Daniel Roher swaps Navalny for a piano-tuner heist with Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman

A piano tuner sits in a room with an instrument and listens for what almost nobody else in the room can hear: a frequency drift of a fraction of a semitone, a sympathetic vibration that shouldn’t be there, the patient catalogue of tiny mechanical wrongnesses that a tuned piano hides. The conceptual situation that Tuner sets up is that the same patient ear, applied to a slightly different object, will open a safe. The picture rests on the proposition that tuning a piano and cracking a safe are the same task in different rooms.

Daniel Roher is directing his first narrative feature. He arrives at fiction from the documentary side of the craft, including the work on Russian dissidence that earned him an Academy Award, and Tuner is the picture testing whether observational documentary discipline transfers to genre. Leo Woodall carries the lead as Niki White, the tuner who finds out what else his trained hands can do. Dustin Hoffman and Jean Reno do the elder-craft work around him. Havana Rose Liu plays the relationship that complicates the operation.

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The Woodall casting is the picture’s argument. The actor has been the public face of a specific register of soft-spoken composure across the prestige-TV stretch that put him in front of an audience, and Tuner takes that quality and asks it to anchor a heist piece in cinema scale. Niki White is not a wisecracking thief; he is a craftsman whose craft can be repurposed, and Woodall plays him with the slightly displaced concentration of somebody who keeps catching himself listening to the wrong instrument. Hoffman is Harry Horowitz, the older mentor figure who explains the logic of the safe to the tuner. Hoffman’s screen presence at this stage of his career is itself a tonal signal: the picture is courting heist comedy as old-school craft, not as kinetic spectacle. Jean Reno as Marius carries the European-heist lineage with him; Havana Rose Liu as Ruthie is the entanglement that complicates the work; Tovah Feldshuh as Marla rounds out the four-handed support cast and gives the picture its theatre-trained edge.

Roher’s documentary practice built a particular reputation. The Robbie Robertson film and the Russian dissidence project that won him the Academy were both exercises in getting close to a subject who could not be acted into existence; the camera had to find them, sit with them and earn the take. The pivot to a genre piece, where the actor is in full possession of the material and the director’s job is to stage a camera around an idea rather than around access, is a different professional muscle. Tuner is the picture testing whether that pivot works, and the genre choice is unusually specific: not a prestige drama, where documentary-trained directors typically land first, but a comedy-leaning heist film. That is a harder transfer.

The metaphor the picture is built on is editorially elegant. A piano tuner spends his working life on a discipline that nobody who hires him actually understands; he sits in front of an instrument that the room treats as already working, and he hears what is wrong with it. The premise of Tuner is that the same trained listening, the same patience, the same refusal to be hurried by the impatience of the room, opens a safe. The argument the picture makes about its own genre is that the heist film is fundamentally a film about a craftsman whose craft has been pointed in an unsanctioned direction. The TMDB tags the picture carries are Crime, Thriller and Comedy, which is a hard three-way tonal load to balance over a hundred-and-seven-minute runtime. Most pictures that try the trifecta lose one of the legs.

What Tuner does not resolve, on the basis of its premise alone, is whether a documentary-trained director can hold the genre tone across a feature. The metaphor is sharp; the cast is loaded; the elevator pitch is one of the cleanest of the early-summer slate. None of those things is the same as a working tonal register. Heist comedy is built on rhythm, the audience has to feel the picture’s confidence about when to slow down for craft and when to land a joke, and rhythm is not a documentary muscle. Roher’s documentary work earned him an Academy because it sat with difficulty patiently. The kind of patience the new picture asks for is closer to musical phrasing than to observation, which is itself an interesting echo of the metaphor the picture is built on, and an open question about whether the maker has the second skill.

The credited principals are Leo Woodall as Niki White, Dustin Hoffman as Harry Horowitz, Havana Rose Liu as Ruthie, Tovah Feldshuh as Marla and Jean Reno as Marius. Roher directs. The runtime is one hundred and seven minutes. Focus Features is distributing in the United States, with theatrical handling on most major international markets through Universal’s international arm. The picture screened at festival positioning that Focus has been quiet about, and the theatrical release pattern suggests the studio is treating it as a counter-programming option to the late-spring tentpole calendar rather than as a wide-release event.

Tuner opens in United States theatres on 29 May 2026, with the surrounding international rollout staggered across the same release week: France on 27 May, Italy on 28 May, the United Kingdom and Ireland on 29 May, and longer waits in continental Europe through to a Germany date on 2 July. Spain follows on 12 June and Brazil on 11 June. Focus Features and Universal are treating the picture as a global release with market-by-market local timing rather than a single day-and-date event, which fits the counter-programming framing and gives the slower territories room to find the film through word of mouth rather than opening-weekend gross.

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