Movie Review: The Social Reckoning

 Movie Number 38 of 2026

The Movie: The Social Reckoning

The Cinema: Village Cinemas at Crown

Runtime: One hour 52 minutes

Stars: 4

I've loved the work of Aaron Sorkin since The West Wing. Yes, his sensibilities and politics are very similar to my own, but he also gets to tell some important stories. This is another one of those, which he has both written and directed.

We were all around a few years ago when a whistleblower shouted long and hard about the abuses and lack of civil responsibility at Facebook. The Social Reckoning looks at this part of history, to great effect. Sorkin also wrote the screenplay for The Social Network, which looked at the formation and fallout of the formation of Facebook. In both of these films, Mark Zuckerberg doesn't walk away looking like a great human being. 

The Social Reckoning follows Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a young Facebook engineer, who enlisted the help of Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), a Wall Street Journal reporter, to blow the whistle on the social network's most guarded secrets. We also see what Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) and his team do with him to "make him seem more likeable." If you followed the news at the time, Haugen testified in front of Congress about Facebook's nearly inhuman way of taking profits over people. And Jeff Horwitz received a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. 

This is a wordy movie - but this is how Aaron Sorkin runs. Thankfully, the lead players put in excellent performances. Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg is particularly effective. (They asked Jesse Eisenberg to come back and play Zuckerberg but he turned the role down, wanting nothing to do with the man himself - and fair enough.) The well-crafted script would have helped these performances - mind you, Jeremy Allen White plaus a great underdog, just as Jeremy Strong is brilliant playing morally bankrupt characters. Mikey Madison, known best for her Oscar winning role in Anora is also great as the conflicted Frances. 

You'll come out of this movie thinking hard about social media and its horrors. The Social Reckoning provides a number of insider perspectives. It's a film that will play well on the streaming services in the near future. 

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