Throughout her career, Sydney Sweeney has proven herself to be an accomplished genre hopper, tackling teen dramas like Euphoria, rom-coms like Anyone But You, and horror films like Immaculate. But with Christy, she leaps into a new genre: the Oscar bait biopic.
Directed by David Michôd (The King, Animal Kingdom), Christy stars Sweeney as famed boxer Christy Martin, a pioneer for women in the sport. While the film follows Christy’s boxing journey, it also examines her traumatic upbringing with her homophobic mother Joyce (Merritt Wever) and her relationship with her abusive husband and trainer Jim (Ben Foster).
The latter takes up the bulk of Christy‘s first trailer, with Jim even threatening to kill Christy should she ever leave him. Also on display in the trailer is Sweeney’s muscular transformation into Martin, the kind of physical commitment that’s catnip for Oscar voters. (See: Christian Bale in The Fighter or Charlize Theron in Monster.) But beyond its Oscar bait-y premise, how does the film actually stack up?
Following its world premiere at 2025’s Toronto International Film Festival, Christy garnered mixed reviews. Some critics praised Sweeney’s performance while pointing out the film’s flawed, even bland storytelling.
In her review out of TIFF, Mashable Entertainment Editor Kristy Puchko criticized Sweeney’s performance along with the film as a whole, writing, “Despite the premiere buzz, Christy is not the Oscar contender that Sweeney, who also produced the film, seems to have swung for. Its script is a mess, creating clumsy archetypes and hitting on Lifetime movie cliches with no self-awareness.”
Christy hits theaters Nov. 7.
