Here Are Some Movies You Can Go See Before, After, or Even During the Oscars

Here's a funny story: This intro was going to have a short discussion of the Oscars, and how I don't really care about the Oscars. So I wrote a little, and then I wrote a little more, and it turns out I care so little about the Oscars that I wrote 2,200 words about my Oscar picks.

Saner heads prevailed and that intro will instead run tomorrow as a stand-alone post. Until then, you can find short reviews of every Best Picture nominee in the Ongoing section below.

Special Screenings

Thursday, March 7

The Flintstones (1994)
Alamo Drafthouse
So, like, are people really nostalgic for this? $5. 12 p.m. More info here.

Mother of George (2013)
Capri Theater
A Nigerian couple in Brooklyn have trouble conceiving. $5, or free for North Side residents. 7 p.m. More info here.

Madagascar (2005)
Emagine Willow Creek
Is this the "I like to move it move it" movie? $3. 12 p.m. More info here.

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997)
Grandview 1&2
If they made this movie today, Austin Powers would have to be a spy who was frozen in the '90s, and *whispers* it still wouldn't have been very funny. $12. 9:15 p.m. Saturday 11:59 p.m. More info here.

The World of Nelsito (El Mundo Nelsito) (2022)
The Main
A young disabled man's life takes a fantastical turn after an accident. $7-$10. 7 p.m. More info here.

Snow White and the Seven Samurai (2024)
Trylon
Ah, those three magical words: "starring Eric Roberts." $8. 5 p.m. More info here.

Friday, March 8

A Matter of Life and Death (1946)
Trylon
Heaven tries to figure out what to do when a soldier who's meant to die is miraculously saved in this Powell/Pressburger classic. $8. 7 p.m. Saturday 9:15 p.m. Sunday 3 p.m. More info here.

Black Narcissus (1947)
Trylon
Nuns! $8. 9:15 p.m. Saturday 7 p.m. Sunday 5:15 p.m. More info here.

Nowhere Near (2023)
Walker Art Center
Filmmaker Miko Reverez, a proponent of "stateless cinema," travels from L.A. to the MOA trying to track down his family's immigration lawyer. Also Saturday. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.

Saturday, March 9

The Little Rascals (1994)
Alamo Drafthouse
Those scamps! $10. 2:10 p.m. More info here.

La Forza del Destino
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek/Showplace ICON
Verdi, live from the Met. Also Wednesday. $27.09. 11 a.m. More info here.

The Dead Next Door (1989)
Emagine Willow Creek
Sam Raimi used part of his Evil Dead II money to produce this Super-8 filmed zombie flick. There will be a Q&A with director J.R. Bookwalter. $11. 7:30 p.m. More info here.

Frida (2024)
The Main
A partly animated documentary of the life of Frida Kahlo, with most of the narration drawn from her diaries. 11 a.m. Free; for Film Society members only. More info here.

Toy Story (1995)
The Parkway
Do toys get jealous of each other? This film suggests that they do. $5-$10. 1 p.m. More info here.

Sunday, March 10

It Happened One Night (1934)
Alamo Drafthouse
I think of the part where Alan Hale sings "Young people in love are very seldom HUN-GREEE!" maybe once a week. $10. 11:05 a.m. More info here.

On Cinema at the Cinema Special
Alamo Drafthouse
Wanna find out what's happening with the Oscars without watching? Tim Heidecker is your guide. $13.50. 6 p.m. More info here.

Labyrinth (1986)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Rosedale 16/Emagine Willow Creek
Bowie had a strange '80s. $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.

The Quiet Man (1952)
Emagine Willow Creek
John Wayne goes to Ireland. Also Wednesday. $11. 1 & 6:30 p.m. More info here.

Go Fish (1994)
Emagine Willow Creek
A lesbian romcom, from back when that sort of a thing was a real novelty. $11. 7:10 p.m. More info here.

Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Trylon
Wanna see Harvey Keitel's dick? $8. 7:30 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 & 9:15 p.m. More info here.

Monday, March 11

Pulp Fiction (1994)
Alamo Drafthouse
The stories are so interrelated! $10. 6 p.m. More info here.

Forty-Seven Days With Jesus (2024)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
"I know you guys are good friends, but really, don't you think it's time he found his own place?" Also Tuesday $16.35. 7 p.m. More info here.

Event Horizon (1997)
Emagine Willow Creek
Just a reminder that you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter of the same name here. $6. 7:30 p.m. More info here.

Tuesday, March 12

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)
Alamo Drafthouse
A sneak peak at the Kristen Stewart lesbian bodybuilding movie. $13.50. 7 p.m. More info here.

Leprechaun (1993)
Alamo Drafthouse
Oh, so the leprechaun just wants what's his and now he's the bad guy? $7. 8:45 p.m. More info here.

Side Effects May Vary (2024)
The Parkway
The latest from cult horror filmmaker J.R. Bookwalter, making his second local in-theater appearance this week. $15/$20. 7 p.m. More info here.

Wednesday, March 13

The Primevals (2024)
Alamo Drafthouse
A tribute to old school stop-motion monster movies. $10. 7:15 p.m. More info here.

Secret Movie Night
Emagine Willow Creek
You won't know what the movie is till you take your seat. $10. 7 p.m. More info here.

Repo Man (1984)
Grandview 1&2
Personally, I like ordinary fucking people. $12. 9:15 p.m. More info here.

Carrie (1976)
The Parkway
They knew how to handle bullies in the '70s. $9/$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m; film at 8 p.m. More info here.

Ennio (2021)
Trylon
A profile of Ennio Morricone by the director of Cinema Paradiso. Presented by Sound Unseen. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.

Opening This Week

Follow the links for showtimes.

Cabrini
A Frances Cabrini biopic? Sure, why not?

Imaginary
Boo! We want the other Ryan.

Io Capitano
The Oscar nominee about two Senegalese teens who struggle to reach Italy.

Kung Fu Panda 4
Oh no! Viola Davis is a shapeshifting supervillain!

The Piper
Julian Sands's final movie.

Ongoing in Local Theaters

Follow the links for showtimes.

American Fiction
Jeffrey Wright never misses (his brief turn as Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was a highlight of last year's by-the-numbers Bayard Rustin biopic, Rustin), and he's reliably hilarious as an intellectual Black novelist who dumbs down to write a book in "realistic" hood style. Once My Pafology becomes a bestseller and a hit with the literati, Wright's Thelonious "Monk" Ellison has to get in character as its thug author to promote the book. Meanwhile, Monk has to live his real life: dating a neighbor, mourning his sister's death, dealing with his mother's dementia, and clashing with his newly out brother. Phew! The suggestion is that we, like the fans of Monk's Black stereotypes, will only watch a movie about an upper-middle-class Black family if we're hooked by a more sensational story. But for that clever bait-and-switch to work, you need to tell a much more interesting story about an upper-middle-class Black family. B+

Anatomy of a Fall (read the full review here)
Justine Triet’s latest is a kind of austere pulp, its subject matter juicy but its mood somewhat rigorous. After her husband plummets to his death from an upstairs window, an icy novelist is quickly transformed from grieving widow to prime suspect and struggles to recast herself as an acceptable defendant. And the more evidence that we’re given, the less certain we are of everything. Far from an invitation to speculate, however, that ambiguity seems to be the point: actual truth and legal truth are not identical. A showcase for Sandra Hüller, who plays the accused as a woman not just defending herself but defending her fundamental belief in the complexity of human motive, a belief she’s loath to surrender even for the sake of proving her innocence. A-

Anyone But You

Argylle
Doesn't Sam Rockwell have better things to do? Are the visual effects trash because the team got lazy or on purpose, for, like, camp reasons? Why didn't Henry Cavill and John Cena kiss? Doesn't Bryce Dallas Howard have better things to do? These are just a few of the questions with which I distracted myself while waiting for meta-hack Matthew Vaughn's latest manic foray into ridic spyjinks to end, and in fact, I'm still not sure that a part of me isn't still back at the Showplace ICON, where I will remain forever, grimacing through one self-referential post-credits scene after another. Winking so hard you hope he'll sprain his stupid face, Vaughn hustles Howard and Rockwell through a plot that's about as fun to untangle as an extension cord; BDH writes spy novels that are so good real spies want her dead, and it just gets weirder and more hectic from there in that "everything's a joke and nothing's funny" post-MCU way. Wait, did I hear someone say "I hope there's a shitty CGI cat in this!"? How could there not be? C

Barbie (read the full review here)
The best Hollywood director of her generation has plunged into the muck of IP and emerged with her craft, sensibility, and vision unscathed. And I’m not gonna knock a blockbuster Barbie movie with insight into gender roles, even if that insight is that they’re perpetually frustrating, especially when it’s this funny. As Sonic might put it (or, Amy Rose, more likely), there is no objective analysis of gender outside of commodity fetishism under capitalism. (Kinda wordy, I know. That’s why they don’t let me make memes.) Still, the intertwining of sentimentality and brand-awareness here affected my stomach the same way as hearing an NPR acknowledgement that Dow Chemical is sponsoring an upcoming segment on climate change does. B+

The Beekeeper (read the full review here)
The premise of The Beekeeper should be a slam dunk for a brainless action flick: Jason Statham is a (you guessed it) beekeeper who swears vengeance on scam artists that target the elderly—and he’s also a Beekeeper, a member of a secret government org of unstoppable killing machines. In his Carhartt jacket, ball cap, and rusty pickup, The Beekeeper is a working-class hero out to avenge us average poors against the slick elites, with Statham declaiming wonderfully moralistic lines like “Taking from an elderly person is just as bad as stealing from a child—maybe worse” in that iconically garbled deadpan of his as he fucks up evil phishing bros. But for all the heads ingeniously bashed in here, I couldn’t help but feel that a movie this dumb really should be a helluva lot more fun. Bee Minus

The Chosen Season 4: Episodes 7-8

Demon Slayer: To the Hashira Training

Drive-Away Dolls
In Joel Coen’s first effort without his brother, his wife played Lady Macbeth. Ethan Coen responds by writing a trashy little lesbian road trip flick with his wife, Tricia Cooke, that someone talked them out of titling Drive-Away Dykes. Does this contrast offer some insight into the sensibility that each brother brings to the table? Maybe, maybe not. But while the former could be enjoyed apart from the Coens’ collective oeuvre, the latter all but begs for comparison: This is Coens lite, with all the frenetic energy and silly accents but little of the inspired zaniness. Two young Philly lesbians (a bit too broadly Texan Margaret Qualley and a pitch-perfectly uptight Geraldine Viswanathan) agree to drop a car off in Tallahassee. Is there something in the trunk they don’t know about? Oh, there sure is, sister. Are the goons dispatched after these ladies comically inept? Funny you should ask. Does the plot revolve around Matt Damon’s penis? OK, that I didn’t necessarily see coming. Drive-Away Dolls is brisk and harmless, with Coen trading in fatalism for friskiness. But while it’s nice to see him working with younger actors, a little Beanie Feldman goes a long way, and an un-youthful Bill Camp, as a sour car rental clerk, gives the best performance here. B

Dune: Part 2 (read the full review here)
The first part of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation was a well-crafted slog, occasionally spectacular but often merely studently, as the director seemed intent to prove that he deserved the assignment. But with all the power players set in place, Part Two does an awful lot right. Villeneuve distills the essence of the novel’s currents of deception and misdirection into a legible screenplay while generating some truly uncanny moments. And as Paul Atreides, Timothée Chalamet shows us a man who makes a pragmatic decision to exploit the dogmatism of his followers because he believes that every other choice will cause more death and destruction, or who at least rationalizes his motives that way. With IP-recycling now the culture industry’s standard cannibalistic practice, Villeneuve, like Paul, imagines himself the good guy in this scenario, respectful of the traditions placed in his care rather than merely exploitative. But also like Paul there are forces at play beyond his control. So what happens when Villeneuve’s hero threatens to become a butcher? Stay tuned for Part 3. B+

The Holdovers (read the full review here)
Alexander Payne makes movies about unlikeable, obsolete men, and then leaves us to wonder whether they’re obsolete because they’re unlikable or unlikable because they’re obsolete. The latest addition to Payne’s roster of curmudgeons is Paul Giamatti's Paul Hunham, a staple in many high schools and probably every single prep school: the sexless (if not virginal), odd-smelling disciplinarian. Hunham is condemned to spending Christmas break with bright-yet-underachieving Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), who brandishes a truly formidable Adam’s apple; their relationship evolves from purely adversarial to a wary kind of trust and respect, with school cook Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) intervening between them. Especially as its third-act revelations roll in, the humanization of the characters can feel a bit mechanical if you’re not in the mood. But though I usually feel like I’m being worked over in Payne’s movies, and often I push back, here the cast coaxed me along for the ride. B+

The Iron Claw
Good acting, bad hair, not enough wrestling, and just one brother after another dying and the dad saying "You boys gotta get tougher!" B-

The Jungle Bunch: Operation Meltdown

Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese has always shoved the futility of a thug’s life in our faces, but in his later years he’s taken a longer, historicized view of the banality of crime. Participating in the attempted genocide of the Osage Nation under the delusion that he’s helping his family, Leonardo DiCaprio’s dim Ernest Burkhart is kin to Robert De Niro’s Frank Sheeran in The Irishman, a man who squanders his life as a goon in the service of powerful, violent men. But this film belongs to Lily Gladstone as Burkhart’s Osage wife Mollie. With her impassive gaze, a smile that reveals nothing while edging toward a smirk, and eyes that eyes can tease without mocking, rage with sadness, or go dead-blank with shock, she takes center stage here to represent all the people (and particularly women) that Scorsese pictures have happened to over the years. A-

Kiss the Future

Land of Bad

Lisa Frankenstein
Set in 1989, this snarky horror-comedy's heart is in 2009, when writer Diablo Cody’s zippy post-millennial Buffy/Heathers patter still felt fresh, or at least marketable. Kathryn Newton is Lisa Swallows (eh), who cowered in the next room while her mother was killed by an axe murderer during a home invasion. Her father remarries an uptight nurse (Carla Gugino, shoehorned into a nasty stepmom-shrew role), forcing Lisa to switch schools, and now she spends her time in an abandoned cemetery, mooning over the carved head of a boy who died in the late 19th century. (You 21st century goth kids might not be impressed, but in the '80s that was cutting edge moodiness.) A freak electrical storm reanimates the boy's corpse, and he happens to be Cole Sprouse. Bodies start to hit the floor, and Lisa and her zombie suitor find a way to supply his missing parts, stitching them on and zapping him with a short-circuiting tanning bed. Phew! That's a lot, and all that keeps it entertaining rather than totally exhausting is a gamely unhinged performance from Newton, who makes Lisa over from a weepy wallflower to a kind of Madonna Bonham Carter. C+

Madame Web
OK, fine, I saw it. And no matter what you’ve heard, this lackluster mess is no camp classic. In fact, before Dakota Johnson clocks out entirely and starts delivering her lines like she’s reading an eye chart, her aloof frustration is entertaining, albeit in a way I wouldn’t exactly call great acting. And there’s a fun rapport between the three “teens”—uptight Julia (Sydney Sweeney), bratty Mattie (Celeste O'Connor), and brainiac Anya (Isabela Merced)—who Johnson’s Cassie Webb has to protect after she has visions of their death. Still, a mess it is. We’re shown that the three girls will have superpowers—but only in the future. (We’ve had so many origin stories on film, now we’re doing pre-origin stories?) And writer/director S.J. Clarkson, with help from the screenwriting brain trust behind Morbius, decides to keep reminding us that Sony has the rights to all Spider-Man characters except the important one—not only is Ben Parker Cassie’s pal, but we watch Emma Roberts give birth to (an unnamed) Peter Parker. Oops, almost forgot to mention the villain, probably because he’s so forgettable. You can distract yourself from the dull goings-on by spotting weird incongruities (when Cassie returns from a trip to Peru, she’s still driving the cab she stole earlier in the movie?) but if you get more than a few snickers from this, you’re way more desperate for crap than I am. C

Maestro (read the full review here)
There’s a vacuum at the center of Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein biopic, and it's Bradley Cooper—he skirts the line between expert impression and fully realized character. As Bernstein's wife Felicia, Carey Mulligan is given an opportunity to enact noble suffering during a prolonged death from cancer that feels cinematically morbid. But the film’s biggest flaw is how it slights Bernstein’s bisexuality. Because Maestro focuses on the Bernsteins’ marriage, Lenny’s affairs with men become mere indiscretions, flings, dalliances with pretty boys. Is that truly all they were? And if so, what did they mean to Lenny? B-

Mean Girls (read the full review here)
The trailer promised that this wouldn't be "your mother’s Mean Girls,” but exactly whose Mean Girls it would be remained unclear. It also did its best to conceal the fact that it’s a musical by not featuring a big musical number, and that sure didn't bode well. Frankly, the very premise—a homeschooled American girl who grew up in Kenya as the daughter of a research zoologist not understanding how everyday U.S. teenage life works—feels misguided in 2024. In the real world, Cady would amass a huge online following after at least one video of a lion went viral, and then she’d get canceled when an old problematic tweet surfaced. Another big misstep is Reneé Rapp as the infamous Regina George. Now, obviously, in 2024, a PG-13 movie isn’t going to feature blatant homophobia or multiple uses of the R-slur, and I’m certainly not saying it should, but this film didn’t replace those examples of meanness with… well, anything. The new Mean Girls isn’t mean enough—and it isn’t good enough either.—Joel Swenson C+

Migration

Bob Marley: One Love
For me, the most forgivable music biopic cliché is the scene in the studio “where it all comes together,” usually after the genius has been struggling to articulate his vision to the band. At least in their clumsy way scenes like this try to understand where great music comes from. And so the best part of this rote retelling of the reggae great’s life, rigorously vetted by his family, comes during the Exodus sessions, where new guitarist Junior Murvin adds a rock tinge to the Wailers’ established sound. As for the rest, well, it’s not all as ridiculous as when Bob and his crew leave a Clash show and stroll blithely through London as riots break out behind them, or the singer’s flashbacks to his youth that occur while he’s performing on stage, but if you know anything about Bob Marley’s life, you’ll learn nothing new here. Lashana Lynch does what she can as Rita Marley, James Norton’s job as Chris Blackwell is to keep saying “I don’t know if that’ll work, Bob,” and Kingsley Ben-Adir has real screen presence but his charisma doesn’t suggest Bob’s own. Optimistically, I’ll take the movie’s success as a good sign that there’s real hunger to know more about one of the great international Black diasporan culture heroes, and I hope the curious don’t stop here. Read Chris Salewicz's Bob Marley: The Untold Story or Timothy White’s Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley or, hell, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, which fictionalizes Marley’s shooting. Watch any number of YouTube clips, including Marley’s 1977 set at the Rainbow. And definitely listen to the music. If you know Legend, which you probably do even if you’ve never listened to it on purpose, go back to Marley’s start at Island Records—Burnin’, Natty Dread, and Catch a Fire. Sample the earlier Studio One recordings. And don’t stop there. C+

Oppenheimer (read the full review here)
If you think it’s wild that so many people turned out this summer to see a three-hour biopic about a theoretical physicist, well, wait till you hear that they actually showed up for a three-hour movie about a commerce secretary nominee’s U.S. Senate confirmation hearing. A story of how figures who consider themselves world historical agents play the game and get played, with the final word on the matter delivered by none other than Einstein himself, Oppenheimer is vivid pop history told through anecdote, image, and aphorism, and its politics aren't entirely reprehensible or stupid. There are times, even, when it's as smart as Barbie. A-

Ordinary Angels

2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films—Animation

2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films—Documentary

2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films—Live Action

Past Lives (read the full review here)
A Korean man, a Korean woman, and a white man are sitting at a bar, and, offscreen, two voices guess at the relationship between the three. Are the Koreans a couple? If so, who’s the white guy they’re barely acknowledging? Maybe they’re just coworkers? It’s all ordinary night-out chit chat, nothing too heavy, until the woman turns to face us, and the ambivalence of her expression suggests a deeper mystery than the one under discussion. Past Lives begins with this intriguing moment, which inadvertently gets at the central flaw in Korean-Canadian playwright Celine Song’s celebrated debut film. The relationship between these three people does seem complex and uncertain if you stand back far enough, but the closer you approach them the simpler their story is. Which is the opposite of how you want a movie to work, no? B

Perfect Days
In Wim Wenders’s latest, Koji Yakusho is Hirayama, an elderly man who cleans public toilets in Tokyo with dutiful care. (Every American will leave this film envious of a city with such well-maintained public restrooms.) In his work and his free time, Hirayama hews to a routine so strict that every slight deviation over the course of the film feels seismic, to him and to us. He doesn’t exactly shrink from human contact—he bonds with his irritating young co-worker’s would-be girlfriend while listening to Patti Smith’s “Redondo Beach” and plays shadow tag with a dying man. But his existence is largely self-contained, and this is one of the rare films to show that a life lived alone is not necessarily lonely and certainly isn’t meaningless, though like any life it comes with its own regrets. Hirayama is open to beauty in every moment—during his breaks he photographs the way the sunlight hits the leaves—and so is Wenders. In fact, I would say that Perfect Days captures the unbearable joy of being alive if it didn’t make me sound like a pretentious sap. Fortunately, the closing sequence, as we watch an array of emotions flickering across Yakusho’s face, makes that point for me without using any words. A

Poor Things (read the full review here)
Yorgos Lanthimos is such a cheekily off-putting director it never occurred to me what his idea of crowd-pleaser might look like. But with Poor Things, he doesn’t just want to be admired; he wants to be loved. And in its own creepy, garish, oversexed, male-gazey way, Lanthimos’s arch fairy tale does have heart. An Eve who can’t wait to get the fuck outta Eden, Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter becomes Frankenstein’s monster as Candide in the world at large, indomitable because she has no shame. Bella’s sex-positivity is indubitably a man’s ideal of what it means to be a free woman, addressing fewer contradictions of femininity than Barbie does, but Stone inhabits her character so completely that you might even say she liberates Bella from her creator. A-

The Taste of Things
Trần Anh Hùng’s sumptuous tale of love in a rural French kitchen is a good old-fashioned movie—by which I mean, it could’ve been released by Miramax during the first Clinton administration. And while I might have found it a bore back when similar dinosaurs ruled the Earth, now it’s nearly as charming as a baby triceratops. Benoît Magimel is late 19th century gourmet Dodin Bouffant and Juliette Binoche is Eugénie, his cook of 20 years (and lover when she’s in the mood); he repeatedly courts her, while she remains aloof. But the love story feels like an excuse to linger in the presence of these gourmets and, more to the point, the lavish meals they prepare. The deliberate, patient efficiency with which Eugénie works just highlights how thoroughly TV has conditioned us to think of cooking as a hectic, nervous affair—here even gutting a fish becomes an elegant task. Cinematographer Jonathan Ricquebourg shoots Binoche’s wonderful ass as lovingly as he does the dishes she cooks, and he goes for the gold in every scene. While Dodin may hold forth on the notion of balance in a meal, this film hardly shares his aesthetic—it’s suffused with the summer light that Eugénie cherishes. Bougie as hell, mais oui, but any class warriors who don’t salivate over the fare on offer here don’t deserve a share in the spoils of the revolution. B+

The Teacher's Lounge
Not all is as it seems at a German middle school in director İlker Çatak’s darkly comic drama. Leonie Benesch plays a teacher who, offended by the racial profiling of an Arab student, goes poking into a series of unsolved thefts in the school. She runs afoul of a coworker, which embroils her in a clash of wills with that woman’s son, and soon all order crumbles around her. The Teachers’ Lounge does eventually teeter on the edge of the absurd, but Benesch grounds the story as a woman whose good intentions torpedo her goals, and it’s not like Çatak is exactly aiming for documentary realism here. B+

Tenet

Wonka
Even more unnecessary than most prequels, and I couldn't hum any of the tunes if you promised me a lifetime supply of chocolate as a reward. But the Dickens by way of Rowling characterizations and settings are distracting enough for a couple hours, and your kids have made you sit through worse. B

The Zone of Interest (read the full review here)
Jonathan Glazer's latest embeds itself in the quotidian routine of a Nazi family that lives on a gorgeous estate that just so happens to share a wall with a death camp. Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) have five children, including two younger kids who squabble and a perpetually wailing baby—they’re the exact sort of family Goebbels would want an Aryan Norman Rockwell to paint. Yet what do we accomplish by spending two hours in the company of these drab Nazis? After The Zone of Interest I knew what I was supposed to think about Herr and Frau Höss—Glazer’s forcedly aestheticized didacticism saw to that. But what was I supposed to feel, aside from horror at the systematic extermination of Jews, which, I hope, anyone going into this film already experiences? B-