigator pulled back into the masked identity he abandoned years earlier. When a case exposes a network of corruption tied to the city’s criminal underworld, Reilly is forced to confront the legacy of the Spider and the violence that once defined him.

Directors Oren Uziel and Steve Lightfoot shape the series as a hard-boiled detective story threaded with superhero mythology, leaning into noir atmosphere rather than modern spectacle. The show’s dual presentation — an Authentic Black & White version and a True-Hue Full Color edition — underscores its period sensibility, pairing shadowed alleys and smoke-filled interiors with bursts of stylized action.

Cage anchors the season with a weary, lived-in performance, playing Reilly as a man wrestling with guilt and the cost of heroism. Lamorne Morris brings steady warmth as Robbie Robertson, while Li Jun Li’s Cat Hardy and Abraham Popoola’s Tombstone add texture to the city’s shifting alliances. Brendan Gleeson’s Silvermane emerges as a commanding presence, tying the season’s criminal threads together.

“Spider-Noir” is a moody, atmospheric reinvention of the Spider-Man mythos, grounded in character and era.

“The Last Viking”

Mads Mikkelsen, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Sofie Gråbøl; directed by Anders Thomas Jensen

Anders Thomas Jensen’s “The Last Viking” follows Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), newly released after a 15-year prison sentence for bank robbery, as he returns home to recover the buried heist money only his brother Manfred (Mads Mikkelsen) once knew how to find.

Manfred, now living with dissociative identity disorder and slipping between personalities — including one who believes he is John Lennon — no longer remembers where the loot is hidden, sending the brothers on a darkly comic search through old trauma, fractured memory and the wreckage of their shared past.

Jensen leans into his signature blend of absurdity and melancholy, shaping the film as a black comedy built around misfits, emotional damage and the uneasy bond between siblings who never learned how to navigate each other.

The story moves through forests, rural homes and institutional spaces, grounding its humor in the brothers’ attempts to reconstruct a past neither fully trusts. Shot in Denmark and Sweden, the film is presented in its original Danish with English subtitles, continuing Jensen’s long-running collaboration with Mikkelsen and Lie Kaas.

Expect a dark, offbeat journey threaded with sharp turns and Jensen’s unmistakable sense of humor.