"Pressure"

☆☆☆☆½

Weather forecasting isn't a subject that has lent itself to particularly memorable movies. There's Twister, sort of, and Nicolas Cage in The Weather Man. Temperature and barometric pressure both get some nice callouts in L.A. Story and Magnolia, underscoring L.A.'s fascination with meteorology.

Now here is Pressure, a movie entirely about correctly forecasting the weather on one specific day. Much of the movie takes place in one room where lots of stuffy-looking men stare at charts and draw lines. Yet, Pressure is captivating, delivering genuine suspense even though we know full well what the weather was  in Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944.

D-Day is the one specific day in question, and Pressure is about the decision Gen. Ike Eisenhower had to make: Whether to send 150,000 Allied forces into a situation that would kill tens of thousands of them in an effort to defeat the Nazis on June 5, 1944. Needless to say, he didn't. And the reason the world commemorates June 6 as the day the Nazis began to lose World War II came down to a weather forecast.

The man who made that weather forecast was named James Stagg, and he is played in Pressure by Andrew Scott, who does something really extraordinary. Stagg is presented as an uptight man, quiet and solitary, maybe slightly bitter, and not at all likable. He is hard and serious — it is all but impossible to imagine him cracking a smile. The world is at war. Maybe it isn't the time to smile.

Scott steps into the weather forecasting room that has been run by American Col. Krick (Chris Messina), who couldn't be more unlike Stagg. And he has an entirely different approach to reading the weather.

Eisenhower, played by Brendan Fraser with unexpected force despite no physical resemblance, calls them both into a room filled with the top Allied military officials. Krick says Monday, June 5, will be bright, calm and clear. Stagg says the opposite. Two storms are making the weather unknowable.

There are no satellite images to consult. There is no internet to hold the answers. There is science, there are observable facts, and there is skill. One man recommends landing at Normandy on Monday. He is jovial, accomplished and everybody's pal. Another man recommends against it. He is hard and cold and nobody likes him.

In playing Stagg, Scott makes absolutely no effort to show the audience something that nobody else sees. He is committed to the man's insularity, to his distaste for almost everything, and to his certitude. Scott delivers a performance that will almost certainly be overlooked at awards season but shouldn't be, because what he's doing here is almost impossible to pull off — we want a character we fundamentally dislike to succeed, not just because of the stakes but because he is right, and he is capable.

Years from now, Pressure might join 1949's Twelve O'Clock High as a movie studied by people who want to understand how leadership works, how conflict within organizations is managed, how the highest leaders sometimes cannot hear what they must because they don't like the messenger. (Kerry Condon makes a big impression in the cast as Eisenhower's secretary, who knows how to talk to him but not stand up to him.) If it does achieve that kind of lasting legacy, it will be deserved.

But for now, Pressure is something more urgent: It's a terrific film, made by adults for adults about adults dealing with complex, fundamentally difficult issues. Why the studio decided to release it at the beginning of the summer, to have it compete against far less meaningful movies for entirely different audiences, is anyone's guess. Pressure deserves better, because it's one of the best movies of 2026.

Viewed May 30, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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