FYC screener season is well under way, as critics and guild members are starting to draft ballots for their respective Best of 2026 awards rituals as part of the year-long movie-marketing cycle that never truly ends. Depending on what titles you afford your thinly-stretched attention, that can mean spending the last few months of 2026 watching overlong, overly dour festival-circuit dramas in a desperate effort to catch up with the year’s pre-ordained Important Movies, which are typically held back until the last minute before votes are due. A more relaxed approach could be to just coast through FYC season watching middlebrow crowdpleasers starring always-welcome celebrities you already know & love, playing dress-up & make-believe for easy layup accolades. This year, for instance, has seen prominent awards-seeking runs for John Malkovich in Wild Horse Nine, playing a too-old-for-this-shit wisecracking criminal in a 70s throwback acting vehicle, and John Turturro doing the exact same in The Only Living Pickpocket in New York. I’d also like to offer, for your consideration, the unassuming crowd pleaser Tuner, featuring a prominent supporting role for Dustin Hoffman as a too-old-for-this-shit wisecracker in yet another 70s throwback crime-drama acting showcase. Tuner was released back in May to strong critical marks and relatively quiet fanfare among wide audiences, and it’s now resurfacing to seek potential placements on Best of 2026 ballots in the season where it truly belongs: the time of year when we endlessly discuss & promote movies people otherwise only engage with on the backs of airplane headrests.
If anything, Tuner acts as a symbolic passing of the torch from one generation’s always-welcome celebrity actor to the next. Dustin Hoffman’s role as an overly chatty piano tuner with a vaguely shady past and a heart of tarnished gold only accounts for a few minutes’ screentime, which he mostly spends in a hospital bed cheering on his young costar from the sidelines. The fresh-faced Leo Woodall is the Tuner of the title, a talented pianist whose career in music has been sidelined by a hearing disability that makes him overly sensitive to loud noises, relegating his perfect-pitch ear to the more humble craft of tuning dust-gathering pianos for the wealthy, jaded citizens of New York City. By happenstance, he also learns that his overly sensitive hearing also makes him perfectly skilled for cracking safes, which gets him in quick trouble as he scrambles to pay for his aging mentor’s out-of-control medical bills. Woodall mostly plays the titular safecracking piano tuner as a kind of gentle giant, a sensitive soul who’s constantly mumbling “Sorry” as he bumps into things despite his jockish, muscular physique. However, as the pressures of his duty to Hoffman’s mentor figure, his gradual integration into an underground crime world, and his burgeoning romance with a career-hungry composer (Havana Rose Liu) bring him to an uncontrolled boil, he becomes genuinely dangerous in his volatility. If he’s not capable of physical violence, he’s at least at risk of committing emotional violence against his precious few loved ones, especially as the constant, blaring sounds of NYC rattle his practiced sense of laidback cool.
Why does this safecracking piano tuner continue to live in New York City anyway? When explaining his extreme hearing sensitivity to his new girlfriend, he says, “You’d be surprised how loud the world is.” That’s doubly true for New Yorkers, though, especially the ones unlucky enough to drive a work van down city streets from job to job to make ends meet. Tuner is not nearly as interested in plausibility as it is in recreating a vintage 70s crime thriller vibe in its jazzy score, its character-actor quirks, and its whip-pan camera maneuvers. Director Daniel Roher is fighting an uphill battle on that front, since he’s shooting this big-city crime story on modern digital cameras instead of relying on the throwback celluloid grain of a Safdies-style production to sell its retro cool to the audience. As Woodall learns how to crack safes via YouTube tutorials, finds himself walking through security camera footage, and has to beg his fellow boneheaded criminals to turn down the volume on their video games & TikToks, the movie does gradually justify its flat digital patina, but if any modern thriller was begging for the shot-on-film treatment, it’s this one. Still, it establishes a relatively cool, laidback heist thriller vibe with some surprising visual choices in how to represent its routine safecracking sequences so they never become stale: fetishistic close-up details of the inner locks clicking into place, fish-eye views of the thieves from the safe dial’s POV, rapid-fire clicks & edits as the piano tuner hops from one rich prick’s safe to the next. It’s fun, it’s freewheeling, and when our handsome lead gets into legitimate trouble, it’s effectively thrilling in its brutality.
If there’s anything inadvisable about Dustin Hoffman’s deployment as Tuner’s celebrity mascot, it’s that his presence does recall the once celebrated, now disgraced autism drama Rain Man, especially in sequences where Woodall is tasked to recognize complex musical notes & patterns with near-supernatural accuracy. Otherwise, Hoffman’s perfectly suited for the task of affording the film some vintage New Hollywood authenticity as a 70s-era throwback and, more importantly, making sure it lingers in the discourse past its theatrical run, as his name inevitably will find its way onto a few Best Supporting Acting ballots in the next couple months. This is the one time of year that Dad Movies, Airplane Movies, and other solidly entertaining Middlebrow Crowdpleasers are treated as Important Cinema before they’re shuffled off to basic-cable rotation or forgotten to time entirely. It’s Hoffman’s performance that sneaks Tuner into that conversation, and it’s Woodall’s preposterous journey as history’s most musically talented safecracker that makes it worthy of the extra attention. Its FYC season victory lap is well earned.
-Brandon Ledet
