105 min | R | February 20, 2026 | A24
A family thriller that doesn’t moralize about its villains. Smarter than it looks.
John Patton Ford follows up Emily the Criminal with another story about people who want money badly enough to do ugly things to get it. How to Make a Killing takes place inside a wealthy family reunion that turns into something darker. Glen Powell plays Becket, an outsider who arrives already calculating his position. The film is clever in the way it withholds who is working against whom. It earns the confusion.
Margaret Qualley plays Julia Steinway with a precise kind of controlled danger. She has been doing this in smaller roles for years. Here she gets the space to carry a film and she does it. The character is deceptive without being cartoonish. Qualley finds the specific way someone smiles when they’re taking inventory. Ed Harris and Bill Camp are predictably good as older men with money and bad intentions. The whole ensemble commits to a world where everyone has an angle.
Ford shoots the film with enough restraint to keep the tone from tipping into satire. The cinematography by Todd Banhazl keeps things clean and composed. The score by Emile Mosseri underlines tension without announcing it. The script is disciplined. It doesn’t spend time asking you to feel bad about people who chose this.
The film’s best quality is the one the user noticed immediately. It doesn’t moralize. Wealth and deception and manipulation are the landscape, not the lesson. Nobody stops to explain that greed is bad. The movie trusts you to draw your own conclusions, or not to draw any at all. That restraint is rarer than it should be.