Every week, I tuck a short review or two into my movie listings post. But those can be hard to keep track of, so I finally created an archive for yer handy reference.
I haven't fiddled with these reviews much, just clarified a couple points, smoothed over some phrasing, and fixed obvious typos. Some movies have been upgraded or downgraded after a rewatch, and that's noted here.
I'll start keeping a running archive of my 2026 reviews soon.
After the Hunt
In the worst movie of his career so far, Luca Guadagnino dares to ask the pressing question, “What if safe space #MeToo Gen Z sexual abuse trigger warning woke campus pronouns?” Guided by a screenplay from Nora Garrett that mistakes second-guessing for ambiguity, Guadagnino follows the cues of our national media in assuming that the surest way to understand the world is to plunge into the insufferable lives of tiresome people at an Ivy League school. Julia Roberts is Alma Imhoff, an ice queen philosophy prof at Yale married understandingly if not happily to a pompous shrink (Michael Stuhlbarg, Stuhlbarging all over the place) while playing will they/won’t they (or did they/didn’t they) with an everybody-loves-me colleague (Andrew Garfield, who seems to have forgotten to fill his Ritalin prescription). After Ayo Edebiri (who really shouldn’t let herself become typecast as The Young Person in movies like this) claims Garfield “crossed a line” with her, secrets from the past are exhumed, jobs are lost, generational cliches are bandied about, the Smiths are saved from #cancelculture, and Chloë Sevigny, as a ’90s-styled lesbian academic, pops in as essentially a sight gag. These characters’ motives aren’t just mysterious; they’re inscrutable, contradictory, and uninteresting. And while Roberts does what she can, finally I was left muttering “Professor Imhoff, I served with Lydia Tár, Lydia Tár was a friend of mine…” C
All We Imagine As Light
Two nurses live together in Mumbai. The responsible Prabha (Kani Kusruti) is married to a man who emigrated years ago to Germany, a fact we only learn when he ships her a rice cooker with no note of explanation. Her younger and more carefree roommate Anu (Divya Prabha) has a secret Muslim boyfriend, Shiraz (Hridhu Haroon). Writer/director Payal Kapadia’s second feature looks at how their relationship changes once they help the hospital’s cook Parvathy (Chhaya Kadam) move back to her village after she’s booted by luxury housing developers. All That We Imagine as Light is a collection of indelible moments: scenes from the playful courtship of Anu and Shiraz (leading up to a gentle, realistic sex scene), the devastating chill of Prabha when a doctor shyly expresses a romantic interest, and above all shots of teeming Mumbai nightlife, accompanied by voiceovers from unidentified individuals about how they came to live in this massive city. The stakes here are pretty high—the displacement of working people, religious intolerance, marital abandonment—but Kapadia has such a light touch that what we see are humans enduring the obstacles that humans endure. She tells these stories without softening any blows or overstating any drama, and that’s a rare gift. A
Americana
This non-linear revisionist Western has it all: a white child insisting he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull, Eric Dane getting shot in the throat with an arrow, Halsey firing a shotgun while dressed like Laura Ingalls, an abusively patriarchal trad clan battling some comic but not clownish Native American militants led by Zahn McClarnon, Sydney Sweeney as a stammering waitress at a roadside diner who falls for a right-handed goof named Lefty, Simon Rex for some reason—you get the idea. They’re all chasing after a stolen Indian artifact (what’s the Lakota word for MacGuffin?), and writer/director Tony Tost’s script is so good-hearted about its bloody quirk I kept rooting for it till I reached the end and was supposed to have deeper feelings for what I'd just witnessed than I could summon up. Still, Americana is almost certainly the best film by someone who has written a book for Continuum’s 33 ⅓ series on classic albums (about Johnny Cash’s overrated American Recordings, fwiw). B
Anemone
In his first feature-length picture, director Ronan Day-Lewis proves himself capable of crafting scenes that would shine in the context of a great film. Unfortunately, those scenes are part of Anemone, a mediocre movie merely aching for greatness, and here they’re ponderous and overreaching. You can’t blame papa Daniel for wanting to work with his boy, though you can blame him for the script, which he co-wrote, and which overuses that creaky actorly device, the monologue. Though this is one of those movies that pretends to generate mystery by just not telling you what the fuck is going on, the story’s pretty simple. After an unnamed (but—don’t you worry—quite dramatically revealed) trauma, a former soldier (Day-Lewis) disappears into the wilds, leaving his brother (Sean Bean) to look after his wife (Samantha Morton) and son (Samuel Bottomley). Decades later, brother sets out to retrieve soldier because son has become bitter and violent. Cinematographer Ben Fordesman, who’s done excellent work with director Rose Glass, is permitted to indulge himself with sometimes overly gorgeous results; so is Bobby Krlic, aka The Haxan Cloak, who attempts to drown the film beneath ambient swells. We get another (final?) elder Day-Lewis performance to add to the limited store. And it’s possible the younger Day-Lewis will eventually learn to hold back, maybe even to recognize how this story could have made for a quieter, more effective drama. But the climatic hail storm that sends ice chunks the size of fists plummeting from the sky doesn’t give me a lot of hope. C+
Ballerina
The full official title is From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, but it’s not my job to do PR for yet another IP extension that flails around for two hours in search of a reason for existing. I’ll admit, many of the action sequences (grenades! flamethrowers! kitchen utensils!) are more imaginative than I’d expect from director Len Wiseman, best known as Kate Beckinsale’s ex-husband and second-best known as the auteur behind the Underworld vampire movies, which were essentially an excuse to ensconce Beckinsale in latex. (I mean, there are worse ideas.) Once we’ve trudged through tiresome exposition and Ana de Armas’s vengeful death-machine Eve makes it to a quiet mountain village where everyone turns out to be a killer, Ballerina approaches something like fun. But this is just not the right vehicle for de Armas. Keanu Reeves’s glum zen stoicism perfectly anchored the mayhem around him in the other Wick movies, but who would watch de Armas’s brief, delightfully glam turn in No Time to Die and prefer to see her trudging through rehashed lore as a dour assassin? And yes, Keanu does appear in Ballerina—though I’m not sure anyone told him. B-
Becoming Led Zeppelin
I’d hoped that the sensory bludgeoning of IMAX Zep would be ideal Super Bowl counterprogramming last Sunday, but this all-too-authorized doc (no sex or drugs or mudsharks) is way scarcer on live footage than I’d been led to believe. Well, actually there’s lots of footage (and hell, I’d watch silent film of John Bonham slapping and stomping) but too much of it is set to the studio recordings. The ’60s studio recordings, that is—Becoming Led Zeppelin is true to its name, wrapping up with the band’s Royal Albert Hall homecoming in 1970, which I’d honestly rather watch in full rather than listen to so much jawing from three elderly Brits who really need to get over a certain 1968 Rolling Stone review already. (At least give me visuals of the wonderfully sloppy Eddie Cochran covers that are instead relegated to the credits.) Those studio LPs do sound great over a cineplex soundsystem, of course, but first you’ve got to wade through 45 minutes about skiffle and life as a ’60s session man in London. Some of that's engaging enough, but sorry but I did not pay $20 to see and hear Lonnie Donegan and Lulu in The World’s Most Immersive Movie Experience. B
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
What if Knight Rider had been a romcom? That's not exactly the concept behind the latest from mononymous director Kogonada, who may be the first to tell you that he didn't write the script, as he had with his more subtle successes Columbus and After Yang. Put simply, this is a movie about a magical GPS that forces two relationship-averse single people to relive the most traumatic moments in their lives until they fall in love. Margot Robbie and Colin Ferrell are charming, hot, and determined to make this damn thing work, and at some of the loopier moments (Ferrell performing in a high school production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) and quieter ones (Robbie, as her 12-year-old self, seeking advice from her mother) they pull it off. In fact, I'll go out on a limb and say this may be the best possible movie you could make about a magical GPS that forces two relationship-averse single people to relive the most traumatic moments in their lives until they fall in love. B-
Black Bag
I’m not saying Steven Soderbergh’s second release of 2025 offers nothing more than well-dressed attractive people in swank settings trying to outwit one another for 90 minutes—but if it did, would that be so awful? Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are married spies George and Kathryn; he’s a stone-faced expert at ferreting out lies and she’s, well, Cate Blanchett. When George is tasked with discovering who leaked a sinister program to Russian dissidents, he invites the suspects (including Kathryn) to a dinner party where the chana masala is laced with a truth drug, with hilarious (and violent) results. That scene is neatly mirrored by an “I expect you're wondering why I've gathered you all here today” finale—screenwriter David Koepp, who’s made a living off Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, and late-model Indiana Jones sequels for years now, has clearly always wanted to wed le Carré and Agatha Christie. (There’s also just a touch of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) Soderbergh’s digital camerawork, with its occasional glares and bends and blurs, isn’t exactly made for the big screen, but it does have its nice touches, like the long introductory shot that follows Fassbender from behind into the bar where he learns of his mission, or a fishing boat shot from below the waterline. In George, the director has a character just as clinical and masterful as he himself can be, yet for all the geopolitical intrigue and lives on the line, the stakes feel comfortably low. Above all, this is a parlor game, and our only concern is whether its hot married leads will get back to having hot married sex. A-
Bring Her Back
There’s nothing like watching a feral child chomp down on a knife blade, shattering teeth within his bloody maw, to make you think, “You know, I don’t really want to watch a feral child chomp down on a knife blade, shattering teeth within his bloody maw.” I’m not saying that moment was the first time Bring Her Back made me flinch, or that Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian brothers known collectively as Rackaracka, totally lost me with that gore. But it’s definitely when I no longer enjoyed flinching. With Talk to Me, the brothers updated urban legend for the TikTok era; here they turn to the “orphans move to a creepy new home” genre, with Sally Hawkins as Laura, an eccentric foster parent to spunky, partially sighted Cathy (Mischa Heywood) and her protective half-brother Andy (Billy Barratt). Laura’s daughter is dead, and ever since, her son (Jonah Wren Phillips) has been mute—nothing suspicious there. But she sure seems to be planning an elaborate ritual to resurrect the girl. There’s lots to admire here, from the performances to the orchestration of suspense. As a full-throttle assault on the audience, it's effective. But Bring Her Back wants to be both a portrait of maternal grief and a cineplex gross-out all at once, and you gotta be some kind of genius to square that circle. B
The Brutalist
Brady Corbet’s aspiring epic tracks the disillusionment of a man who believed himself beyond illusion. László Tóth (Adrien Brody, once more a heroic European Jew) is a Bauhaus-tutored architect, Buchenwald survivor, and recent immigrant in Philadelphia. Into his life strides Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a Bucks County nouveau with a pseud’s hunger for as much expert-approved culture as money can buy. He enlists his pedigreed discovery to design and construct a massive community center for the suburban backwater of Doylestown. The Brutalist is a film about grandiosity that also aspires to it. There are tremendous moments, in which far from subtle images communicate boldly what language cannot, that only a filmmaker gifted with a certain degree of self-importance can achieve. But on the back end it loses the shape of a masterpiece, and the sturdy facsimile of a greatness we'd been watching reveals itself as something lumpier and less monumental. And for a film supposedly about ideas, The Brutalist is strangely devoid of them, unless you count “rich people will fuck you over,” “Americans hate foreigners,” and “the Holocaust!” Read our full review here. B
Bugonia
fEven when I like a Yorgos Lanthimos movie, I feel kinda played—there’s just something so smugly conniving about his glib riffs off our cultural moment, as though he’s figured out exactly how much nihilist grotesquerie titillates Americans without turning them off. But I can’t deny how thoroughly he rips a simple idea to shreds once his jaws clench down. Here, Lanthimos chomps on the paradox of how conspiracy theorists can acutely diagnose societal ills while veering so ludicrously off base when it comes to assigning blame. Jesse Plemons is Teddy Gatz, a beekeeper whose mother is in a coma because she participated in a clinical trial run by pharmaceutical behemoth Auxolith. Putting two and two together, Teddy arrives at the obvious conclusion that this is all part of an extraterrestrial plot to destroy humanity. With often reluctant help from his autistic cousin Don (Aidan Delbis, providing what little heart the movie has), Teddy kidnaps Auxolith’s glam girlboss, who is, of course, Emma Stone. Down as ever for whatever Yorgos flings at her, Stone particularly excels at the effortless doublespeak of the affluent, as she displayed in The Curse. I mean, rich people do sound like aliens when they talk to us. Bugonia succeeds primarily as a series of tense moments—Teddy’s interrogations of Michelle, a visit to Teddy’s home from a cop with a creepy past, Michelle’s attempts to turn Don against his cousin—but I appreciate how Lanthimos undercuts what could be an absurdist catharsis with a grim coda. And corporate queen Stone, head back, singing along to “Good Luck, Babe!” as her Range Rover cruises down the highway, is an indelible image of our age. A-
Captain America: Brave New World
The Captain America movies are where the MCU gets “serious,” where comic book idealism clashes with the dark side of U.S. history, where unfettered heroism encounters the restraining forces of bureaucracy. With Anthony Mackie inheriting the shield, Brave New World adds race to that equation. After shouldering endless Steve Rogers comparisons, Mackie's Sam Wilson gets a little speech where he wonders if he'll ever be enough, while for contrast we have Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly), an older Black super soldier who’d been imprisoned by the U.S. government. Meanwhile, President Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) nearly gets us into a war with Japan (couldn’t be China—Disney needs that big overseas market) over adamantium, a new substa—ah, you know, what? Don’t worry about it. Since in the real world, an authoritarian prez is seeking to purge the military (and everywhere else) of non-whites while saber-rattling with the nation’s historic allies, theoretically the film’s themes should resonate, at least in a half-assed pop culture kinda way. But this slapdash entry is more concerned with callbacks to the MCU D-list like the Eternals and 2008's The Incredible Hulk. Its one big reveal (unless you’re genuinely wondering, “Will Liv Tyler appear?”) was torpedoed by the need to fill seats: This would have been 10 times more fun if we didn’t know Ford was gonna Hulk out at the end, but the theaters would have been ten times emptier if the trailers didn’t spoil that. Brave New World is about one thing only: The MCU struggling to justify its continued existence. C
Caught Stealing
What a slog. Austin Butler (weirdly channeling Barbarino-era Travolta at times) is Hank Thompson, a hunky bartender on the Lower East Side who coulda been a star ballplayer if he hadn’t rammed his IROC into a tree as a kid. His neighbor (Matt Smith with a mohawk that would’ve got him hooted off St. Mark’s Place in 1998, which is when this movie takes place for some reason) asks Hank to look after his cat; soon Russian mobsters start pummeling Hank, and Hasidic hitmen are on his trail too. The film veers between bloody ha-ha and bloody oh-no without settling on a style, and if you try to miss its “last good days of New York” thesis, don’t worry, Darren Aronofsky will get the Twin Towers into every shot he can. Maybe Charlie Huston’s 2005 novel of the same name works on the page, but nothing in his lackluster adapted script suggests how, and though Butler does have charisma you’d never know it from his performance here. Still, Aronofsky haters (we are legion) will be relieved that the film keeps his auteurist tics in check, so no women are tormented to the brink of insanity and beyond—which doesn’t mean no women get a bullet to the head. C
The Count of Monte Cristo
France’s highest grossing film of 2024 distills 1,200 pages of Dumas père down to a brisk three-hour romp through 19th century France with impressive economy and clarity. At no point during Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de La Patellière’s adaptation do you wonder “That must have made more sense in the book” or “Why did they leave that in?” or really anything besides “What’s next?” The first half feels a bit rushed—the movie's gotta get framed innocent Edmond Dantès in and out of prison ASAP so he can seek his revenge as the mysterious count. And that's where the film settles down and the fun kicks it. Still, the characterizations could be bolder—Pierre Niney’s Edmond just kinda feels like some guy who does stuff rather than a wronged hero who's corrupted by his life-changing decision. And the filmmakers could showcase pivotal moments more dramatically, so that the pacing isn’t just a continual onward rush. And all this could've been done without sacrificing narrative efficiency. Those are the kind of decisions that could make a film great rather than impressive. B
Eddington
If you’ve ever wondered what Ari Aster would make of Covid, Black Lives Matter, and our all-too-online modern existence… why? Why would you ever wonder that? Aster’s films are airless, carefully arranged dioramas, which is OK when you work in horror, where self-contained formalism can be part of the point, but unacceptable when you’re using the murder of George Floyd and the aftermath in Minneapolis as a plot point for your dim satire. Joaquin Phoenix, in Doc Sportello stumblin’ ‘round mode, is an Arizona sheriff (styled to resemble Dennis Weaver, which is funny, I admit); he’s so miffed that he has to mask up that he decides to unseat the town’s smug mayor, Pedro Pascal. With seemingly every encounter between townsfolk mediated by screens, misinformation proliferates, bodies pile up, and everyone, from dumbass cops to woke protesters, embodies their worst selves. That, apparently, is How We Live Now. But what’s so soul-deadening about internet life isn’t just how it leads us to act out in cartoonish ways; it’s how it encourages us to perceive our fellow humans from a single, simple vantage point, to strip their actions of all context, and to make that point, Aster would have had to give us some three-dimensional characters to begin with. Plodding loudly toward its preordained conclusion, Eddington is as cynical and misanthropic as dumb people have always said the Coen brothers are; worse still, its cynicism and misanthropy are flaunted as intellectual and spiritual achievements. And Aster really needs to get over his mommy issues. C
Eephus
Baseball movies and sentimental nostalgia go together like peanuts and crackerjack. So maybe director Carson Lund decided to lean into the inevitable with this pleasantly lazy film about two amateur New England ball teams squaring off in the last game before their field is replaced by a new school. The film is named for an offspeed pitch that’s so unexpected it seems to suspend time, we’re told (just like baseball, we’re also told), and it certainly knows its milieu, with '70s Red Sox wackadoo Bill Lee even showing up to get three outs. If it’s ultimately too long, well, so’s a baseball game. But unlike baseball, Eephus lacks moments of unduplicable magic, though it tries to conjure them up. We’re introduced to a cast of oddballs on and off the field, but they feel more like types than individuals—one guy’s drunk, one guy’s fat, one guy’s angry, etc.—and in the end, Lund shows us how he feels about these fellas rather than showing us how they feel about each other. B-
F1
Well of course this is Top Gun for race cars—you thought Joseph Kosinski was gonna go back to directing Tron movies and Halo ads? What matters is that F1’s on-track action is as gripping as Top Gun: Maverick’s mid-air feats, and there are moments that had me, a non-gasper, gasping. The acting bits are not entirely as bad as those TG:M’s Oscar-nominated screenplay made us endure. And if your attention may wander in these off-track moments, at least F1 (I am not calling it F1: The Movie—I got my own Google problems to worry about) leaves us at leisure to compare and contrast Tom Cruise’s smugness with Brad Pitt’s: eternal youth vs. staved-off decline, skill vs. savvy, unnerving intensity vs. indolent swagger. Yes, ideally, Pitt’s Sonny Hayes would learn as much from his younger colleagues as he teaches them, but instead it’s the wily old driver who touches the lives of everyone he encounters—he’s kind of a Magical Caucasian. Chastened hotshot Damson Idris learns not to showboat for the press. Kerry Condon overcomes his mistrust of Sonny’s arrogance long enough to bed him. And team owner Javier Bardem, who took a chance on Sonny, sees his long shot pay off, defeating the machinations of evil-as-ever Tobias Menzies. And they say Hollywood doesn’t make movies for aging white guys who feel like their talents have gone unacknowledged anymore. B-
40 Acres
I know we’re all too smart to think genre films need to be “elevated,” but sometimes a special performance does spark a decent thriller with an unexpected resonance, and that’s what Danielle Deadwyler provides here. The matriarch of a family that’s survived plague and civil war, Deadwyler’s Hailey Freeman instills military discipline in her children with martinet chill, as though she realizes that for her kids to survive she has to be as scary as the cannibalistic militia goons who lurk beyond her farm’s fence. Her teen son Manny (Kataem O'Connor) suspects that there’s more to life than drills and patrols and living with your mom, and when he spies Milcania Diaz-Rojas’s Dawn diving in his favorite river he thinks he knows what that is. (O'Connor really captures how it must feel when you see the first fine ass that you’re not related to.) Manny hides a wounded Dawn on the farm, leading to a clash between Hailey and her boy that in turn leads to a showdown with the occupants of the world beyond the farm. When the action subsides, we’re left with a more nuanced portrait of Black motherhood than you’re likely to find in any “serious” movie this year. A-
Final Destination: Bloodlines
Now this is how you juice up an aging franchise: Raise the stakes but stick to what works, acknowledge past entries without going all winky-winky meta or bogging down in lore. Bloodlines begins with an elaborate disaster scenario in which a young woman and her beau attend the opening night of a rotating restaurant atop a glittering new Sky Tower. Will that structure soon topple and crumble, slaying its occupants in myriad ingenious ways? Yes and no. Turns out the woman had a vision and saved everyone that night, and ever since Death has been eliminating the survivors, family by family. This movie is just a piñata of gruesome treats awaiting a firm whack. There’s an elaborately Final Destination-proofed home surrounded for some reason with dangerously sharpened poles. We have to wait impossibly long to learn how and if a glass shard will factor into a kill. And of course, the camera suggests that practically every item in every scene is a potential murder weapon. It’s all arranged with the kind of craft lacking in too many contemporary goremeisters, hacks and auteurs alike—a Final Destination does not allow for sloppiness. The characters are even reasonably sympathetic, though after each gets taken out you still gotta say, “OK, good one, Death.” If you wanted to assign Bloodlines a simple moral, it’d be that the more we try to keep our children safe, the more we estrange ourselves from them. Or, as Tony Todd puts it, returning one last time as Death-understander William Bludworth, “When you fuck with Death, things get messy.” A-
Frankenstein
That’s Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, if you must. As opposed to “Mary Shelley’s,” I suppose, though to be fair del Toro approximates the original novel more faithfully than most adaptations. In spirit, at least—he takes liberties with the story, most cleverly in making it so the Creature (Jacob Elordi) can never die. But he also ladles on an excess of motivational cues. F’rinstance, Victor Frankenstein’s father, the old Baron (Charles Dance), beats his son, which is why the doctor rejects the Creature so violently, you see. Frankenstein also juices up the conflict between Victor and Creature with several layers of jealousy: Mia Goth’s Elizabeth, Victor’s fiancé in the book, is here engaged to his brother William, and, as del Toro heroines will, she falls for the Creature. And while the addition of Christoph Waltz as Victor’s angel investor Heinrich Harlander is, I suppose, meant to highlight that our latter day mad scientists are funded by even madder financiers, his is one subplot too many. While Frankenstein has a vivid pop goth sheen, it lacks any real poetry or madness; humanist softie that he is, Del Toro even arranges a final reconciliation between the maker and his creation. And though it’s fun as hell to watch the Creature wreck shit, flinging people about with Hulk-like ferocity, his look is kinda wanting: He’s just a big, stitched together guy, kind of a jacked, overgrown Gollum. B
Friendship
Some comedy punches up. Some comedy punches down. Tim Robinson punches himself in the face. Though written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, this is essentially a 100-minute I Think You Should Leave skit, as both admirers and skeptics have agreed. So how long can an audience endure the presence of a character so one-dimensional that nobody else on screen can put up with him? About 100 minutes, I’d say. With his hawk nose and arsenal of unsettling stares, Robinson is a walking punchline; here he’s Craig Waterman, a marketing director with no apparent interests or skills. That changes when he meets his new neighbor, a dynamic TV weatherman named Austin (Paul Rudd), who invites Craig into his circle then understandably cuts the obsessive weirdo off. Now won over to the idea of doing things with other people, a jilted Craig tries to pattern his life after Austin, only to alienate his coworkers, poison himself, and endanger his wife—he’s kind of the mirror image of Nathan Fielder, but instead of carefully rehearsing how a person behaves to fit into social situations, Craig thinks he can skip the hard work and just skate by as a mimic. Friendship doesn’t so much satirize modern masculinity as satirize anyone who thinks they might have something to say about modern masculinity. And where most comics, no matter how abrasive, deep down want you to love them, Robinson never softens Craig or asks for sympathy. He’s committed to the bit. A-
Grand Theft Hamlet
Amid the tedium and loneliness of Covid, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen decide to put on a production of Hamlet in the world of Grand Theft Auto. What results is a gimmicky little movie, for sure, in which some of the interpersonal drama feels a bit staged. But it’s also funny as hell and evocative of a yearning for community that wasn’t quite sated even after we left our homes again. As you might expect, they meet some wild characters: the guy cast as Hamlet totes a rocket launcher with him, and you will never forget the silent, anarchic Parteb. And as corporate enclosures make the idea of public online space, Grand Theft Hamlet that you can reconstitute these spaces for your own purposes. Or, as Crane exclaims just before some in-game police slaughter him and Oosterveen for the umpteenth time, “You can’t stop art, motherfuckers!” A-
Grand Tour
As he did with Tabu, the Portuguese director Miguel Gomes once more eats away at colonialism from the inside in his enigmatic, elliptical way. Here a sullen British civil servant named Edward (Gonçalo Waddington), stationed in Burma in 1918, flees across southeast Asia from his fiancée Molly (Crista Alfaiate). For the first half of the film we follow Edward’s journey, his glum perspective blinding him to the vibrant societies he passes through. Then we meet Molly, whose annoyingly charming laugh and high spirits bring a screwball heroine’s energy to the film as, undaunted, she chases after Edward. The scenes these characters work through are hybrids of the contemporary and the past, and Gomes captures their unfamiliarity without exoticizing them. A-
Hamnet
There’s no reason this should work. Hamlet isn’t “about” the death of Shakespeare’s only son, and even if the play was his way of processing that calamity, what’s that to us? But while I feared the biographical fallacy would run amok through (cursed phrase incoming) Chloé Zhao’s first film since Eternals—movies have a tedious habit of treating works of art as riddles we decode to understand an artist’s life—Hamnet honors the complexity of human creativity. It helps that the central figure isn’t Shakespeare (Paul Mescal, here to make the girlies weep once more), but his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley), a “forest witch” (as the villagers say) who takes to motherhood intensely, with a protectiveness born out of her visions of dark foreboding. With the aid of DP Łukasz Żal’s muddy tones and chiaroscuro interiors, and an allusive yet plainspoken script co-written with Maggie O'Farrell (author of the novel that serves as source material), Zhao creates a credible Elizabethan world, and Buckley’s performance, ranging from the subtle flickers of a smile to wracked howls of grief, is all-encompassing. The final segment—the premiere of Hamlet itself—is the emotional equivalent of juggling chainsaws, yet Buckley’s commitment anchors a conceit that could as easily elicit snickers as sniffles. In her expression we watch as the stuff of life—mourning, family drama, the unworthiness we feel in the face of personal tragedy—is subsumed into something greater than its components. A
Hard Truths
When someone casually proposes a little family get together in a Mike Leigh film, you just know some shit’s going down at that party. At the center of Hard Truths’ gathering is the miserable but caustically hilarious Pansy Deacon. (“What’s it gonna keep in its pockets? A knife?” she asks incredulously about a baby wearing an outfit with pockets). As brilliantly portrayed by Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Patsy is the latest character to demonstrate that while Leigh is sometimes called a realist, the characterizations he coaxes from his actors are broader than that term suggests. In a worse movie, a child or a dog would soften Pansy up, and she’d deliver an Oscar-primed speech about her formative trauma. Instead, an act of kindness draws a complicated response from her (and better acting than whoever will win that dumb trophy) and the long standoff between Pansy and her quiet husband Curtley enters a new stage. Even as we learn more about Pansy, we never get a simple answer as to why she is the way she is. Why would we want one? Read our full review here. A
Honey Don’t!
Theoretically, I appreciate that Ethan Coen’s lesbian wife and new filmmaking partner Tricia Cooke has brought out the horndog in the ol’ feller. Turns out men and women alike want to see Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza fuck—who knew? (Everyone knew). But that doesn’t mean I’m gonna giggle every time I see a dildo. I was no fan of Cooke/Coen’s first film together, the “brisk and harmless” Drive-Away Dolls (to quote myself), but I figured they were still working out a few, erm, kinks in their collaborative style. Nope—what you see is what they want you to get. Here Qualley is a high femme Bakersfield PI whose investigation into an auto fatality leads her to a drug-smuggling church run by a self-involved Chris Evans as people die all around her—accidentally, gruesomely, comically, pointlessly, and at great length (often all at once). But while Qualley does look great in her ’40s outfits (those red heels are her), I’ve yet to discern the star quality directors keep projecting onto her, she struggles to master the rushed deadpan the Coen(ish) patter requires, and every time I hear her do a southern accent, all I can think is, “Ma’am, you are no Holly Hunter.” B-
The Housemaid
Sydney Sweeney is Millie, an ex-con living out of her car who miraculously lands a job as a live-in maid for the wealthy Winchester family. Amanda Seyfried is Nora, the too-perfect wife. Brandon Sklenar is Andrew, a kind Barry Lyndon buff who’s built like an underwear model. There’s also a daughter who looks like she sees dead people. No sooner does Millie sign on than Nora becomes unpredictably moody and vicious. Mysteries abound! Does Nora have an ulterior motive for hiring a hottie with a killer rack? Why does Andrew stick around with his cuckoo wife? Just what is the deal with that dead-eyed kid? If Sydney Sweeney can act, why does she deliver every line in the same flat zoomer mutter, as though she’s just getting the words out of the way? Seyfried has a ball throughout, and Sweeney does wake up for the finale, but trash shouldn’t be this impressed with itself, and the twist—you knew there was one—is undermined by an extended period of explanatory voiceover. Cartoonish about class, which is fine, and about domestic abuse, which is less so, and overall just not enough fun. Next time you think, “They don’t make movies like that anymore,” be careful what you wish for: This is what happens when they try. C+
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
If I wanted to be cute I’d call Mary Bronstein’s frenzied If I Had Legs I’d Kick You the Uncut Gems of motherhood. But where Adam Sandler’s Howard Ratner thrives on chaos, Rose Byrne plays a woman here who, unable to control the tumult of her life, strives desperately to escape it. With her husband (Christian Slater) away at work for two months, Byrne’s Linda, a therapist, is left to care for her child (Delaney Quinn) who has an eating disorder, a feeding tube, and typical childly needs. A colossal hole floods Linda’s apartment, sending her and the kid to a nearby motel as she juggles some sort of transference issues with her therapist (Conan O’Brien), the demands of a needy patient (Danielle Macdonald) with a newborn child, and the unwanted friendly gestures of a motel neighbor (A$AP Rocky). Bronstein presents the impossible demands of motherhood as a Matryoshka doll of failure, with Linda feeling guilty for feeling guilty about feeling guilty about her guilt, and Byrne bravely burrows into the harrowing, hilarious core of her role. (It’s not easy to make Byrne look unattractive, but the extreme closeups and garish lighting do their best.) This is anxiety as it’s actually lived, where every input is re-interpreted as a threat and every inconvenience is a catastrophe and objecting that “It isn’t supposed to be like this” doesn’t help a damn bit. A-
It Was Just an Accident
Jafar Panahi’s first film since Iran lifted its hideous sanctions against him is a manic riff on Death and the Maiden that dips a toe in black comedy without ever diving in—fitting for a movie so openly about hesitation it doesn’t shy away from mentioning Godot. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) is an Azerbaijani mechanic who was once tortured in an Iranian prison. When a one-legged man (Ebrahim Azizi) stops at his garage one night, Vahid is convinced that this is his torturer. At first, that is—the next day, after he snatches the guy and begins to bury him alive, he has second thoughts. And so he enlists a whole crew of victims, including a bride and a groom, a wedding photographer and her short-fused ex, to confirm his hunch. As they hem and haw, Iran’s bribe-ridden authorities persistently rial and dime them at every turn; a good-hearted Vahid even winds up assisting his prisoner’s family. At times you almost forget that these people are haunted by an experience they will never escape. Hollywood loves to assure us that a vengeful spirit exists inside us all, just waiting for an excuse to be unleashed. Ever the humanist, Panahi disagrees. Yes, this crew is inept and indecisive when it comes to revenge, he seems to say, but wouldn’t you be too? A-
Jane Austen Wrecked My Life
A catchy little title for a quiet, pleasant rom-com that has less to do with Jane Austen than it lets on—and while we’re at it, Agathe Robinson (Camille Rutherford) wrecks her life without any novelist’s help at all. Agathe is a French bookseller who unexpectedly lands a writers’ residency in England populated by the sort of dotty characters you’d expect to show up. Long single and celibate, she finds herself ensnared in a love triangle between her womanizing pal Félix (Pablo Pauly) and Oliver (Charlie Anson), a haughty Austen descendant. There’s a lot of froth about what literature means and how each of us must live and love fully that rings hollow in such a subdued movie. In the end Jane Austen isn’t all that’s missing here—there’s just not enough rom. And it could definitely use some more com as well. B-
Jurassic World Rebirth
Well, at least now we know why the dinosaurs went extinct—they couldn’t hunt for shit. I mean, one predator here not only fails to gobble up a child hiding under a life raft, but the loser can’t even pop the raft. Godzilla director Gareth Edwards and original Jurassic Park screenwriter David Koepp (who I’ll just note is also responsible for the Indiana Jones duds The Dial of Destiny and The Crystal Skill) were called upon to right this series seven installments in, but the best they can dream up is an island of mutant dinosaurs like the Distortus Rex and the Mutadon. Plotwise, a team of mercenaries organized by Scarlett Johansson (who must have serious gambling debts or something) is dispatched to collect blood samples from the three largest breeds of dinosaurs, a key ingredient in a cure for heart disease. En route, the adventurers rescue a family that’s crossing the Atlantic on a sailboat, because these pictures need children to imperil. The pro-forma backstory these characters are given is worse than none at all—a friend of Johansson’s Zora Bennett was blown up by a Yemen car bomb so she’s ready to retire, Mahershala Ali’s Duncan Kincaid lost his son so he wants to protect children (he’d let them die otherwise?). But it’s hard to care what happens to these people unless you’re just opposed in principle to the idea of make-believe humans being eaten by make-believe dinosaurs. C
The Life of Chuck
Tom Hiddleston is one of many talented actors who profitably allowed the MCU to Thanos-snap away the prime of their careers, and from the looks of The Life of Chuck he doesn’t seem like he’ll be back to doing quietly intense Joanna Hogg films anytime soon. In this razzle-dazzle puzzle of a heart-tugger he’s Chuck Krantz, a mysterious accountant who turns out not to be so mysterious after all. Once the film pulls the metaphysical rug out from under a resonantly apocalyptic first act, The Life of Chuck stacks the deck in the interests of life-affirming profundity so gratuitously you can tell it’s lying to itself. There’s a good reason I don’t turn to Stephen King for the profound or Mike Flanagan for the life-affirming (or vice versa). Though seeing both Mia Sara and Heather Langenkamp as old ladies certainly does confront the middle-aged among us with intimations of mortality, the inexorable passage of time, and all that jazz. C+
Marty Supreme
Josh Safie and Ronald Bronstein’s script brings the frenetic energy of postwar Jewish fiction to the story of an annoying little man who is very good at 1) ping pong and 2) getting people to do what he wants. In the course of two and a half hours, Marty Mauser robs his uncle, knocks up a married woman, bangs an aging movie star, opens for the Harlem Globetrotters, loses a mobster’s dog, swindles some Jersey rubes, and screws over anyone who gives him a break. The cast is uniformly great, even (grits teeth) Kevin O’Leary, but this is the Timothée Chalamet show, let’s be real. He gets that Marty’s ego and his willingness to be humiliated all come from the same place, that drive to succeed that either hollows you out or reveals your hollowness. Open wounds from the last war seep out all over this film via Jewish resentment, Holocaust survival, Japanese nationalism. And despite an anachronistic ’80s new wave/pop soundtrack blended with composer Daniel Lopatin’s audition to become this generation’s Giorgio Moroder, the production design is impeccable: No one in this movie looks like they’ve ever seen a cell phone. So smart and frantic and bracing that if you’re not careful you might even mistake its closing scene for a moment of heartwarming redemption. A-
The Mastermind
Let’s clear one thing up: This is a Kelly Reichardt heist movie, not a Kelly Reichardt heist movie. If you’re here for thrills ‘n’ quips ‘n’ plot twists, you’re gonna be really puzzled about why you’re spending so much time watching Josh O’Connor wander around his house in a sweater and boxers trying to figure out where to stash some stolen paintings. (I start with this disclaimer only because Reichardt has a unique gift for getting her movies out in front of people who hate them—this was chosen as AMC’s “Screen Unseen” mystery movie this month, can you even imagine?) This 1970 period piece is a character study of a guy with no character, marked by the contrast between its leisurely pacing and Rob Mazurek’s obtrusively jazzy score, the way the camera practically lusts after those huge Nixon-era cars, and the simple joy of watching a man methodically ruin his life in slow motion. Lots of actors know how to be charming. Some even know how to fail at being charming. But not many know how to not realize they’re failing at being charming as brilliantly as O’Connor, maybe the only male actor today who could have gotten work in ’70s Hollywood. And if the idealism of the ’60s curdling into the narcissism of the ’70s is a pretty shopworn theme, Reichardt finds new resonance in relating it to our own age, and her ironic “womp womp” of a kicker is no cheaper than O’Connor’s dope deserves. A-
Materialists
Well now, someone finally figured out what to do with Dakota Johnson. As Lucy, a get-’em-girl NYC matchmaker, the self-possessed daze that Johnson inescapably floats around in makes an eerie sense—she’s a true believer in her product, convinced that data points can substitute for intangibles. Hell, I’d hand her my business card too. Her sales instinct attracts a wealthy suitor (Pedro Pascal) but she can’t shake an unprofitable attraction to her ex (an unglammed Chris Evans), an actor who does catering or vice versa. The first third bubbles along pleasantly, though things get predictably wobbly once Johnson has to impersonate a human. But as a Celine Song skeptic who considered the characterizations in Past Lives too vague, I’m surprised by how much speechifying the writer/director allows her love triangulators here: People haul off with monologues about who they truly are so often it’s like being trapped in a city solely populated by Crash Davises. I wish I could say you’ll be surprised who Lucy ends up with, but though Song eventually knocks the matchmaker’s rickety ideology out from under her, the film settles for romantic mystification rather than working toward some compromised realism. Am I saying Materialists is insufficiently dialectical? Not just that, comrades—it’s insufficiently materialist. B
M3GAN 2.0
Complaints that there’s no horror here and not enough action are valid, but there are plenty of laughs to compensate. While the trailer did have me fearing that writer/director Gerard Johnstone would take this too over the top, even the painfully convoluted plot is part of the fun. With the murderous M3GAN (voiced more bitchily than ever by Jenna Davis) safely dispatched (OR IS SHE?), her creator, Gemma (a still pitch-perfect Allison Williams), pivots to warning about the dangers of tech, while M3GAN’s BFF (emphasis on the second “F”) Cady (now looking like a young Shannen Doherty) takes up taekwondo and starts idolizing Steven Seagal. But when a sexy, militarized lady droid (Ivanna Sakhno) goes rogue, it takes a fembot to catch a fembot, and in true T2 fashion M3GAN allies with the good gals (OR DOES SHE?) Along the way we get Jemaine Clement (with a prosthetic chest?) as a loathsome tech oligarch clumsily attempting a seduction to the exotic sounds of Les Baxter, a M3GAN musical number that at least equals “Titanium” and “Toy Soldiers,” and Timm Sharp doing a great turn as a dim, smug fed. “Don't go looking for an incisive commentary on AI,” warns a critic at Total Film—seriously, what is wrong with some people? Sorry if it’s not The Godfather Part II of killer doll movies, you absolute nerds. B+
Mickey 17
More like Mickey Infinity. (Because it’s too long.) I will say, I’ve never seen a better Jerry Lewis-indebted anticolonialist sci-fi tragicomedy. Then again I’ve never seen a worse one either. For whatever it’s worth, Mickey 17 is sui generis—unlike its protagonist (Robert Pattinson), an "expendable" on a long-term space mission who is resurrected via 3D printer after each harrowing death. (It’s a metaphor! For capitalism!) Robert Pattinson is entertaining as both the schlubby title character and the much cooler Mickey 18 (as both the Julius Kelp and the Buddy Love characters, if I may), the latter hatched prematurely when 17 is believed gobbled up by some spectacularly designed wormy creatures with whom he develops a strange rapport. Bong Joon-hoo’s cheap gags and obvious critiques hit as often as they miss, yet your enjoyment of Mickey 17 relies primarily on how long you can tolerate Mark Ruffalo’s Trump impression and Toni Collette doing her usual rubberfaced mugging. Mostly Mickey 17 leaves me to wonder why the tonal clashes feel so much klutzier in Bong’s English-language efforts than they do in his Korean films. Do they just go down easier when I have to read subtitles? Or do I just miss Song Kang-ho? B-
Misericordia
You may know French filmmaker Alain Guiraudie from his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake, about the murderous and erotic goings on at a gay nude beach. But I think he’s topped himself, if you’ll pardon the phrase, with this nasty and often quite funny little thriller, in which a young man’s return to a village after the death of his mentor raises multiple questions. Were they doin' it? Why does the deceased’s son want him to scram? Why does the deceased’s wife want him to stay? And why does that priest keep hanging around? These queries get only more pressing after, yes, a murder. And while it’s darkly enjoyable to watch the killer squirm as he evades suspicion, what’s most wickedly fun about Misericordia is that you never quite know who wants to fuck who until their pants come off. A-
Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning
How is it that the only prominent person in this dumb country suspicious of AI seems to be Tom Fuckin’ Cruise? The most consistent action franchise this side of John Wick wraps up (or does it?—you really think that peppy lil guy is about to retire?) with Cruise’s agent Ethan Hunt fighting to prevent an all-powerful artificial intelligence called The Entity from starting a nuclear war. But The Final Reckoning is no more immune to bloat than any other blockbuster—you could lop a full half-hour of talking from this nearly three-hour adventure and no one would be the wiser. The script hunts for loose ends from previous installments just to tie them up, and the supporting cast is uneven—if Pom Klementieff has a truly fierce shooting-people face, Esai Morales remains a nonentity of a villain. By next month, you’ll remember The Final Reckoning as the MI where Tom hunts through a nuclear sub at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and climbs around on a biplane as the wind resistance does weirder things to his face than Vanilla Sky. Both incredible set pieces, worth the price of admission even. But you’ll probably forget most of the rest. I already have. B
The Monkey
I’ve got a conundrum: To accurately convey just how irritating this movie is, I’d have to spend more time thinking about it than is good for my mental health. So I’ll just punt and say if the ridiculously overpraised Longlegs suggested that Oswald Perkins was a dumb but talented guy, this Stephen King adaptation reminds me that a talent with no idea how to use his skill is just a fancy hack. The story is simple enough: Twin brothers inherit a cursed toy monkey from their dad and every time they turn its key someone dies in a ridiculous manner. But that’s ridiculous, not ingenious—if the Final Destinations understand their place in the world and just go about their business; Perkins can’t stop reminding you he’s slumming here. I haven’t been so impatient for a movie to end since Argylle, and this one was only 90 minutes long. With its swearing pre-teens, occasionally decent splatter, and elbow in the ribs humor, this may be the perfect sleepover movie for none-too-bright 12–year-olds. Thirteen-year-olds might find it a little corny though. C
My Undesirable Friends: Part I—Last Air in Moscow
Soviet-born American documentarian Julia Loktev arrived in Moscow in 2021 to film the work and lives of independent journalists who’d been declared “foreign agents” by the Putin regime. The six women Loktev trailed, most employed by the dissident station TV Rain, were required to disclose their new classification on air, on blogs, and even on personal Instagram posts. Throughout this five-and-a-half-hour film, the camera dips intimately in and out of the apartments and studios of these women, always ID’d by their nicknames, as they talk Harry Potter and read I Love Dick, pamper their cute pets, cook dinner together, and indulge in gallows humor or projects of extravagant defiance. “Russians—they’re just like us!” may not be Loktev’s primary message any more than “It can happen here,” but both takeaways are inescapable. The most somber among the subjects are the oldest, Anya, who’s been through the most, and Kyusha, who has good reason to expect the worst—her fiancé Ivan, a journalist, is in prison and incommunicado. When Russia embarks on what the state orders all media to refer to as a “military operation” in Ukraine, everyone’s mood bottoms, the question of whether to flee the country becomes more urgent, and helplessness and guilt well up. “What will I show my future children?” a journalist exclaims all-too-relatably at one point. “Insta Stories?” A
The Naked Gun
Such is the ridiculous state of the film industry that the success of Akiva Schaffer’s spirited tribute to the laff-a-minute cop spoofs of his teenage years (and mine) might well determine whether we get another silly comedy in theaters ever again. (Could we even get a gagfest like this if it hadn’t piggybacked off existing IP?) Liam Neeson can hardly compete with Leslie Nielsen’s granite deadpan—he’s having fun here, as is Pam Anderson, and they want us to know it. (Also, mazel tov, kids.) And we’re having fun too, so sometimes we will ourselves to laugh at bits (“Take a seat.” “No thanks, I have one at home.”) with some nostalgia for our inner tween’s sense of humor. But relax, tell your adult brain to STFU, and this is a fun ride. The plot is some nonsense to do with a sonic frequency that transforms people into creatures of pure id, all the better for comic fight scenes that the movie does best. Show it to a 12-year-old who doesn’t know it’s a homage and they’ll never stop quoting it. B+
Nickel Boys
You probably know the deal: Director RaMell Ross’s debut feature is shot almost entirely from the point of view of two Black teens sentenced to a brutal Florida reform school. The opening moments are so perfect and impressionistic you think, well, this could be a fine short film, but there’s no way Ross can keep that level of formal command up for over two hours. And there are occasional stumbles, but the technique is no gimmick, or maybe it’s just a gimmick that deepens the content. Being essentially trapped in a character’s body with them creates a distancing effect. We feel as alienated from the strange surroundings as the somewhat naive innocent Elwood (Ethan Herisse) does; we keep a keen eye open as the more savvy Turner (Brandon Wilson) has learned to do. Using the techniques of screen realism to tell this story is what would really have felt like a gimmick—just a gimmick we’ve learned to accept as natural. A [A- on rewatch]
No Other Land
Maybe the Oscars can be a force for good? Certainly a Best Documentary nomination has helped this acclaimed look at the Israeli displacement of Palestinians on the West Bank belatedly access U.S. theaters, after major distributors ignored it for more than a year. But the struggle for distribution shouldn’t overshadow the film itself, which is much more than just a competent document of brutality. No Other Land is the product of four directors (Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor), two Israeli and two Palestinian; the various sources of footage from cameras and phones are brilliantly edited, and the strained friendship between two of the filmmakers—the Palestinian Adra and the Israeli Abraham—is central to the story it tells of the limits of empathy and humanitarian universalism. There are plenty of horrors to catalogue here, and even if months of violent clips from Gaza have desensitized you, watching a settler casually gun down a displaced Palestinian will still make you gasp. Yet it's the everyday cruelty that's most unsettling, the sight of an army pouring concrete into a well and bulldozing the homes of families forced to relocate to caves. Humans really are capable of doing anything to one another, and in cold blood. A
Nuremberg
Nuremberg promises us both a stirring old-school courtroom drama and a keen psychological battle of wits, and on both counts it only half delivers. After WWII, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) is determined to take down imprisoned Nazi second-in-command Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe) in a fair trial. The film practically plays up the devious Göring as a Hannibal Lecter figure, and his would-be Will Graham is psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), sent to find out what makes the runner-up Führer tick. As Jackson, Shannon has the needed gravitas and pride, and the skills to nuance the thunderous Oscarish moments. The supporting cast is good as well: Colin Hanks always makes a good pinhead, John Slattery would have regular work if they still made war pictures like they used to, and Richard E. Grant is quietly effective as the Brit who saves Jackson’s ass. Malek is fine, but he really needs to learn not to constantly smirk. Anyway, I was there to see Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring, and he delivered the same precise hamminess he brings to the title role as The Pope’s Exorcist or Zeus in Thor: Love and Thunder. He doesn’t render Göring human—that would be silly. But he does create a well-rounded film character, and that’s all Nuremberg requires. B
Oh, Hi!
There’s just too much going on in Sophie Brooks’s manic take on 21st century dating, co-written with Molly Gordon. Gordon is Iris, who takes it very hard when she discovers the fella who brought her on a romantic getaway (Logan Lerman) isn’t as committed as she is: She leaves that sucker strapped to a bed (they’d been toying with some bondage gear before their spat) to reconsider his decision. You gotta have real control over material like that to make it work, but this story swerves from broad comedy to dark drama and even dips its toe into a witchcraft subplot at one point. Gordon and (weaselly mustache aside) Lerman are such engaging leads that they carry it much of the way, but I gotta ask anyone who says the film is “playing with" or somehow complicating our preconceptions about the idea of the “crazy girlfriend”: Would you date this woman? As someone old enough to have some distance but single enough to be implicated in male shenanigans (and with soft-boy tendencies myself), I appreciate how much ground Oh, Hi! covers. Still, call me old-fashioned, but I don’t think a guy should be imprisoned for giving head in the afternoon. B-
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
Dressed like Missy Elliott in the video for "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)," a woman named Shura (Susan Chardy), who has recently returned to her home country of Zambia, is driving home from a party at night when she spots her Uncle Fred’s corpse in the road. That’s how writer/director Rungano Nyoni’s second film begins, with a modern, westernized woman who seemingly wakes up in the middle of an ancient folk tale. But though the absurdist humor persists, the film gets darker as the long funeral preparations wear on and Sura’s female cousins discuss Uncle Fred’s abusive past. As with her previous film, I Am Not a Witch, Nyoni sees much of her nation’s traditions as a smokescreen that conceals how petty male buffoons cling to their power. Chardy is remarkable as the quiet Shura who is forced into action, and Nyoni herself is just as observant as her lead, never overplaying the drama but letting her imagery speak for her as the repercussions slowly sink in. A-
On Swift Horses
There’s too much happening in Daniel Minahan’s period melodrama to condense into a blurb, so let’s just say it’s about a quasi-love triangle in the 1950s between a stolid homeowner (Will Poulter), his restless wife (Daisy Edgar-Jones), and his queer brother (Jacob Elordi). Edgar-Jones starts winning at the track and explores her bisexuality in a dalliance with a freethinking neighbor (Sasha Calle). Elordi falls for a coworker (Diego Calva) while working at a casino in Vegas. An unnecessary horse plays an unnecessarily prominent role. I’ve seen reviews invoke Douglas Sirk, and while I’m tickled by the idea of Todd Haynes’s Euphoria, that’s just wishful criticking. There’s just something very YA about all this: Edgar-Jones in particular seems to be living a 21st century fantasy of how it felt to rebel in a closeted past. What a waste of a good cast. B-
One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson’s universally lauded tragicomic revolutionary epic has a lot on its thematic plate. It’s a movie about rescuing your daughter that’s really about how you can’t protect your kids, about the contrast between the glamour of doomed revolutionary action and the quiet victories of everyday resistance, about a parallel United States that mirrors our police state already in progress. And to white folks (like me and maybe you and probably PTA himself) who just wonder when all this will all be over in the real world, Anderson offers his most self-explanatory movie title since There Will Be Blood. But aside from all that One Battle After Another is just plain engaging and immersive and entertaining the way too many movies that make much more money only pretend to be. As in Killers of the Flower Moon, Leonard DiCaprio is a dopey white guy outclassed by a woman of another race (glad he’s found his niche); his greasy top-knot and Arthur Dent bathrobe will be the stuff of hipster Halloween costumes. Teyana Taylor is iconic in the true sense of the word as insatiable revolutionary Perfida Beverly Hills. (I told you all to see A Thousand and One, but did you listen?) Supremely unruffled as a Latino karate instructor, Benicio Del Toro is the calm center of the film’s most remarkable sequence. As the spirited abductee, Chase Infiniti (who somehow was not herself named by Thomas Pynchon) slowly accrues an echo of Taylor’s screen intensity. And I regret to report that Sean Penn is as brilliant here as everyone says. His Steven Lockjaw is a swollen testicle of a man, incapable of properly fitting into any suit of clothes, a walking study of the psychosis of authoritarianism. Oh yeah, and that climactic car chase is totally boss. A
One of Them Days
A Keke Palmer/SZA buddy comedy with an Issa Rae imprimatur, and I waited almost two months to see it? What was I thinking? Then again, what was Sony thinking burying this fun little romp in the doldrums of late winter? Conscientious waitress Dreux (Palmer) and spacey artist Alyssa (SZA) are roommates who get swindled out of their rent by the latter’s no-good boyfriend, and they’ve got an afternoon to rustle up $1,500. Before running afoul of the neighborhood’s baddest bitch and its thug kingpin, the duo barely survive a visit to a blood bank staffed by Abbott Elementary’s Janelle James and risk doing business with a payday loan servicer that’s proud of its readiness to dole out cash and its draconian enforcement policies (motto: “We gotcha—and we’ll getcha!”). The jokes in Syreeta Singleton’s script could occasionally be snappier, but the situations are perfect and SZA’s timing is a match for Palmer’s, which is saying something. At a time where every comedy is some blaring high-concept cross-genre nonsense (I’m looking at you, Novocaine), what a relief to laugh a little and hope things turn out all right for a couple of characters you’re happy to have met. B+ [A- on rewatch]
Pavements
Alex Ross Perry begins from a very Pavement-like supposition: Music documentaries are as fatuous as music stardom. So his take on the quintessential ’90s indie heroes is a kind of gonzo cubism, mixing straight band reunion footage with three fabricated conceits: a trendy pop-up Pavement museum, a Pavement jukebox musical, and a clunky by-the-numbers Pavement biopic with Joe Keery going full method as Stephen Malkmus. Ironic self-indulgence is still self-indulgence, and at times, Pavements plays like an extended prank on the band. I mean, I think they're the best white male band of the Clinton years, and at times even I would rather have just watched some old footage. But if you’re the right person seeing this with the right crowd, as I am and I did, it can be as funny as Friendship. B+
The Phoenician Scheme
As a lukewarm Wes Anderson apologist, I take no joy in reporting that this chuckle-eliciting puzzle box is essentially the movie the dandy director’s haters accuse him of constantly remaking. Benicio del Toro is Zsa Zsa Korda, an apparently assassin-proof international power broker with a knack for wrangling slave labor and inciting famine. Following his latest near death encounter, Korda embarks on facilitating his final, most ambitious project, accompanied by his daughter and potential heir, a moonfaced and expressionless would-be novitiate named Liesl (Mia Threapleton). Thing is, all his backers want out, and he’s got to wrangle and manipulate a collection of terrific bit players (hearing Jeffery Wright recite Anderson/Coppola dialogue is always a pleasure) into ponying up the dough. Threapleton is a perfect match for Anderson’s schtick, and the zany final showdown between del Toro and a bewhiskered Benedict Cumberbatch should cap a much funnier movie. But a handful of pleasing moments don’t add up to much, and we get far more of Michael Cera’s dazed turtle expressions than anyone needs in 2025. B-
Predators
I never watched To Catch a Predator. Mostly I had better things to do with my time, but I was also put off by the self-righteous thirst for public humiliation that powered the show. David Osit’s skeptical documentary first places the program in context, reminding us of the high-level, universal adulation host Chris Hansen received (Jon Stewart bestows a particular sloppy smooch). Then he arrays his critiques: He speaks to the young women who pretended to be teenage girls, recounts the suicide of one nabbed “predator,” shows us the messes made by online copycat versions, and looks into the problems with prosecuting people set up by a TV show. It’s hard to capture in words what he’s after. Even taken as a whole, the concrete, documentable damage the show caused probably won’t feel damning to anyone who doesn’t already, like Osit and I, find the underlying ethos of the Predator spectacle socially corrosive. But for the haters, it’s vindication. A-
Resurrection
“In a wild and brutal era, humans have discovered that the secret to eternal life is to no longer dream!” a title card tells us with suitably melodramatic aplomb. And yet, in this world of the future (or is it?), some outcasts, called Deliriants, continue to dream regardless, even though they wither to nosferaturian husks as a result. An introductory sequence shot as a silent film follows an agent (Shu Qi) who tracks down a decaying Deliriant (Jackson Yee) in a steampunk opium den that recalls the space station in Twin Peaks’ third season. When he begs for a mercy killing, the agent instead keeps him alive a century longer, and he in essence relives the age of film, as condensed into four segments, each with its own characteristic style. Resurrection is like nothing you’ve seen before and yet every element of it seems familiar. Even if you’re not the sort of cineaste who can tick off boxes here and there—Orson Welles here, the Lumieres there—its remixing of genres, images, and techniques will stir up déjà vu. And since narrative is never Bi’s main concern, images are what will stay with you: the way a woman’s sneaker pivots as she turns to climb a ladder, or how a double rear-view mirror reflects a driver and a passenger individually. When we return to the framing device, and the Deleriant finally expires, the film ends in an empty movie theater. Is this an elegy for cinema or a call to rebirth? Resurrection suggests that we’ve barely begun to draw upon the wealth of images that can sustain us, and yet also that our time is running out to retain that capability. Which may make it the most realistic film of the year. A-
Roofman
Probably not a good movie, and certainly not an honest one, Roofman is as desperate to be liked as its main character, serial McDonald's robber and escaped convict Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum). After ingeniously smuggling himself out of the clink, Manchester hides out in a Toys "R" Us and inconveniently falls for a store employee because she’s played by Kirsten Dunst. He follows her to church (calling himself John Zorn, heh heh), wins over her daughters and fellow churchgoers, and creates a new life for himself that can’t possibly last. And you know what, gosh darn it? I did like Roofman in spite of my (spiteful) self. Because Tatum is charming, especially when he’s playing with kids or flirting with Dunst, who is infallibly wonderful. Because the movie is relatively free of condescension to ordinary folks who find community at church and because it assumes that there’s a cineplex audience out there willing to root (with reservations) for a guy who robs fast food chains and big box stores. Let’s not go crazy here, though. Though relatively effective, the handheld camera is an affectation, a sign that director Derek Cianfrance wants Roofman to be a more credible movie than it is. But Tatum doesn’t have what it takes to truly plumb the pathological side of Manchester’s need to be loved. Still, if you’re in the mood for a crowd-pleaser turned tear-jerker or just want to see a liberal amount of Tatum’s bare ass, happy holidays. B
The Room Next Door
Turns out Almodóvar is as disorienting in English as opera or kung fu flicks—the tonal command that allows the Spanish director to extract unexpected nuance from broad comedy and ripe melodrama is all but absent from his first feature en Inglés. The setup is simple: Tilda Swinton is a woman with terminal cancer who is ready to die and Julianne Moore is her friend, a woman who is afraid of death. Moore’s Ingrid, perpetually fussing about and obtrusively plucky, is the last person anyone would ask to accompany them to a country home where they plan to euthanize themselves, But that’s exactly what Swinton’s Martha chooses to do. (Granted, several other friends turned her down first.) We’re kept at an uncertain distance from these women: The front end is loaded with tiresome exposition and flashbacks, while the latter half insists on an intimacy between them we don’t feel. And though there's a mortified dignity to Swinton’s performance, or maybe just to her screen presence, her suffering feels existential or even spiritual rather than bodily. After the lived-in mortality of Almodóvar's Pain and Glory, The Room Next Door feels abstract and mystical, and determined to convey a moral. "There are lots of ways to live inside a tragedy," Ingrid says wisely at one point, and it’s such a resonant line that I wish the film had earned it. B
The Roses
I’m not gonna pretend I remember much about Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner going at each other 36 years ago in The War of the Roses, a movie that mostly existed because people really liked them together in Romancing the Stone. But I do recall its core conceit—how quickly passion flips to hatred—which this reboot/revamp/do-over/whatever avoids with laborious determination. Tony McNamara’s screenplay, which dodges predictability so assiduously it rarely has much fun, is dedicated to the even more cynical proposition that marriage can turn even the most thoughtful humans into monsters. Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch are Ivy and Theo, married Brits bemused by life in the U.S., where friends give them guns as gifts; while his career as an architect craters, hers as a chef skyrockets. A self-aware modern liberal man, Theo consciously resists toxic resentment as he takes on childcare duties, and the duo’s shared ironic sensibility allows them to bicker cordially for most of the film. Until this all collapses into violent farce, that is, at which point it’s like Scenes from a Marriage turning into Punch and Judy. Docked a notch for letting Kate McKinnon do her “Ooh, am I sexy or creepy, who can say, ooh” shtick along the way. B-
The Secret Agent
Kleber Mendonça Filho’s exhilarating new film is deceptively titled. Not only isn’t Marcelo, a.k.a. Armando (Wagner Moura), a spy, but The Secret Agent isn’t even exclusively about him. Mendonça follows Moura’s character, an academic whose clash with a bureaucrat has endangered his life under Brazil’s military dictatorship in the late ’70s, because this story brings us in contact with so many others. The gas station attendant who struggles for days to get the cops to retrieve a dead body. The chatty, energetic Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria), who knows everyone in town and helps those in need hide. The Angolan refugee Claudia (Hermila Guedes), hoping for true revolution in her homeland. If you’ve seen the film, each of these characters will live on in your imagination afterward, examples of the breadth of humanity that flourishes despite repression. Searching for some record of his mother, who he never met, Armando visits his son, who while living with his mother’s parents has become obsessed with Jaws. Meanwhile, Armando’s enemies find his location and target him for death. Coincidentally, a human leg is discovered in the jaws of a shark; soon urban legend has it that it’s become reanimated and is prowling the town For added chaos, this takes place during carnival. All this and Udo Kier’s final role too. A-
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
A disappointment. Shot in secret, Mohammad Rasoulof’s film wants to be both an effective thriller and a depiction of how state-generated paranoia strengthens the Iranian patriarchy, but these two elements don’t entirely mesh. Appointed to the role of investigating judge despite his bosses’ reservations about him, Iman (Missagh Zareh) learns that he’s expected to rubber stamp certain political rulings. He does so despite his qualms, and thus begins his descent from loving father and husband to tyrant of the household. Desperate to find his missing state-issued gun, fearing that he’ll be jailed for incompetence, Iman turns on his family, who belatedly fight back. At times this is almost an Iranian take on The Shining, complete with a tense chase through a disorienting setting. But... B-
Seeds
In the early 20th century, Black farmers owned 16 million acres of land in the U.S. Now they own just one million. Though Brittany Shyne’s black-and-white documentary isn’t particularly concerned with such statistics, that historical backdrop, that elegiac undercurrent that a way of life is passing, sets the tone for her study of a Black farm family in Georgia. Mixing policy and poetry. Shyne patiently spends her time with the farmers who remain, and is rewarded by images as simple and universal as a grandmother handing a child candy from her purse as they drive to a funeral. At the film’s core are the interactions between patriarch Willie Head Jr., tired but unbowed, and his great-granddaughter Alani. I’ve heard complaints that it’s too long (it’s just over two hours) or too slow, but Seeds is paced appropriately like a farewell to people you might not ever see again. A
Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier may be the kindest great director of his generation and its most gently devastating—a sort of Scandinavian Ozu. In Trier’s latest, Stellan Skarsgård is Gustav Borg, a once-heralded filmmaker who hasn’t worked in 15 years. Gustav was also, you won’t be surprised to learn, a terrible father who abandoned his wife and his two daughters: Nora (Renate Reinsve) still resents his absence, while the younger Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas) seems to have made her peace. Gustav returns on the day of their mother’s funeral and offers Nora a part in his new film, which reckons with their family’s dark past. When she rejects his offer, he instead casts Hollywood star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning), who gradually realizes she’s wrong for the part. All this could be the stuff of high drama or broad comedy, but Trier generally keeps both extremes at a low simmer. Reinsve, as the daughter reluctantly recognizing herself in her father, is no less an incarnation of millennial neurosis here than in The Worst Person in the World, while Skarsgård exercises his charm and authority lightly but firmly, regret battling stubbornness in his every action. At the center of the film is the Borg home, a creaky old storehouse of memories that allows Trier to exercise his easy way with chronology. The film slips into the past then fast-forwards, creating the sense that the past is always just beyond our reach, even while we’re firmly stuck in the present. A
September 5
If turning a horrific real-life event into a gripping thriller is a morally questionable act, how do we feel about turning the TV coverage of a horrific real-life event into a gripping thriller? That’s what director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum does here with the abduction and murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, and to his credit September 5 is wholly upfront about the amorality of journalism. Both John Magaro’s control room newb Geoff Mason and Peter Sarsgaard’s quietly authoritative ABC Sports chief Roone Arledge are in this for the story, and to hold on to it they’ll fight the local police, the ABC News team, and the other networks demanding equal satellite time. It’s hard not to root for the scrappy, ingenious sports journalists improvising with the limited tech on hand as events unfold, even as we realize their tricky sensationalism is the future of TV news. (September 5 is otherwise as stripped of politics as this story can possibly be, which is probably for the best. I mean, just imagine.) For all the sharp performances—Benjamin Walker perfectly capturing Peter Jennings’s plummy cool, Leonie Benesch as a translator who becomes an essential part of the team—everyone here is upstaged by actual footage of ABC Sports’ Jim McKay, a guy visibly struggling with how to convey this horror to viewers in real time. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a little skeevy after September 5. But I’d be lying to say I wasn’t caught up in it all. Like the man said, this is tremendous content. B+
The Shrouds
In his later years, David Cronenberg has settled into what you could call the “hangout thriller,” a genre that’s decidedly not to everyone’s tastes. As with Crimes of the Future, multiple plots and counterplots are afoot in The Shrouds, but settling them never seems urgent, and Cronenberg is deliberately blasé about tying up loose ends. Vincent Cassel (not entirely comfortable in English) is Karsh, the proprietor of GraveTech, a burial company that specializes in The Shroud, a full-body cam that envelops a corpse and allows mourners to watch their loved one decompose over time. Karsh is obsessed with his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger), whose disintegration he monitors via Shroud and who reappears to him in lurid dreams. Events require Karsh to reconnect with Maury (a wonderfully schlubby Guy Pearce), the nerdy programmer behind Karsh’s creation; he's obsessed with his ex-wife, Becca’s near-identical sister (Kruger again), whose idea of foreplay is batting about conspiracy theories. So much happens to ol’ Karsh—vandalism wrecks his cemetery, his flirtatious bitmoji of a personal assistant (still Kruger) gets flakier, and he’s seduced by the blind Korean wife (Sandrine Holt) of a Hungarian mogul who wants to help GraveTech go global—and yet so little apparently changes as a result. Call The Shrouds a tone poem (or a deadpan comedy) about the interconnections between paranoia and grief and jealousy. It might just annoy the hell out of you, but I was happy to loiter in this intriguing world and remain just as happy to muse over its ideas after the fact. B+
Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s Jim Crow vampire flick is a truly rare thing: a wholly self-assured mess. Technically and narratively, Coogler knows exactly what he wants to do, whether or not you can keep up, and each of the performers are just as committed. You get Michael B. Jordan distinguishing the murderous twins Smoke and Stack without resorting to caricature, Delroy Lindo as an aged bluesman. Hailee Steinfeld as a seductive quadroon, Jack O'Connell as an undead banjoist, Wunmi Mosaku as a wise hoodoo woman, Saul Williams as a preacher with a new wave hairdo, and I could just keep going. They all populate a vividly simulated Clarksdale, Mississippi, to which Jordan’s gangsters have returned to open a juke joint soon targeted by bloodsuckers—you could call this August Wilson’s From Dusk to Dawn. There are visual moments that split the diff between cornball and visionary (I truly did not know cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw had this in her) and more ideas—about Black spirituality and its vexed relationship to Christianity, about the social role of music, about integration as a deal with the devil—than your average multiplex sees in a whole summer. And if Coogler never slows down to develop those ideas, they still pack a conceptual wallop that complements the film's lived-in texture. This world is so engrossing that by the time the vamps come calling, I almost wished Coogler would just let his people have their one night undisturbed. But America’s not really like that, is it? A-
Sketch
My comically exaggerated exasperation aside, I don’t hate kids’ movies. I just think most of ’em are for, well, kids. But Seth Worley’s goofy but genuinely creepy Sketch was a pleasant surprise. Tony Hale is raising two children after his wife’s death: Amber (Bianca Belle), who’s channeling her anger into drawings of cartoonishly vicious monsters, and Jack (Kue Lawrence), the protective brother who just wants everything to be the way it was. When Amber’s drawings get dumped into a magical lake, her visions come to life, and many of these predators of crayon, marker, and chalk target a boy who teases her (the perfectly annoying Kalon Cox). There’s something a little too much of the pitchman about Worley—the screening I attended ended with an ad for an app that can bring your own kid’s drawings to life. But without edging into trauma-dump territory, his script feels emotionally astute to me, and its characters more like actual kids than most onscreen young’uns. Parents really do need to take it easy when naming their babies though—this cast also includes a Jaxen, a Genesis, and a Leigha. B+
The Smashing Machine
Benny Safdie is on to something with this character study of UFC pioneer Mark Kerr. The ungainly grappling and kicking of mixed martial arts, the improvised clutter of knees and fists—these call for a style other than the pulp classicism of the boxing picture, and Safdie’s vérité editing rhythms, jaggedly aestheticized by Nala Sinephro’s ambient-jazz soundtrack, mostly do the trick. Dwayne Johnson, in uncanny-valley prosthetics, is Kerr, an almost pathologically genial behemoth who pounds faces to mush for a living. Only one person seems capable of disturbing his peace—his needy girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt, in a pushup bra as aggressive as any of the fight scenes here). Safdie’s script gives them plenty to work with: He nails the self-fragilizing “I gotta call my sponsor” tone of the newly sober, and maps the moving goalposts of lovers’ squabbles with hectic precision. Even the climactic showdown between Mark and Dawn, set to the entirety of Springsteen’s “Jungleland” and fated to be analyzed by dim YouTube scholars who want to demonstrate “acting,” is as impressive as it wants to be. But the phonier moments leap off the screen—not just the training montage set to Elvis’s “My Way” but the ringside announcers who compulsively restate the obvious stakes of each match while crafting the sort of hokey sports narratives the film seems to want to rise above. And though Kerr battles addiction and control issues, we don’t get inside his head, and his only external foe is Dawn. I don’t think anyone here wanted to make a movie about a crazy girlfriend distracting a warrior from his goal, but the way the story plays out, that’s what we’re left with. B
Sorry, Baby
Eva Victor takes some getting used to. As a screen presence, they often hold back cryptically behind a half-smile or throw other actors off the beat with their own rhythms, capturing how awkwardness feels to be around, rather than how it's typically performed on screen. Yet to say Victor seems like a person who learned to talk from the internet is description, not criticism; we’ve had decades of actors who learned to talk from TV or magazines or other movies after all. Victor also wrote and directed Sorry, Baby, which takes some getting used to as well. Partly it’s the non-chronological storytelling, which feels unnecessary and therefore affected, but it’s also because Sorry, Baby is the story of a sexual assault, and how to talk about it, or around it, when the words you have to communicate seem to distort what you’ve experienced. What anchors the film is the friendship between Victor’s Agnes and Naomi Ackie’s Lydie, and how it shifts over time. Often the humor is too broad for the scenario (Agnes’s nemesis Natasha, played by Kelly McCormack, feels especially sitcommy), and Sorry, Baby can also feel too crafted, with Victor creating moments—a stranger commiserating with Agnes after a panic attack, a postcoital cuddle ruined by a discussion of the future, a heart-to-heart about life’s cruelties with your friend’s infant—that feel deliberate, arranged, artistic. But all these moments, along with the halting discussion between Agnes and Lydie immediately after the assault, all work, and isn’t great filmmaking about believing in the illusion even when you know how the trick is done? A-
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere
Bruce sure knows how to sabotage synergy, don’t he? The Boss released the long craved “Electric Sessions” of his lo-fi acoustic classic Nebraska (as part of a pricey box set) just in time for fans to watch Jeremy Allen White’s onscreen Springsteen complain about how those versions suck. And the artist was right to stand his ground against the big, bad money men at Columbia and insist that they release the haunted tapes he’d four-tracked on a TEAC 144 at his Colts Neck crash pad. Still, watching a guy write in a notebook and sing in his bedroom isn’t particularly cinematic. And you know what’s even harder to dramatize? The depression that Springsteen slipped into during this period, which writer/director Scott Cooper tries to explain via black and white flashbacks to a childhood dominated by an emotionally distant, physically abusive dad (Stephen Graham, doing his best as a psychological bogeyman). Jeremy Allen White, whose alleged charisma remains imperceptible to me, mostly plays Bruce as a sullen non-entity, and though he’s got the hunched shoulders and stretched, stiff neck down pat, half of the white guys in Jersey look more like the Boss than Allen does. But the big problem is that Cooper can’t match the eloquence with which Bruce Springsteen has written, sung, and spoken about his relationship with his father. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere may be as earnest as its subject, yet it's telling that a movie about a guy demanding that an album cover not even feature his photo lets someone prefix “Springsteen” to its title to make the film more marketable. C+
Superman
James Gunn’s flagship reboot of the DC film universe has its moments. In its best scene, a smug Clark Kent insists on a candid interview—as Superman—with co-worker/girlfriend Lois Lane, and the ace journalist he’s dating pulls no punches, getting in as many good hits as any of Lex Luthor’s henchfolk. David Corenswet’s Clark/Kal/Supes is all-too-human, with a real temper and self-regard bubbling up from beneath his Midwestern aw-shuckistude. He’s well-matched by Rachel Brosnahan, a purely 21st century Lois Lane who avoids Rosalind Russell throwback vibes as she fields modern problems like work-life balance and how to fly Mr. Terrific’s spacecraft. Yet the rest of Superman never matches the energy of that interview; in fact, Gunn foolishly splits Clark and Lois up on separate adventures. As we enter a world of intra-dimensional pocket universes and Metropolis-(Cleveland- actually) gobbling black holes, Superman gets loud and ugly and digital and, well, MCUish. And sorry, but there’s just too much Krypto. Read the full review here. B-
28 Years Later
Maybe I was just in a shitty mood (though I don’t remember being in one when I walked into the theater) but this Danny Boyle/Alex Garland reunion irritated the hell out of me. Could be Boyle’s affected jitter-glitch montage style, the arthouse equivalent of a cheap jump scare, haphazardly splicing in newsreels, Olivier’s Henry V, and the music of Young Fathers, whose gritty beatcraft I generally appreciate on its own. Or could be that I resent films where characters plunge nonsensically into danger for reasons I’m supposed to consider noble. Along the way, you get Ralph Fiennes as a cuddlier Col. Kurtz, “alpha” zombies who pluck spinal cords out by the head (pretty cool), Jodie Comer adding another accent to her CV, and a newborn baby to symbolize how life overcomes death or whatever. “Pretentious” is generally a lazy insult for dummies, but what else do you call it when a film makes such a show of insisting it has achieved technical feats and reached emotional truths that remain far beyond its grasp? C+
Train Dreams
Clint Bentley’s Denis Johnson adaptation tells the story of man who lives in two worlds, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is a logger who works on the railway, a place for men that’s violent but companionable, a site of vengeance murder and fireside tall tales, of labored exhaustion and insuperable beauty. The other is a homestead he shares with his wife (Felicity Jones) and daughter, a place of peace until tragedy transforms it into a den of isolation. With its sonorous narration and ecstatic natural world cinematography from Adolpho Veloso, Train Dreams has the look and feel of a more accessible Terrence Malick, and given the perfume-ad direction of so much of that auteur’s later work, someone should pick up the baton. Like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Bentley’s film stands as a memorial for all those who were torn away from family for work, suffered loss because of the elements, and whose small, quiet lives otherwise go undocumented. A-
Twinless
The biggest surprise of the year comes from writer/director/star James Sweeney, with a film that itself never stops surprising. Two men—the twinkish Dennis (Sweeney) and hunky Roman (Dylan O’Brien) meet at a Portland support group for people who have lost their identical twins—and the clever premise just gets wholly upended from there. Unexpected revelations disturb the unlikely friendship developing between dim Roman and the shifty little Dennis develops, and I don’t want to say much more than that because finding out where this goes is half the fun of Twinless. Sweeney has a spectacular command of tone: Whenever you think Twinless is getting too sweet, it takes a psychotic turn, and whenever you think it’s too dark, a character redeems himself. Who knew that O’Brien had this in him? You just never call tell with these teen heartthrobs. A-
Vermiglio
Who wouldn’t be suspicious of a quiet period piece set in a picturesque, isolated Alpine village saturated with natural light? But as we drift through a year in the life of a rural Italian family dominated by its patriarch, a stern provincial schoolmaster, director Maura Delpero probes the cruelty beneath the placid, pastoral surface. One daughter falls for a WWII deserter hiding out in the village, while another is obsessed with self-mortification and in love with the local wild girl. The children all vie for papa’s affection so they might escape Vermiglio for boarding school, except for a son who rebels by becoming a field hand. And babies just keep being born and occasionally dying. The storytelling isn’t just episodic but anecdotal; Delpero typically cuts away before a scene is resolved, with much of the action happening off screen, as befits a story of shame, thwarted desire, and withheld affection. But there are moments of joy—the children whispering together at night in their shared beds, a shared elicit cigarette in a barn—suggesting that not all vitality has been stamped out. And it’s all very pretty to look at, of course. Not major, but rewarding. B+
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
In the latest of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out whodunnits, Daniel Craig’s swampy-voiced Benoit Blanc largely cedes the spotlight to Josh O’Connor’s Father Jud, an idealistic young priest caught in a battle of wills with the charismatic Monsignor Jefferson Witt (Josh Brolin). When Witt is murdered mysteriously, everyone in the parish is a suspect, including (bum bum bummm) Father Jud himself. Dead Man is heavier in tone than past installments; its characters don’t get to flaunt their quirks as memorably. And here’s something you may never hear me say again: A Catholic really should have approved this script before they started filming. Not to censor any of the naughty bits, but to explain to Johnson how the Catholic hierarchy works. When a film strives to take spiritual dilemmas seriously, and often succeeds at it, the institutional differences with Evangelical or even mainline Protestant churches are crucial to pin down. Still, O’Connor, who’s really gunning for “best actor under 40” honors these days, almost pulls it off, and there’s a special pleasure in a performance that holds its own in a flawed setting. B
Weapons
Zach Cregger is no Oz Perkins (complimentary). Still, “17 children left their homes in the middle of the night and they never came back” is the easy part, and without giving too much away to the “I’ll wait for streaming” crowd, the explanation struck me as anticlimactic and a little goofy. As with Barbarian, Cregger works better with premises and characterization than with “what’s behind that door,” and, ugh, old ladies still creep him out. Still, Weapons is a manic meditation on grief, kind of an energy-drink-fueledThe Sweet Hereafter, with each adult is wrapped up in their own world—the kids’ teacher (Julia Garner) makes it all about herself, Josh Brolin is a dad doing his own research, and Alden Ehrenreich is a hapless cop who distracts himself by targeting a homeless swindler. So, how do you grade a film that zips from ominous to amusing to dumb to creepy-despite-itself to arrive at a truly galvanizing ending. Let’s try… B [B+ on rewatch]
The Wedding Banquet
What all but tanks Andrew Ahn’s remake of Ang Lee’s 1993 international breakthrough is that in out ‘n’ proud 2025 everyone involved seems a little embarrassed by its wacky, recycled premise (gay man has to trick his traditional family into believing that a green card marriage is real). The film's attempts at a serious relationship drama are undercut by its screwball obligations. There are cute moments and a few laughs—especially from Joan Chen as a mother belatedly overcompensating for neglecting her daughter by going gangbusters with PFLAG—but it's a bummer to watch a terrific cast try to shoehorn themselves into an unnecessary remake instead of telling an original story about queer 21st century people of color. B-
A Working Man
Suspecting that I underrated the silly-but-effective/effective-because-it’s-silly Jason Statham vehicle The Beekeeper last year, I went into the grim-visaged Brit’s latest vengeance romp determined not to not-get-fooled again. (It doesn’t help that they screen these things for a smattering of critics in the afternoon rather than plopping us into a rowdy crowd of comped civilians at night.) But sorry The Beekeeper fans—this is no The Beekeeper. In his new outing with director David Ayer, Statham is a black ops soldier turned construction foreman whose name I’m not going to bother to look up; when the daughter of his kindly Latino bosses gets snatched, he reluctantly goes back to his old ways. As always, the baddies—tastelessly attired Russian gangsters, a bald Black meth kingpin who sits on an ornate metal throne in the back of a redneck bar—are colorfully sketched if never unforgettable. But if I can get with Statham belonging to an absurdly mysterious org (of beekeepers!) and uncovering an even wilder conspiracy, A Working Man is too grubby and self-righteous to be sheer dumb fun. Whenever someone asks him why he cares about the girl he’s rescuing, Statham mentions that he has a daughter of his own, and I couldn’t help shake that A Working Man believes that the worst thing about trafficking women is that it upsets girl dads. C+
Universal Language
In an alternate Winnipeg populated entirely by Iranians, two children try to excavate a frozen 500-rial note so they can buy eyeglasses for a schoolmate; meanwhile a sullen man who’s abandoned a bureaucratic job in Quebec returns to town, hoping to belatedly reunite with his mother. All that may sound like standard indie-film quirk, diverting but inconsequential, but as deadpan as writer/director/star Matthew Rankin’s humor can be, Universal Language is genuinely funny rather than merely amusing. Rankin’s kids are clearly inspired by the determined, unromanticized children who frequently populate Iranian film, and in exploring the connections between his characters he achieves something like the humanism of greats like Kiarostami, even if follows his own idiosyncratic routes to get there. And cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko endows the bleak, snow-draped concreteness of Winnipeg with drab grandeur—as I overheard while leaving the theater, “It made me wish Minneapolis was uglier.” A- [A on rewatch]
