MICHAEL (2026)

If you love Michael Jackson's music, this is a good night at the movies. The performances — the early Jackson 5 hits, the "Thriller" and "Beat It" videos, the 1983 Motown "Billie Jean" moonwalk — are staged with real joy, and they'll carry anyone who lived through that pop-culture moment right back to it.

It's also an incomplete story by design. The film ends in 1988, five years before the abuse allegations that would define the rest of Jackson's public life, and it leaves out his mother's involvement in the Jehovah's Witness faith and other hard details. What it does show plainly is a boy beaten by his father and left to find comfort in fantasy and pet animals instead of people — a portrait that's honest about the wound even while it stays quiet about what came later.

Bring your teenager, not your eight-year-old. The music is a gift; the whole truth isn't fully here. Watch it for the artistry, and talk about what it leaves out.

Chicago, 1968: five brothers and a demanding father chase a dream. The Jackson 5 sign with Motown, score hit after hit, and young Michael — gifted, lonely, and often afraid of his father's temper — starts to find in music the escape he can't find at home. As the brothers' fame grows, so does Michael's pull toward something bigger than the group. What his solo career costs him, and what it gives him, is the story the movie is really telling.

Three stars means this: when MICHAEL is performing, it's excellent, and when it's explaining, it's careful to a fault. The musical sequences — the Jackson 5 medley, the "Thriller" and "Beat It" video re-creations, the "Billie Jean" moonwalk moment — are staged with real electricity, and they're the reason to watch.

The performances hold up the drama around the music. Colman Domingo is genuinely powerful as Joe Jackson, making the father's cruelty and its damage legible without cartoonishness. Juliano Valdi is affecting as young Michael, and Jaafar Jackson (Michael's own nephew) carries the role with evident care, even with his singing dubbed. The film's caution — its choice to end the story in 1988 and leave the harder chapters untouched — keeps it from being the fuller, riskier film it could have been.

This is a film that believes in talent, family loyalty, and the redemptive power of art — and it's honest, as far as it goes, about the cost of an abusive father chasing his sons' success. The Jehovah's Witness faith of Michael's mother goes unmentioned, as does the plastic surgery, the skin disease, and the abuse allegations that would later engulf him; the movie chooses celebration over reckoning, and viewers should know that going in.

There's a strong current of pro-capitalist striving here too — fame and recognition as the engine that lets a wounded boy escape his father's house and build something of his own. It's not wrong to admire ambition and hard-won craft, but the film never really asks what fame cost Michael relationally; his only friends as a boy are a pet llama and a monkey, and the movie treats that loneliness almost wistfully rather than as a warning.

What lingers most is the ache underneath: a boy retreating into a Peter Pan fantasy to survive a father's anger, forgiving that father years later but never fully escaping the scars. Scripture speaks straight into that wound: "For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in" (Psalm 27:10). The film shows us the wound honestly. It doesn't show us where the healing ultimately has to come from.

MICHAEL gives you the music at its most electric and a father's cruelty at its most plain — and quietly steps around everything that came after 1988. For teens and adults who know that going in, it's a good night at the movies. Worth the trip — teens and up.