The Light Gets Hard to Follow

Read Time:5 Minute, 40 Second

MOVIE REVIEW
Starbright
–

Genre: Fantasy, Adventure, Drama
Year Released: 2024, 2026 Blu-ray/CD Ruby Max Entertainment
Runtime: 2h 28m
Director(s): Francesco Lucente
Writer(s): Joseph Bitonti, Francesco Lucente, Olimpia Lucente
Cast: John Rhys-Davies, Diego Boneta, Alexandra Dowling, Ted Levine, Becky Ann Baker, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Tom Carey, John Westley, Christine Ebersole, Gary Grubbs, Lance E. Nichols, Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Elisabeth Röhm
Where to Watch: available now, order your copy here: www.mvdshop.com or www.amazon.com

RAVING REVIEW: STARBRIGHT is the kind of movie that makes you wish wanting something badly were enough to make it work. Francesco Lucente’s fantasy adventure has sincerity pouring out of nearly every frame, from its grieving farm girl to its fallen star to its big speeches about hope, faith, and the possibility that light can survive in a broken world. It wants to be sweeping. It wants to be old-fashioned. It wants to make you feel again. That’s admirable, and there are moments where that ambition peeks through. The problem is that the movie keeps mistaking scale for depth and length for emotional weight.

Alexandra Dowling plays Aisling, a young woman carrying an overwhelming amount of grief on a farm near the edge of a fading town. Her life changes when an eclipse brings a star crashing to earth, and Raphael, played by John Rhys-Davies, entrusts her with its living light. The star is placed inside a locket, and Aisling becomes its guardian as dangerous men begin to show up seeking its power. Along the way, she meets Joshua, played by Diego Boneta, who becomes part of a long night filled with chases, threats, romance, spiritual guidance, and the promise that hope can transform more than the people chasing it.

The biggest issue isn’t that STARBRIGHT is sentimental. Sentiment can work when it’s earned, and fantasy needs a certain amount of emotional openness to survive. The issue is that the movie often says what it wants the audience to feel before it has created the conditions for those feelings to land. Characters speak in ideas, declarations, and poetic fragments, but too many of the relationships lack enough texture beneath them. The film keeps insisting on wonder, love, danger, loss, and redemption, while the connective tissue between those ideas remains frustratingly thin.

At 148 minutes, the film’s problems have too much room to spread out. Some scenes seem designed to create atmosphere, then keep lingering past the point where atmosphere becomes motionless. There are moments of action that should tighten the story, yet they often add more clutter. There are fantasy elements that should clarify the mythos, only to make the rules feel hazier. STARBRIGHT doesn’t need to be small, but it desperately needed to be more disciplined.

That’s the frustrating part: the tenderness is there. Dowling gives Aisling a wounded softness that fits the film’s fairy-tale ambitions, and Rhys-Davies brings history and impact as Raphael. He has the kind of voice that can make even overly ornate dialogue sound carved in stone, and the film leans heavily on that presence. Boneta has an appealing screen quality as Joshua, though the movie asks him to carry romance, action, and wounded nobility without giving the character enough edges. The cast is capable. The material keeps asking them to sell feelings that haven’t always been shaped into scenes.

Ted Levine, Becky Ann Baker, Christine Ebersole, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Elisabeth Röhm, and the rest of the supporting cast add something. However, some of them feel trapped in a film that doesn’t know how to use all of its pieces. The antagonists should bring urgency, but the threat often feels oddly disconnected from the magic. The emotional side of the story wants to be delicate, while the chase elements want to be forceful, and the movie struggles to make those feel like they’re part of the same world. The result is less genre-blending than genre traffic.

STARBRIGHT never feels cynical, lazy, or even forced. It feels deeply personal, maybe too personal to see where it’s losing the audience. The film reaches for big mythic simplicity but keeps burying that simplicity under extra plot, extra runtime, extra speechmaking, and extra dramatic turns. A story about protecting a living star should feel elemental. Too often, this one feels overexplained yet underdeveloped. The romance also suffers from that imbalance. Aisling and Joshua are positioned as two wounded souls drawn together during a miraculous night. Yet the film treats their connection as destiny before it gives them enough chemistry or conflict to make destiny feel earned.

That doesn’t mean STARBRIGHT is without value. In a market crowded with ironic genre storytelling, a film willing to look the audience in the eye and talk about hope has a certain appeal. The problem is that sincerity isn’t a substitute for structure. Belief can guide a story, but it can’t organize one by itself.

STARBRIGHT's heart is visible, even when the movie around it keeps drifting out of reach. It has a sincere lead, a committed cast, a few gorgeous images, and the bones of a better fantasy buried inside its overlong runtime. What it doesn’t have is enough control, focus, or precision to make that fantasy shine the way it should. The film wants to be a glowing reminder that light survives darkness. By the end, the light is there, but you have to dig through too much confusion to find it.

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[photo courtesy of RUBY MAX ENTERTAINMENT, MVD ENTERTAINMENT]

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