We all know I'm a joyless little bitch when it comes to the Oscars, and I'll just leave this link here rather than repeat myself. But since eight of the 10 movies nominated for Best Picture made my own year-end list, I don't have much room to complain. Will the Academy find some way to fuck this up anyway? Only time will tell.
This week, I've also reviewed Crime 101 and Sirât.
Special Screenings
Thursday, March 12
Twin Peaks: The Return (2016)—Episodes 7-9
Alamo Drafthouse
Gotta light? $10.99. 4:45 p.m. More info here.
Bad Santa (2003)
Alamo Drafthouse
Christmas starts earlier every year. $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
Moon (2009)
Emagine Willow Creek
Things get weird for Sam Rockwell after three years on the moon. $10. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Mallrats (1995)
Grandview 1&2
I heard this was filmed in Minnesota someplace? $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
Human Flow (2017)
Main Cinema
Ai Weiwei looks at the international refugee crisis. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
Two to One (Zwei zu Eins) (2024)
Trylon
East Germans discover millions in soon-to-be-worthless cash in 1990. Presented by the Germanic-American Institute. $3. 7 p.m. More info here.
Salut les Cubains (1963) and Black Panthers (1968)
Walker Art Center
Agnès Varda travels to the Americas for these short films about revolutionary movements. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here. tourists. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
Friday, March 13
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Extended Edition (2002)
Alamo Drafthouse
The extended version should have a third tower. $10.99. 2:30 p.m. Sunday 11 a.m. More info here.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)
Alamo Drafthouse
Oops, they made more dinosaurs. $20. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
Sous le figues (2021)
Alliance Française
Terrific movie about women bonding as they pick figs. I know that doesn’t make it sound super exciting but really, it’s good. $10 donation requested. 7 p.m. More info here.
They Live (1988)
Heights Theater
Indeed they do. $13. 9:45 p.m. More info here.
Alien (1979)
Trylon
Don’t know why I bothered to list all the screenings—they’re all sold out. $8. 7 & 9:30 p.m. Saturday 4:30, 7, & 9:30 p.m. Sunday 12:30, 3, & 5:30 p.m. More info here.
La Pointe Courte (1955)
Walker Art Center
Agnès Varda liked to say she had only seen about 25 movies in her life before she made this French New Wave precursor at age 25. $12/$15. 7 p.m. More info here.
Saturday, March 14
Twin Peaks: The Return—Episodes 10-12 (2017)
Alamo Drafthouse
In which Monica Bellucci shows up, because why not? $10.99. 11:30 p.m. Monday 3:15 p.m. Tuesday 3:30 p.m. More info here.
2026 Best Picture Showcase Day Two Marathon
AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
Cram five movies down in one day. AMC: $40. 11:30 a.m. More info here. Marcus: $35. 10 a.m. More info here.
Pi (1998)
AMC Southdale 16
Shouldn’t it cost $3.14? $7. 3:14 p.m. More info here.
Brazil (1985)
Emagine Willow Creek
Fifteen-year-old me: “Oh, the guy from Monty Python has a new movie out. That’ll be fun.” $10. 7:30 & 8:30 p.m. More info here.
Beetlejuice (1988)
Heights Theater
I almost forgot they made a sequel. $13. 11 a.m. & 9:45 p.m. More info here.
By Design (2026)
Heights Theater
Juliette Lewis's life changes for the better when she becomes a chair. Also Tuesday. $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
It Was Just an Accident (2025)
Main Cinema
Catch Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s Oscar-nominated meditation on vengeance. Free for MSP FiIm Society members. 11 a.m. More info here.
NTL: The Fifth Step
Main Cinema
A 12-step program takes a dramatic turn. $20. 11 a.m. More info here.
Le bonheur (1965)
Walker Art Center
A crushingly ironic feminist fable from Agnès Varda. $12/$15. 2 p.m. More info here.
Sunday, March 15
Jurassic Park III (2001)
Alamo Drafthouse
Again with the dinosaurs. $17. 4 p.m. More info here.
Sound of Freedom (2023)
AMC Southdale 16
I'm guessing it sounds something like "URGH!" Also Wednesday. $7. 4:45 p.m. More info here.
Unsung Hero (2024)
AMC Southdale 16
An Australian family travels to Nashville to become CCM stars. $7. 4:10 p.m. More info here.
Hollywood’s Big Night
Emagine Willow Creek
They have to call it that for legal reasons. 6 p.m. More info here.
North by Northwest (1959)
Emagine Willow Creek
For those of us not making it to South by Southwest. Also Wednesday. $11. 3 & 6:15 p.m. More info here.
The Optimist: The Bravest Act Is Truth (2026)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16/Emagine Willow Creek
A holocaust survivor befriends a troubled teen. AMC: $15. 12:30 p.m. More info here. Emagine: $17. 2 p.m. More info here.
Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
Grandview 1&2
Anyone know where this takes place? $14.14. 9:15 p.m. More info here.
For Your Consideration (2006)
Heights Theater
Just in time for the Oscars. $16. 7 p.m. More info here.
The French Connection (1971)
Parkway Theater
Racist cop has cool hat. $15/$20. Preshow music from the Larry McDonough Quintet at 7 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
The Bad Sleep Well (1960)
Trylon
An underseen Kurosawa noir. $8. Sunday 8 p.m. Monday-Tuesday 7 p.m. More info here.
Monday, March 16
Thirst (2009)
Alamo Drafthouse
Chan-Wook Park’s slurpy vamp flick. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999)
Edina Mann
In case you’d rather see it in Edina. Also Wednesday. $12.12. 7 p.m. More info here.
Amityville II: The Possession (1982)
Emagine Willow Creek
$9. 7:30 p.m. More info here.
WTF! Watch Terrible Films
56 Brewing
I don’t know what they’ll be showing, but I know it’ll be terrible. Free. 7 p.m. More info here.
After Hours (1985)
Heights Theater
Would it kill a guy in a movie with Teri Garr to be nice to her? $13. 7 p.m. More info here.
$5 Secret Movie
Lagoon Cinema
Don’t ask me! $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Tuesday, March 10
Tommy (1975)
AMC Rosedale 14/AMC Southdale 16
Ken Russell takes on The Who, in IMAX. Also Wednesday. $19. 6:30 p.m. More info here.
He Calls Me Daughter (2026)
AMC Southdale 16/Marcus West End
One of those god movies. Showtimes, prices, and more info here.
Wednesday, March 18
Dead Lover (2026)
Alamo Drafthouse
Shown in Stink-O-Vision. $10.99. 8 p.m. More info here.
After Hours (1985)
Lagoon CInema
Your second chance to see it this week. $11. 7 p.m. More info here.
Cherri (2025)
Main Cinema
The choreographer for a plus-size ballet troupe falls for a young security guard. Part of the Minnesota Cuban Film Festival. $12. 7 p.m. More info here.
The Women’s Adventure Film Tour 2026
Riverview Theater
It’s that time of year! $7. 7:15 p.m. More info here.
Despiser (2003)
Trylon
Sounds like a mid-’00s blog. $5. 7 p.m. More info here.
Thursday, March 19
Britannia Hospital (1982)
Alamo Drafthouse
It’s about a British hospital. What would you do without me? $10. 7 p.m. More info here.
A Bug’s Life (1998)
East Side Freedom Library
It's about workers' rights! Free. 6 p.m. More info here.
Josie and the Pussycats (2001)
Emagine Willow Creek
You couldn't make this today because we now know that pop music is good. $10. 7:30 & 8:30 p.m. More info here.
Clue (1985)
Parkway Theater
Can’t believe they made a board game out of this movie. $9/$12. Trivia at 7:30 p.m. Movie at 8 p.m. More info here.
Terry Jones and the Haudenosaunee Micro-Short Film Program
Walker Art Center
Seneca filmmaker Jones curated the annual Indigenous-led program this year. Free. 6 p.m. More info here.
Opening
Follow the links for showtimes.
Cutting Through Rocks
Documentary about an Iranian woman elected to office in her village.
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Who doesn't love Kiki?
The King’s Warden
A South Korean blockbuster about a deposed king.
Mui Pho
A man teaches his grandpa to make soup.
Reminders of Him
The Colleen Hoover industrial complex thunders on.
Scared to Death
Boo!
Slanted
An Asian teen undergoes a cosmetic procedure that makes her white. And we’re sure there are no side effects or anything like that.
TMNT II: Secret of the Ooze
Where have we gone wrong as a society that we are celebrating the 35th anniversary of a Ninja Turtles sequel?
Undertone
Scary sounds!
Ongoing in Local Theaters
Follow the links for showtimes.
Avatar: Fire and Ash
There’s a silly ongoing online debate that no, I will not join, about whether the Avatar movies have any “cultural impact.” But I can say that watching the first 10 minutes of each new sequel is like seeing your in-laws’ extended family over the holidays: Everyone looks kind of familiar but damned if you can be expected to remember their names, let alone what their deal is. And you know what? I like that. When you’re not actually watching an Avatar movie, nobody expects you to think about Avatar at all, and what more can you ask from a talented megalomaniac’s misguided passion project? James Cameron still can’t plot for shit, and even more than its two predecessors, Avatar: Fire and Ash is just one damn thing after another. (It hardly fits his grandiose vision, but what Cameron is narratively suited for, with his cliffhangery series of captures and escapes, is an old-fashioned serial.) So… do those damn things still look cool? Sigh, yes, they still look cool. We’re introduced to the Mangkwan, a more vicious race of Na’vi who shoot flaming arrows and practice dark magic, ruled by the sinewy, feline Varang (Oona Chaplin, whose hissing skills rival even Zoe Saldana’s). There’s a billowy, translucent trading vessel that floats through the air. Nasty squids with pincers haunt the ocean depths. So while all the usual caveats apply—Cameron’s ideas about Indigenous peoples remain ideologically suspect; the younger actors still sound like they’re doing voice work for a tepid Scooby-Doo reboot; the whole thing’s just too damn long—Avatar remains your best one-stop-shop for state-of-the-art ecotopian fantasy and the righteous destruction of military hardware. B
Bugonia
Even 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-
Crime 101
Good actors can take you a long way, and Bart Layton’s adaptation of the Don Winslow novel is cast expertly, if a little predictably, top to bottom. A beady-eyed Chris Hemsworth is Mike Davis (is this an L.A. in-joke?), a wily, emotionally unreadable/unavailable crook-with-a-conscience who seems to somehow always know when insured valuables are being transported. The scruffy divorced cop who thinks he’s got the thief’s m.o. pegged? Mark Ruffalo, of course. (All Mike’s robberies are within a short distance of Highway 101. Get it?) A carefully de-glammed Halle Berry is the insurance agent who stumbles into both their lives, while Barry Keoghan (always best in supporting roles—Hollywood please note) is the hothead out to muscle in on Mike’s action. These stock figures are given some psychological parameters to work within, but sometimes I wondered why. The slick opening sequence and killer chase scene would have worked just as well if we knew a lot less about these people; the characterizations didn’t add much to the already somewhat clumsy Mexican standoff at the climax. And really, does love interest Monica Barbero—who gets involved with Mike despite the serial-killer lack of personalized touches in his apartment—have no survival instinct at all? B-
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba The Movie: Infinity Castle
EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
Elvis Presley and Baz Luhrmann share a common flaw: an inability to trust the music. For Elvis, this showed through in the compulsive bad jokes he told onstage; this was the behavior of a guy who got away with whatever he wanted for too damn long but also doubted he deserved the attention he received. For Luhrmann, there’s no such psychological complexity: He just has a short attention span. And so what’s billed as “Elvis in Concert” is interspersed, overlaid, and just plain interrupted by Elvis backstage, Elvis in historical clips, Elvis in rehearsal, and Elvis trying to come up with interesting answers to the same boring questions from reporters he’s been asked for 15 years. EPiC never finds its groove because groove is anathema to Luhrmann’s schlock postmodernism—we get multiple onstage climaxes with too little foreplay, and with performances edited anachronistically together, it’s slightly distractingly to see Elvis fluctuate in weight, intensity, and sartorial finesse. As in life, the King’s charisma struggles to emerge from someone else’s vision of him. Still, the live stuff is killer, if more reliant on showmanship than grit. And we get documentary evidence of Elvis’s favorite simile (“feels like Bob Dylan slept in my mouth”) and of the license his mere presence continued giving women of all ages to be horny on main. Precious lord, did that man kiss a lot of ladies. And not on the cheek either. 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-
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
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
The Love That Remains—ends Thursday, March 12
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-
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Matt Johnson cashes in the cred he earned with his 2023 film Blackberry to turn his ‘00s cult web series with Jay McCarrol into perhaps the most relentlessly Canadian hit comedy movie since Strange Brew. The two jokesters play their fictionalized selves, with Matt devising increasingly desperate plans to score their musical duo a gig at a Toronto rock club as Jay grudgingly goes along. When Matt invents a time machine, the fellas find themselves back in 2008 (when their show first streamed), and the trail of period clues leading to the moment when Matt realizes he’s not in 2025 anymore are perfect. As time travelers will do, Matt and Jay soon foul up the time line by interacting with their former selves and must undergo a series of hilarious convolutions to set things right. The Main was a-hootin’ when I saw this, with a guy behind me shouting “Oh no! OH NO!” in anticipation of one gag. (Though there was no reaction quite like the theater-wide groan when a certain music vlogger appeared on screen.) But the movie’s heart is its investment in Toronto as a place, evident as Matt and Jay interact with ordinary Torontonians and tourists and leading to climactic gag that involves the CN Tower, miles of electrical cord, and a police chase. You think studios will take the hint and start green-lighting more low-budget romps like this from funny weirdos? Nah, me either. 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
Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
Pillion
Who says BDSM can’t be romantic? In Harry Lighton’s directorial debut, Harry Melling is Colin, a meek little gay fella who sings in a barbershop quartet at the local with his dad while his dying mom tries to fix him up with someone nice before she passes. Enter the opposite of her hopes and dreams: an impossibly chiseled Alexander Skarsgård as a biker named Ray. Under Ray’s laconic tutelage, Colin dives happily into his new submissive leather ‘n’ chains lifestyle, and the first half of Pillion is both warmly affectionate and flat-out hilarious. It loses its way for a bit in the midsection until Colin starts quietly asserting himself, hoping to get to know the Ray behind his dom exterior. The result is a crowdpleaser that doesn’t untangle its kink. If only it had opened here on Valentine’s Day weekend like it did in so many other cities. A-
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
Send Help
Sam Raimi the schlock lover and gross-out king is back, and he hasn’t had this much fun since Drag Her to Hell—there are moments of eyeball-gouging here worth the price of admission alone. Rachel McAdams is nerdy office worker Linda, a spreadsheet wiz who’s been screwed over by her new boss, fratty nepo baby Bradley (Dylan O’Brien). En route to a Thailand business meeting, their plane crashes (an understatement—Raimi gleefully rips apart the aircraft and its occupants), with only Linda and Bradley surviving. Naturally, Linda, a Survivor fanatic, thrives in their new island home, while Bradley struggles. If that makes Send Help sound like a late entry in the eat-the-rich movie trend of a few years back, well, kinda, yes, but Raimi is less overwrought and, well, European about class conflict. McAdams is an underutilized comic actress who deserves more roles like this and O’Brien builds off his success in last year’s Twinless—if modern Hollywood wasn’t so inherently tedious he’d have Glen Powell’s career, though selfishly I’d rather have him making the movies he does. (It’s also the second movie in a row where he shows his butt.) Send Help is the best kind of horror comedy, where rather than fearing what awful thing might come next, you look forward to it. What you might dread instead is that the movie could stumble into opposites-attract territory, with Linda and Bradley learning a little something about each other and finding l-u-v. Rest easy. Raimi didn’t save up all his Dr. Strange money just to piss it away on a romcom. 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
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-
Sirât
Óliver Laxe’s existential desert thriller is certainly overwhelming, if not overstimulating, but also a little exhausting. A portly Spanish dad sets off into the North African desert with his son hoping to locate his adult daughter; there the searchers fall in with a crew of itinerant ravers and trail the dancers’ fitted-out trailers in a far less geographically appropriate minivan. As some sort of military action closes in on the travelers, they slowly learn that the small space of pleasure and community they’ve carved out for themselves will no longer serve as an escape from the wider world. Sergi López (a long way from his role as the fascist stepdad in Pan’s Labyrinth) is excellent as the father, and Laxe gets just the kind of naturalist performances from his non-professional actors as Sirât needs. The dance sequences are tremendous visually and sonically; the settings are a cinematographer’s fantasy, and Mauro Herce does them justice. Laxe concocts a few of the tensest moments in recent cinema—I gasped aloud more than once (though I’m admittedly a pretty jumpy guy)—and no one is safe. (Add this to the 2025 “you can’t protect your kids” canon.) But though he's clearly trying to multiply Friedkin times Antonioni, as the bodies piled up I felt emotionally toyed with. To paraphrase Stalin, one death is a tragedy; a half-dozen or so starts to feel like a melodrama. B
Solo Mio
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-
2026 Animated Oscar-Nominated Shorts
2026 Documentary Oscar Nominated Shorts
2026 Live Action Oscar-Nominated Shorts
