Hades is surely on ice as I now find myself in favor of a Christopher Nolan flick. (Though I do give him an itsy bit of credit for making Robert Downey, Jr. great again in the otherwise MAD-mag-blecch! Oppenheimer.) As the near-three-hour The Odyssey shows, the writer-director’s time-jumbling, subwoofer-detonating bombast melds well with Greek myth.

This is a very earthbound take on Homer’s episodic epic, which unfolds in an era of, per an opening title placard, “apparent magic.” (That’s So Nolan!) A (non-AI) prompt from a court storyteller — who resides at the Ithaca castle where a gaggle of boorish male suitors make macho merry while weaving, frequently weeping wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and defiant son Telemachus (Tom Holland) await the return of warmongering patriarch Odysseus (Matt Damon) — sets the fussy narrative mechanics in motion. This extended “song” of a Trojan horse, a cyclops, multiple sirens, and a manly man sl-o-o-owly working his way toward a regretful “are we the baddies?” epiphany is a tale told in out-of-order snippets, everything situated within the oft-unreliable memories of whoever happens to have hijacked the from-on-Mt.-Olympus-high hot mic.

It’s The Ten Commandments if it was Memento, and dizzying in a good way because means and method brilliantly cohere. Credit the unfortunately named Jennifer Lame’s editing for lending visual and thematic clarity to Nolan’s florid conceits, Richard King and his team for enthrallingly propulsive sound design that, coupled with Ludwig Göransson’s wall-to-wall score, wracks body and soul like the roiling waves of Poseidon, and a starry ensemble whose talent (hey-howdy, R-Patz!), or lack thereof (yo, yo, Zendaya!), matters little when cast in the towering relief of Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema’s IMAX-ed ostentation.

See it big and loud, though know it’s still fustian pretense conjured via faustian bargains — red meat for commentariats of multiple stripes (fuck right the hell off, Elon) and hardly a savior of anything (Hollywood; cinema itself) beyond some enduringly fungible bottom lines. Think-piece prompt for more interested parties than me: This is Nolan’s October 7th movie, one that comes down ever-so-slightly more on the side of “Free Palestine.” Go!

Still I had a rollicking good time, if mainly for Benny Safdie’s hilariously Bane-ified Agamemnon as well as the irreproachable gift of Samantha Morton (as witchy swine-lover Circe) at an unhinged peak.

Less of a benefaction is Michael Mann’s Manhunter: The Final Cut (1986/2026), a masterpiece in its original theatrical version (Chicago Reader critic Pat Graham’s ingeniously professed ambivalence — “simultaneously hypnotic and enervating, meditative and empty, like a white-noise background or a field of electronic snow on the tube” — captures exactly the qualities that so beguile me) and decidedly not that in this damaging retool. It’s somewhat similar to the wonky Director’s Cut released many years ago via Shout Factory, though now fully 4K-scanned, re-color-timed (though not, thankfully, to the extreme-teal modern lengths I feared), and irritatingly tinkered with some more.

Doing the Henry James New York Edition thing to his oeuvre is part and parcel of Mann’s obsessive process, so to be a fan is also necessarily to be a scholar. With some exception, his first instincts are better than his later ones and that’s certainly the case here: Playing the opening credits over the initial dialogue between criminal profiler Will Graham (William Petersen) and his come-back-for-just-one-more-case-I-swear! handler Jack Crawford (Dennis Farina) is sacrilege, denying us the languorously mood-setting pan down from the blue sky above. And adding the unnecessary scene at the end where Graham, in an attempt at psychological purge and purification, visits the family he saves from the psychotic Francis “The Tooth Fairy” Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan) spells out what was previously implied, not to mention denies us the evocative long shot of Graham and Crawford dockside as the sun rises.

The rest of the adds and subtracts are all unnecessary: A little more of Brian Cox’s unnerving Hannibal Lecktor as he dissects the term “layman.” Extra expository groundwork on serial killer motivations during an early brief-the-troops sequence. The iconic “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” climax is also edited more conventionally so that Dollarhyde’s bullet-ridden, blood-winged corpse pose, and the various avant-gardish jump cuts that get us to that point, lose their punch. And much like the revised opening, an awkward re-placement of Graham’s last line — “Some of ’em made it” — over the final ocean-side composition rushes us out of the movie instead of allowing, as the theatrical cut does, for comedown and contemplation. It’s the tiniest things, sometimes, that muck up the works.

SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT

“Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett/There are two kinds of men and only two/There’s the one staying put/In his proper place/And the one with his foot/In the other one’s face/Look at me, Mrs. Lovett/Look at you!”

That’s one Stephen — Sondheim — placing vengeful dictum on the operatic tongue of bloodthirsty barber Sweeney Todd. “No, we all deserve to die!” Todd howls immediately after, and it’s possible, given how intoxicatingly he rages, that his annihilative ethos comports with Sondheim’s own. Yet the rigidity of the character’s outlook is shown, by musical’s end, to be tragically blinding. Whatever his mortal beliefs, Sondheim, being the deus of this particular machina, does what any great artist must: step omnisciently back to consider the full view — the upside, the downside (there being two sides to every Schwartz) and more beyond.

A literal foot in the (audience’s) face opens another Steven’s — Spielberg’s — unblushingly earnest, philosophically dense extraterrestrial chase thriller Disclosure Day. We’re at a more than vaguely MAGA-coded wrestling show (shades of A.I.: Artificial Intelligence’s Flesh Fair), dropped into a rebellion-in-progress involving surveillance-corp whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) and the treasure trove of video evidence he’s stolen that proves the existence of little green men.

Let’s dispense with the gender binary. As the transparently Spielbergian avatar Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) later says of the film’s spindly, clickety-clack vocalizing other-worlders, “They present as animals…” — cardinals, deer, foxes, raccoons — which makes plain their anatomical and metaphorical fluidity. They’re uncannily CGI, in a way that had me wondering, while watching the trailers, if we might be in for some extra-unholy gloss on The Shack. Yet in context, the animals/E.T.’s are “off” in the way of the puppet robin from Blue Velvet, wizened benevolence and Mephistophelian menace inextricably mingled — not unlike, say, casting a premiere avant-gardist (David Lynch) as a second-to-none narrative-ist (John Ford) in a studio-backed recreation of a seminal moment from your coming-of-age.

Dizzying. And that’s how I suspect meeting God would go: So right that it’s not right and you know that but it’s okay but it isn’t really, is it? and on and on and back and forth and sideways, upside down, ad infinitum. And all this as long as you still have your human senses and sensibilities, which, as many would surely say nowadays, aren’t worth the flesh they’re imprinted on. (We all deserve to die.)

Quite a lot for an oft-endearingly goofy, David Koepp-penned genre piece, and there’s more where that came from. Disclosure Day is constructed as a cascading series of narrative and thematic rhymes — opposites constantly, expansively repelling and attracting. It begins in medias res and concludes on a note of evocative ambiguity. The cinematography by Janusz Kaminski initially has an apocalyptic sterility (as if his trademark lens flares and background blow-outs are razing existence Langoliers style) that becomes warmer, seemingly more enamored of the possible (not necessarily the hopeful) as the film goes on.

Koepp’s screenplay coupled with Spielberg’s direction allows for didactic discussions of belief and skepticism, suspicion and sympathy, alongside some brilliant show-don’t-tell setpieces. An early confrontation between the hobgoblinish villain Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and Daniel’s lapsed-Catholic girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson) revolves around an invasive procedure where one person “drops” into another, the only indicator being a shift in eye color, brown-orbed Noah fiendishly usurping Jane’s baby blues, then wielding her like his own private Manchurian Candidate.

That’s a far cry from the film’s central relationship between Daniel and Kansas City TV weathergirl Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) who share a long-buried childhood trauma on which Hugo, via a wildly immersive recreation of the event, intends to cast some cleansing light. Daniel’s mind is rigorously, antisocially scientific while Margaret’s is flightily, empathically emotional, which makes the parallels with Spielberg’s own parents so incandescently crystal clear you could build the Fortress of Solitude. But the line between the obvious and the obscure is often smudged in Spielberg (my prospective title for a book-length study: Radical Square), which means that Daniel and Margaret not only augment but also reflect and refract each other.

She heedlessly goes with the flow, frequently speaking in prophetic tones and unfamiliar tongues (even mathematical equations, more Daniel’s speed, prove rhapsodically verbal). While he, generally a whirling-dervish of paranoia, beatifically inches himself, in the duo’s first in-person interaction mid-film, toward a sublime moment of connection. “I know you,” he sighs in that emblematic way of an extra-sensorily cowed Spielberg protagonist, the ether of recognition lifting a long-held psychic weight.

A highlight of the director’s oeuvre comes soon after: Having narrowly escaped death by speeding locomotive (in a Proustian-madeleine-like sequence where Spielberg stages his own kinetic elder-version of a formative action setpiece from childhood favorite The Greatest Show on Earth), Daniel and Margaret drop into a train car stocked with pianos that are tied up and stood on edge. The instruments shake back-and-forth with the motion of the vehicle, loosing discordant sounds (surely usual composer John Williams had some input into the aural dissonance) while Margaret has a panic attack. Daniel works to comfort her, eventually placing both their hands on the exposed piano strings, which steadies the jangling music of the spheres and themselves along with it.

To what degree do we have control over universes sole and shared? The question lingers, as do most of the ones posited by Disclosure Day. That title promises concrete answers that, fitting for a blockbuster Hollywood movie of many esoteric contradictions and paradoxes, are not forthcoming. In an early scene, Jane openly wonders what a mass unleashing of knowledge would do to the world; a later discussion with her mentor, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), couches her struggle through the prism of faith — not in God, but in mankind.

Jane is one of the only characters who appears to have more than a smattering of free will (while still being somewhat puppet-mastered). Most everyone else is prey to the inscrutable whims of the superior intelligence that eventually reveals itself onscreen (not to mention the meta-dictates of a screenwriter and filmmaker who never do). As Margaret notes, and as Blunt expertly conveys in her career-highlight performance, there’s an exhilaration to this out-of-body-while-in-it experience, though there’s a fair share of suffering too (”I will not be anyone’s religion!” she screams at a woman acting a-bit-too-enthusiastically postulant).

The ending, of course, is written. Disclosure is inevitable, as are the Spielbergian swells of emotion that make eyes roll as much as well up. The climax posits a local TV news broadcast as ground zero for release of Daniel’s effective X-files — on one hand a plan easy to tar as shockingly naive (and as my friend and colleague Eric Henderson points out, very much of a piece with the profound mixed-bag that is The Post). Yet it simultaneously has the feel of a galactic grassroots effort — start small, so the global and galaxy-brained solidarity builds and sustains itself. I also don’t think it’s lost on Koepp and Spielberg that there’s something infectious about this slow-and-steady approach that is not burst-and-fade Internet viral. What are the best methods by which we become “sick” (and perhaps salubriously so, though also perhaps not) with the capital-T Truth?

In this case it’s via a close encounter of the third kind, with a being who suggests the world-weary, seemingly benign offspring of the Ark of the Covenant and Doctor Who’s Davros. (And don’t think I didn’t also flash on the gentle E.T. safeguarding mankind’s origins in Brian De Palma’s unfairly maligned Mission to Mars.) A game of Lost in Translation-esque telephone ensues; basically the word of God purred softly and imperceptibly into the ears of the two humans long-prepared to receive it. Now, the world!

For an artist often knocked for his exeunts, Spielberg here comes up with a mic-drop doozy: A camera-within-a-camera shot that filters a last bit of Blunt talk through an aesthetic hall of mirrors, leaving characters and viewers alike balanced on a breathless ellipsis, wondering what, if anything, comes next.

What Markiplier begat with Iron Lung let no meme-addled YouTuber-to-Movie-Mogul with a vaguely trust-fundy moniker tear asunder. Atop the box office sit features by Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, names that bring to mind halcyon annus 2005 when one Hunter Richards (a truly gastric-distress-inducing appellation) unleashed the atrocious relationship drama London, from which I still quote a frightfully-bewigged Jason Statham’s line “…sweating like a FUCKING rapist!” more often than is surely salutary.

The 20-years-young Parsons a.k.a. Pixels was born that very year, so I’m delighted that he missed out on Richards’s fittingly forgotten opus and instead built a mind-palace reference library that includes, per a Letterboxd BTS interview, two Portal games, Mr. Robot, One-Hour Photo, Paranoia Agent, and (the fuck?!?) Punishment Park. Are there echoes of the adamantly uncompromising Peter Watkins in the A24-allied Backrooms? Mayhaps if you feel like stretching into Slender Man. And now I’m imagining a lost hour or three of La Commune (Paris, 1871) taking place in the topsy-turvy liminal spaces that Parsons has manifested into a lucrative trademark… and possible gilded cage. (TBD on future hell wrought by IP.)

For now, we get a fully engaged Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve flirting with scare-flick trauma tropes in a movie that has numerous built-in byways allowing for easy escapes back to ambiguity and abstruseness. The deflating threats that are exposition and clarity (here personified by Mark Duplass’s company-man amalgam of Simon Oakland in Psycho and Michael York in Austin Powers) are fortunately always an unconscious egress away from enigma and conundrum.

Sure, Ejiofor’s down-and-out strip-mall furniture store owner drinks too much and has anger issues, while Reinsve’s phlegmatic therapist wraps her own fears, anxieties, and depressions in pop-therapeutic clichés that have helped land her on bestseller lists while keeping Bodhidharma entirely at bay. But they are, much like their terrifyingly Picassoed-cum-Lynchy counterparts in the labyrinthine, lemon-tinged, fluorescent-hummy backrooms, already copies of copies. The ’80s-to-’90s-suggestive real world of the film is a garbled threshold (clock that uncannily unsettling blue sky above) to an even more distorted netherworld that can be void, Valhalla or both depending on how you exist in it.

Patience (of a Wonder Showzen kind) is required. But rest assured there will be monsters that — in a memorable scene that reworks the freak-funhouse dinner climax of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre through the nightmarish prism of a corporate stockholders summit — provide literal sustenance for the non compos menti among us. Backrooms itself is a hearty feast of sentient dust bunnies collated within and self-assuredly loosed from Parsons’s savantish psyche; hilarious that Osgood Perkins was among his “mentors” when student has so bullishly shown-up sensei.

Barker’s Obsession is an unrepentant troll — essentially Ari Aster’s Oleanna with the battle of the sexes sympathetically slanted, as it was in Mamet’s troglodytic conversation piece, toward an odious beta misogynist, here nicknamed, haw haw, Bear (Michael Johnston). The bitches-be-crazy! role is tenanted by Nikki (Inde Navarrette, going the full silk purse-sow’s ear route much like Mamet’s muse/straw-gal Debra Eisenstadt). She’s an initially cool-girl object of affection who seems more than willing to be on Bear’s arm if he could just get over his gosh-damned Gen-Z social anxiety. Instead, Bear requires hellishly divine intervention in the form of a make-one-wish trinket that, once used, turns Nikki into an oft-screeching banshee who loves to hide in shadows and sidle freakily backwards and sideways like a Linda Blair possessed.

The whole production is unwaveringly unpleasant and monotonous, cursed by that muddy digi-sheen that makes so many modern movies look like fingerprint-smudged ink blots, and with every gory boo! telegraphed fifty beats out. Would that some cogent ethos could be discerned in the Zoomer gloom-’n’-doom. Barker’s aims seem closer, apropos, to a carnival showman hawking his sub-par, second-hand goods to a gullible viewership more than willing to pony up for some fudged dread.

Early days, still, but I suspect I won’t see a better movie this year than Patrick Wang’s A. Rimbaud. Easy to pinpoint precedents (Syberberg, Resnais, Rivette, Straub-Huillet), as well as to presuppose terms like “unconventional” and “overlong” being bandied about by bemused/baffled/bored commentators. I’ll go for my own cliché: It’s its own thing, stem to stern, and gloriously so — a summative work by a genuine artist that rewired my every sense and synapse.

A single actor — the Australian Blake Draper, whose only prior feature is the Disney streaming movie Prom Pact (2023) — is onscreen for the entirety of the 175-minute runtime. He portrays the French poet Arthur Rimbaud from his virtuosically unhinged teen years as the enfant terrible of the Gallic literary scene through to his more rigorous and “reputable” middle-aged exploits as a colonial merchant in Abyssinia. It’s a performance that at first blush feels vaguely raw and ragged (is the callowness on display an amateurish limitation or a (sub)conscious manifestation?) and by the end so precise in its every choice and effect that the full scope of Wang and Draper’s collaborative effort becomes awe-strikingly evident.

Death came for Rimbaud at 37, from bone cancer, and his verse, such as The Drunken Boat and A Season in Hell, ultimately achieved posthumous immortality. Yet much of Rimbaud’s legend rests on more salacious factoids, particularly his stormy relationship with the decade-older poet and writer Paul Verlaine, with whom he lived and traveled for several years before finding himself on the wrong end of a pistol. Theirs was a bad-gay-relationship par excellence, one dramatized (in the very, very worst of ways) in the 1995 feature Total Eclipse, directed by Agnieszka Holland and featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine.

Verlaine is a crucial, though smaller part of Wang’s feature, and is represented, like most of the supporting characters, by an offscreen musical instrument reportedly played live on set. (Composer Dan Schlosberg oversaw this contrapuntal, often alien-feeling melodic “dialogue” and the musicians are credited onscreen as “Cast.”) Rimbaud himself speaks in a heady English that is at first dizzyingly rhapsodic and then, in later scenes, possessed of a kind of titan-of-industry-sculpted metric, his post-balladry verbiage simultaneously treading the cultivated and the corporatized.

It isn’t quite right to say the character denies his fluttery, flowery youth so much as he keeps it stewingly in check, something evident in the keenly employed prosthetics that emphasize the pushing-40 wordsmith’s loss of looks (that enduring fear of many an elder-gay). Juvenile prettiness still haunts Rimbaud’s features: To my eyes, he seems to morph over the course of the film from a cousin of the stunningly gorgeous Andy Gillet of Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Celadon into a desert-dapper, walking-dead ringer, mustache and all, for Golden Age Hollywood stalwart Ronald Colman. He’s his own graveyard, as Clive Barker might say, squatting amongst the tomb of the person he was.

Wang’s film is an epic physical and psychological journey captured by cinematographer Frank Barrera entirely in a black-box theatrical setting. Rimbaud is first seen before a rocky outcropping that feels like it’s floating in some liminal mind palace, and among the movie’s many amazements is how it reinvents itself visually scene by scene. An early episode in which the young Rimbaud is assaulted during a long night in jail is envisaged via a hulking shadow, a few ominous shakes of the camera, and Draper’s excruciatingly lingered-upon shell shock. Another aesthetic tour-de-force comes as Rimbaud slowly works his way down a long table peppered with pages of his poetry, reading snippets in varying tones (chest-thumping confidence; huffy reticence) while appearing to corporeally transform like an animate embodiment of one of those monkey-to-man diagrams you might find hanging in a school science classroom. When the scene finally cuts to a long shot of Rimbaud, standing at table’s end beneath a soaringly suggestive wooden ceiling frame, this speculative instant from a maestro’s inner life attains a pious sublimity akin to one of Roberto Rossellini’s late-career profiles of Louis XIV, Pascal and the Medici.

Ah, the biopic! Cursed form of cinematic address (not redress) currently enjoying a brain-voided, blood-moneyed resurgence thanks to the shamefully embraced Michael. A more bitter moviegoer might lament the fact that Wang’s film — which he is self-distributing, beginning with ongoing screenings at the Roxy in downtown Manhattan — will not have a fraction of the exposure of that smoothly criminal enterprise. And that not a single festival has yet seen fit to program A. Rimbaud, whatever the perceived challenges to a prospective audience, is its own malefaction worth some hearty reflection by gatekeepers of all stripes and stations.

Yet I think there’s something in the DNA of Wang’s movie that eschews such resentments, that indeed sees the art life as something both steadfastly complex and simply committed to. A vocation practiced with zeal and impossible to turn one’s back on, as implied by an especially moving moment in the film’s climax when the young Rimbaud, conjured as a kind of deathbed specter, elegiacally declaims with the voice of his older self just before confronting the thing all must face: A line break in the collective poem still being written.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a prime example of “Let Them Eat Cake (And Have It Too)” cinema, a poisonous confection that pleasantly passes tastebuds and time, damn all the moral and ethical gallstones to follow! The film is well aware of its Whitman-ian multitudes given the many instances in which bubbly heroine Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) blithely notes how the high-fashionista milieu she fatefully finds herself drawn back into is “everything that’s wrong with the world.” But what a three-ring circus it is and shall enduringly remain — particularly from a seasoned insider’s POV.

Quite the change from the hard-hitting-journalism path Andy’s been hewing for herself since she exeunted, stage left, from Beelzebubian boss Miranda Priestly’s (Meryl Streep) vehicle twenty years prior. But after one quick newspaper restructuring (the entire staff fired by text while attending their own awards ceremony), she’s back at Runway, the more-than-vaguely Vogue-ish magazine that’s also undergoing its own interpersonal and corporate upheavals.

Plot machinations are paramount, but the narrative skydancing is hardly worth a recap. Rest assured, it all works out in the end, minus a lightly bittersweet implication that nothing, not even the vaunted September Issue, truly lasts forever. The two Prada flicks are best for their onscreen clashes of personality, the myriad ways in which Miranda and ladder-climber Emily (Emily Blunt) lob invective like toxic blowdarts while Andy and Runway right-hand Nigel (Stanley Tucci) deflect them with either fizzy charm or a Wildean bon mot.

In truth, the barbs this time are tempered by a not-always-inapt straining for character complexity. The memorable scene in Prada Une where Miranda breaks down in front of Andy about her divorce seems Prada Deux’s thematic lodestar. Even the beastliest character here has human motivations and longings, something Miranda gets to torturously allegorize when noting the Son of God’s lack of a halo in Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, that eras-transcending triumph playing backdrop, within a decisively of-its-moment non-masterpiece, to an invite-only soiree lorded over by Justin Theroux’s Bezos-ian tech bro Benji Barnes.

Among other pop-up divinities are folks with names like Gaga and Donatella, each gamely playing butts-of-the-joke for 30 seconds to a minute. And Streep has of course long ago assumed an impossible-to-shed celestial mantle, even if her work in Prada 2 is an apex atop an anthill. Personally, I was happiest to see Tracie Thoms, as Andy’s gallerist confidante, get genuinely giddy at the gifting of what I believe was a Dolce and Gabbana purse, character and performer seeming for one near-imperceptibly blissful moment to blur. I’m one of those classless cretins who will probably always go for Levis, and rarely higher than Zara (though a very hearty thumbs up to Thursday Boot Company — try ’em if you haven’t). It’s true what Andy recurrently says about fashion being a major vexation of this mortal Kombat! (i mean, coil). But stans and haterz both take comfort! To our moldering birthday suits we will all soon enough return.

There are probably too many cooks in the kitchen re: Hokum, Irish horror helmer Damian McCarthy’s latest lovingly crafted paranormal tchotchke. Caveat and Oddity each had the dual feature and bug of making little sense narratively, which allowed spoooooooooooooky ambience (at which McCarthy excels) to take precedence. It’s easy to forget how nice it can be when a ghost story is just a ghost story and not some portentous vehicle to explore “trauma” and the like.

Well, Hokum’s Ohm Bauman (Adam Scott) has lotsa trauma, stemming from an accidental killing in his past. But since ‌he’s a fish-out-of-water American staying in a haunted Ireland hotel, his anguish is unmoored. So the gloomy pretensions that in another context might undermine the frights are given a pointed and potent meta-textuality, despite the lingering sense that McCarthy — working with a bigger name for the first time — may have had certain emotional and psychological script beats ordained by keepers of the coin.

Regardless, McCarthy adeptly plays the hand dealt, and shows it by opening Hokum with a seemingly incongruous scene involving a desert-waylaid conquistador and his young charge. This proves to be a fiction within the fiction, one that also makes itself known outside its seemingly prescribed narrative borders. The hall-of-infinite-mirrors effect extends to the various specters and sorceresses who pop into and out of Ohm’s orbit, sometimes as direct threats, other times as ancillary ones.

Take the protagonist’s mantra-like moniker at face value: Everything here (in this world and in all worlds beyond) is ephemeral — arising, passing, and given, at times, too much of a concrete explanation when the wonky nebulousness of McCarthy’s prior two features might be preferable. Still, the leporine apparition that jump-scares Ohm a time or two will be haunting my dreams like no subsidiary antagonist since The X-Files’s Mister Chuckle Teeth.

I’d only ever seen a low-quality file of Maurice Pialat’s 1971 miniseries La maison des bois (The House in the Woods). So it was revelatory witnessing, in the new 4K restore, the Episode One-commencing image of a WWI soldier ambling his way home while on leave from the front. Formerly blotchy pixels are now rendered (paradoxically digitally) as 16mm film grain, gifting the scene the tenor of an in-motion pointillist painting, though that may be a more technical byproduct of a magnum opus that has plenty of other artistic schools in its DNA.

Maurice Ravel’s “Trois beaux oiseaux du Paradis” — one of his patriotic trio of compositions (the “Trois Chansons”) written after the outbreak of the Great War — acts as the plaintive opening and closing theme of most of the seven installments. Though Pialat’s approach is its own strange beast. A term like “unsentimental” gets thrown around a lot when describing his work. I might define it more as a sober surreality through which verisimilitude of emotion and action are rendered with an unsettling, and oft-extraordinary, uncanniness.

Given the longer runtime, Pialat is freer to set the stage, Episode One being all milieu (very Proust in some of its trappings, such as the imposing Marquis (Fernand Gravey) who may or may not have orchestrated his wife’s accidental death). And then only in the second part revealing the crux of a narrative: Three young boys, Hervé (Hervé Lévy), Michel (Michel Terrazon) and Bébert (Albert Martinez), placed in the care of gamekeeper Albert Picard (Pierre Doris) and his wife Jeanne (Jacqueline Dufranne) for the indeterminate length of the war.

If Seurat, Renoir, Pialat’s beloved Van Gogh and the like are alternating touchstones for the series’s general look, the compositions of cinematographer Roger Duculot frequently have the comic-strip-historical feel of Tintin’s Hergé. La maison des bois does prove to be a children’s story to some degree. Hervé (his father at the front, and the only one of the three boys whose mother has abandoned him) is the perspectival center, while the denizens of the rural Northern French village that is the primary setting are often depicted, via wardrobe and demeanor, in a lightly caricatured register, as if they were projections from an agog pre-adolescent id that is numbed and, finally, nullified by series’s end.

Kids see adults as mythic distortions and, in one of my favorite asides — when Pialat himself, playing the town’s stern schoolteacher, cracks up at the three boys in a way that appears inarguably fourth-wall-breaking — vice-versa. Yet when the hard facts of these particular lives (as well as this fleeting, oddly idyllic moment in time) come to a head, the fairy tale turns poisonous.

La guerre itself tends to be kept at the margins, via sound design (the hum of a warplane; the not-so-distant din of gunshots and explosions) or in half-glimpsed instants of bloody aftermath, such as when a shellshocked serviceman receives a transfusion outside the Marquis’s chateau. A slow push-in on a soldier guarding the covered corpse of an enemy aerial combatant is affecting both despite and because the cadaver (probably due to a performer’s restlessness) occasionally adjusts itself under the tarp. Yet scenes such as this and the one in which Hervé runs away from a wintry postwar Paris to the Picards’ verdant household in what seems like springtime are continuity errors that still manage to deepen the poetry of the piece.

History is being playacted in La maison des bois to the point that Hervé lives through his farewell from the Picard household twice, the first organically (in the penultimate episode) thanks to the Armistice, the second artificially (in the finale) as a kind of self-contrived passion play, one willed into being by someone entrenched in their formative experiences. There is no sense that anything will come beyond this point, which undercuts any reading of the series as a standard coming-of-age tale. A very Pialat-ian revelation: Hervé is now, like so many, stuck in the nebulous whorl of days gone by.

More Ravel: His Boléro, which belongs to Femme Fatale, De Palma’s ode to l’amours both cinephilic and Sapphic, but is still well-utilized as aural entry and egress in the Japanese video game adaptation Exit 8. The film initially adopts the eerie walking simulator’s first-person mechanics, following a soon-to-be Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) into the Escher-like purgatory of a subway tunnel that endlessly loops back on itself. There are ways to progress, mainly by clocking anomalies such as misspellings in signage or the position of the briefcase-carrying Walking Man (Yamato Kochi) whose dead-eyed, worker-bee expression is as blood-curdling as any musical-stinger-slathered jump scare.

Even as the movie becomes more standardly cinematic — particularly in the rather rote motivations it gives its central character (expanding the “lore,” so the youths would say, by leaning into clichéd anxieties about impending parenthood) — director Genki Kawamura and d.p. Keisuke Imamura maintain a potent, Shining-level sense of unease throughout. I admittedly longed for an appearance by the game’s sprinting White-Tile monster, but made well-do enough with the Picasso-like monstrosities that creep their way from the Lost Man’s AI-slop-overrun social media feed into his labyrinthine arena of anguish.

Been looking to the telly lately for sustenance — though that’s really been a lifelong pursuit, since I’ve never subscribed to the notion that the small screen was the bloodsucking parasite tainting the precious bodily fluids of the big one. Longer essay, that. If I even felt like arguing the point. I love the theatrical space, but don’t romanticize it. And I agree with what I recall is an Amy Taubin line about film critical/cinematic/motion-picture interests being essentially “lens-based.” We’re each of us responsible for our own attention. Beyond that, you do you. Reject hive-mind consensus. Chart your own path. And be open, intelligent, informed, and passionate.

One of my planned-for projects this year is a deeper dive into the work of Italian director Marco Bellocchio whose The Traitor (2019) mightily impressed me upon first encounter and through several subsequent views. You know it to your bones when you’re in the presence of someone who has moviemaking in their molecules, though the common estimation of Bellocchio seems undervaluing, like there’s his raucous, revelatory debut Fists in the Pocket (1965)…and everything else.

He is, perhaps, not as aesthetically attention-grabby as some of his more esteemed countrymen. And yet his work pulses with what I’d define as an inner operatic life. The day-to-day mundanities of existence are treated as a kind of full-bore performance, and the individual concerns of his characters are showcased as a fervent series of arias, duets and choruses. Bellocchio’s six-episode drama Portobello shares some resonances with The Traitor, seemingly even making use of the same courtroom set where the prior film invigoratingly recreated the 1980s maxi-trials of the Sicilian Mafia.

The focus here is the beloved real-life television variety show host Enzo Tortora (Fabrizio Gifuni) who was vindictively, and wrongly, identified by members of the Camorra as being one of their top lieutenants. Despite the more-than-apparent flimsiness of the evidence, a gauntlet of incarceration, media scrutiny, injustice and ill health followed. Tortora’s homegrown celebrity is part of the problem, since any acknowledgment of his innocence will likely call the prosecution’s wide-ranging case against the Camorra into question. Better an innocent man suffer so “justice” is served.

The series is equal parts carnival and Kafka, though Bellocchio’s technique is best illustrated by a scene in which a literal parade of Enzo’s supporters gathers below his prison window at nighttime to offer support. It’s a phantasmagoria: The vaguely Anita Ekberg-ish mistress of ceremonies rides an elephant; the music is a direct steal from Nino Rota’s score for 8-1/2. Yet the surreality, contra Fellini, feels grounded, gritty, springing fully from the earth as opposed to a grandiose galaxy brain.

That’s not in any way a criticism of maestro Federico, merely an illustration of two differing cinematic methodologies. Bellocchio sees the circus of life through a scrim of realism, in specific details such as, say, the thick-rimmed nerd-glasses worn by Tortora’s initial accuser Giovanni Pandico (Lino Musella) whose ingrained sociopathy is frightening precisely because of such comic-book-esque adornments, as well as the remorseless, rat-like way in which he skulks through the frame. All of Portobello’s characters are torturously tethered to a world of vast imperfections, which helps make their extensive, extended, ever-crescendoing rages and laments soar and stab to the soul.

Most everyone’s favorite real-time medical soap The Pitt is wrapping up a stellar second season (I’ve seen all fifteen installments) that features everything from a medicinally engorged cock to hissable masked ICE agents. I’m certainly here for weekly comfort check-ins with favorites like Taylor Dearden’s Mel King and Gerran Howell’s Dennis Whitaker, though it’s the no-pore-left-behind crispness of Johanna Coelho’s digital photography that for me provides the major emotional through-line, a most perfect marriage of mode-of-capture and milieu. Of the revolving door guest stars, I Leo-DiCaprio-meme-pointed at Law and Order and The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer star Dann Florek, and shed more than a few lachryms at both X-Files alum Jeff Kober (playing a silver-haired and sharp-tongued Zen artiste of motorcycle maintenance) and Breaking Bad standout Charles Baker, popping up throughout the season like Peanuts’s Pigpen as a maggot-infested unhoused given a communal care makeover of a kind only possible at an underfunded metropolitan ER.

An excruciatingly detailed rape kit subplot provides yet another striking spotlight for Katherine LaNasa’s charge nurse Dana Evans. And as ever-beleaguered overseer Dr. Robby, Noah Wyle expertly charts every step of his character’s journey from smug-’n’-scoldy midlife-crisis-er to lovable tear-stained wretch literally embracing the child within. The grin-inducing cherry atop: A post-credits season finale karaoke scene featuring an aggrieved-’90s perennial on which I too have chirruped myself hoarse.

Segue back to the Theatuh for Project Hail Mary in IMAX 70mm. It runs two hours and thirty-something minutes. Feels like it lasts forty-six years. And among the many things I didn’t need in my life was a stealth sequel to Half Nelson…in space. Hawt-’n’-bright schoolteacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling, never a favorite outside of his ego-castrating, dilettante-accentuating appearance in Malick’s Song to Song) is a man with concepts of a plan about how to save a rapidly chilling Earth and its bipedal inhabitants from destruction. A journey to the outer reaches of the galaxy and an adorable rock alien (monikered, heh heh, Rocky) figure heavily, as does Sandra Hüller, phoning in her trademark Teutonic sternness in piecemeal flashbacks that show how this last-ditch mission beyond Mars came to be.

It’s compelling enough at first, with some impressive Greig Fraser photography that goes for the jaggedly refractive look of Boorman’s Zardoz minus the proto-Epstein perversity. But heavens to murgatroyd is this thing ever “written” by a school of J.J. Abrams alum (Drew Goddard, adapting a novel by Andy Weir) — every even lightly upsetting punch pulled and each organic narrative endpoint retconned in that desperate, despondent “Somehow, Palpatine returned” sorta way that becomes the eunuch-infested upper echelon of modern Hollywood scribes.

My buddy Nick Newman asked me to share some thoughts on, and memories of working with, the late Tom Noonan — a great artist and mentor who I was very lucky to know. I’ve embedded the podcast below and you can also listen to it at Nick’s publication, The Film Stage.

End times (for the retchingly named Award Season) approach. Which means it’s my preferred moment, several months into the new year, to take stock of the annus prior. Consensus is an often voguish malady. So not for me the über-fêted One Battle After Another, Sinners or Marty Supreme — white elephants all, and Hamnet the treacle-infused excreta festering in their trampled wake.

These mo-pics’s issues are legion. If you ever see me in the wild, feel free to ask why. I’ll probably vent about how PTA has made a failed Jonathan Demme movie (going so far as to steal one of his greatest needle drops) and I wish more people would clock that. Or, that Coogler’s sluggard (not to mention visually, aurally and thematically inept) From Dusk Till Dawn riff has my teeth in perpetual gnash over the botch he’s sure to make of The X-Files. For the other two I’ll just tender catty side-eye and a Zen-neutral “no comment,” life being Lilliputian and all.

Fran Lebowitz’s sardonic dictum — “Do something new!” — remains evergreen. All of my honorable mentions, as well as my Top Ten titles (as always…a ten, not the ten) gave me that longed-for sense of originality — the novel, the imaginative, the (dear lord in heaven) fresh — in what felt like glances, glints, and gleams. Dod Mantle’s fortifyingly grotty widescreen photography in 28 Years Later, for one, or the arid escalations and combustible horrors of Laxe’s Sirāt (a decided “will never watch again” and I mean that as accolade). Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest struck me as an endlessly (re)inventive remake in the vein of Carpenter’s The Thing or Demme’s The Truth About Charlie — easy movies to unthinkingly hate, but gratifying ones to grapple and vibe with for all the aesthetic curveballs thrown and expected tropes upended.

Lucy Liu’s climactic mirror-scream in Presence (one of Soderbergh’s strongest recent efforts) haunts me still, as does Stellan Skarsgård’s magnanimously roguish filmmaker patriarch in Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, a Nordic B-side to Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory. The father-daughter relationship in The Phoenician Scheme hit emotionally rich veins that I hadn’t felt in a while from Wes Anderson, and watching cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, standing in for customary collaborator Robert Yeoman, carve his own distinct visual paths through W.A.’s diag-/dio-rammatic world was no less fulfilling. I finally got Austin Butler in Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing — one of our most humorless and scornfully straight auteurs doing a full-bore genre piece, photographing his often bare-chested and beaten and bloodied leading man like slouchy eye candy, fetchingly attractive to all and sundry.

Neo Sora’s Happyend provocatively portrayed a tech-saturated, surveillance-heavy post-apocalypse with the tenderest of hearts, its on-the-cusp-of-adulthood characters raging against the machine purely by going through the coming-of-age (e)motions. And in other years, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident might have been an assured Top Ten highlight, particularly for its unsettling opening in which the film’s ostensible villain steps outside a clearly studio-shot vehicle into what seems an actual nighttime exterior. In this moment, however, the film feels a too-self-conscious step below Panahi’s previous effort, No Bears — that one a real slept-on apogee of the persecuted Iranian artist’s unflaggingly subversive oeuvre.

I wouldn’t use the expected “M-”word for any of my ten favorites outside the top two, possibly top three. Though if “mess” is a more apt descriptor for most of my choices, it’s in the Sophia Petrillo-kidding sense of “mess’a somethin’.” That’s how I like my movies — messas’a somethin’.

I hear all the complaints about the digi-/CG mein of Del Toro’s Frankenstein and I counter with the dually affecting co-lead performances of Oscar Isaac (channeling, as my better half noted, John Barrymore at his cockiest) and Jacob Elordi (his own Brobdingnagian pouting given the proper Gothic context — Ms. Emerald Fennell, grave scarcity of talent notwithstanding, should have taken notes). Jarmusch’s familial triptych Father Mother Sister Brother begins in his usual hipster hermetic register and, through blissful repetition, cuts to a profound emotional quick. I cannot fathom those critiques that say the third, less starry vignette is weakest when it’s the poignant acme of the piece. After the bitterly nihilistic (and I think very funny) The Dead Don’t Die, this is Jarmusch gently self-counterpointing.

The emphatically “political” movies that resonated with me — Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent and Ari Aster’s Eddington — both go for sprawl, though Filho emphasizes the human warmth and solidarity that endures in fascist hellscapes where Aster sees little beyond inescapable, society-razing breakdown (“Good or bad, Handsome or ugly, MAGA or Antifa, They are all equal now.”) Agree/Disagree, Hope/Despair — beside-the-point binaries. I appreciated both films for their oft-volatile shifts in tone, as well as the specificity of their respective recent-past settings, each made vibrantly present.

Derek Cianfrance’s Roofman filled the Demme void in my heart, its true-life tale of a genial grifter holing up in a Toys “R” Us for a clandestinely extended stay suffused with genuine compassion for all onscreen, its anarchically anti-capitalist leanings achieved via steadfast goodwill and decency. And Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love thrilled me with its jagged-edge vision of a woman unfurling in every way imaginable. Great as Jennifer Lawrence is in the central role, it’s mom-in-law Sissy Spacek (her gun-toting sleepwalk scene maybe my favorite throwaway moment of the year) who makes the reflective and refractive shards of Ramsay’s vision cohere.

Among their innumerable delights, Ben Leonberg’s petrifying canine-POV horror flick Good Boy and Kelly Reichardt’s incisively idle parable The Mastermind both contain complementary graphic matches that I think get at their respective essences. Specter-besieged furball Indy runs to the window to watch his devoted master head out during daytime. Smash-cut to the pup in the same position many hours later — darkness descended, his trans-species longing quite Kuleshovianly evident. Elsewhere, Josh O’Connor’s Keystone Kop-level art thief (traveling on a nighttime bus to Nowhere-in-Particular, America), spies a woman lovingly conversing with her Navy-uniformed husband and their infant in the seat opposite. Our protag slips off to sleep. Smash-cut to sunrise. Glancing over, he sees the man gone, mother and child frozen in a thousand-yard-stare pieta.

No one escapes history’s times and tides, and I do wonder what it says that my two favorites of 2025 are films I saw in 2024. Different era and all, though I am generally a “same shit, different day” sort, if primarily in the sense of mantra — my profane way of tending those pious foundations that help me to exist in the proverbial Now’s ever-evolving ebbs and flows. Misericordia and The Shrouds (both yes-I’m-gonna-call-them Masterpieces by Alain Guiraudie and David Cronenberg) are “Now” movies that endlessly slip-’n’-slide through interpretive grasp, contorting their way (always sexually, sometimes bone-breakingly) toward transcendence. Guiraudie’s polyamorously perverse pastoral and Cronenberg’s grief-stricken spousal lamentation (the former taking the illusory shape of a black-comic murder mystery, the latter the deceptive contours of a paranoiacally-chilled tech thriller) are transgressive creations honed with uncannily crystalline precision. Two late-career efforts, from virtuosos who have fully lived and practiced the art life, that have the feel of summative statements — particularly in regards to how we might get unstuck, even if only for an evanescent instant, from the mortal coil morass.—Keith Uhlich

1. The Shrouds

2. Misericordia

3. The Mastermind

4. Good Boy

5. Die My Love

6. Roofman

7. Eddington

8. The Secret Agent

9. Father Mother Sister Brother

10. Frankenstein

Honorables: It Was Just an Accident, Happyend, Sentimental Value, The Phoenician Scheme, Presence, Highest 2 Lowest, Caught Stealing, Sirāt, 28 Years Later

I skipped out on Screams 5 and 6, so my last memory of Ghostface and his meta-merry band of body bag prototypes was Courtney Cox’s Gale Weathers saying “Clear…” just before Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott leans in with shock paddles and permanently dispatches her latest knife-wielding nemesis (Emma Roberts! Right! They do blur together). As death-by-defibrillator goes, it’s no patch on The X-Files’ “Leonard Betts” (and let’s be real, The X-Files does everything better).

Still, Scream 7 felt like slipping into a warm, blood-sopped blanket, in no small part, I’m sure, because series creator Kevin Williamson is back in the (co-)screenwriters seat as well as occupying the director’s chair he forswore after the Mrs. Taylor Hackford-starring masterpiece that is Teaching [née Killing] Mrs. Tingle (1999). As evil gays go, I’ll take Williamson’s smug self-awareness, decidedly third-rate, over anything Ryan Murphy is serving (the bar, yes, admittedly far below Gehenna).

The eternally beleaguered now-Mrs.-Prescott-Evans returns with husband (Joel McHale) and daughter (Isabel May) in tow and one-or-maybe-more Ghostfaces in pursuit. Thirty years since Scream The First and Campbell is still treating the proceedings (as the second installment made literal) like Greek tragedy. Bless her, she’s wonderful, turning Williamson’s irksomely above-it-all dialogue into resonantly world-wearied wisdom while the rest of the cast — as I recall a teen character on, whaddya know, Ryan Murphy’s inaugural television series Popular once seething — “goes all Dawson’s Creek.“

Write the little that you know and steal heartily from fellow non-master Wes Craven, whose professorial adequacy in the initial Scream quartet is charmingly channeled here, most effectively in a garage setpiece where fluttery see-through dropcloths provide ample funhouse-scare ambience. Prior Scream alums pop up (a Tarantino bête noire among them), while A.I. is about as equal an antagonist (if half-assedly so) as old Ghosty. Time being the great equalizer, I was most moved by the appearance of ’90s-cinema stalwart Ethan Embry née Randall, the years evident, yet enthusiasm undimmed.

The knives are out lately, cutting deep, rending flesh, muscle, bone. But we can survive and endure. Seeing, the day after the screening, Scream 7’s parent company Paramount do the hostile takeover hack-’n’-slash on Netflix (and let’s be clear that the dead-eyed meat puppet Ellisons vs. the snake-oily bridge troll Sarandos is a ne plus ultra “Let them fight…” skydance, a battle sure to continue even beyond this particular mile-/millstone) stoked ponderings a’plenty, all of them eventually delivering me back to a favored Zen parable, reprinted here in full:

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.”

The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”

The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.”

The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”

A novel by the Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty (who many years back penned the teleplay for Alan Clarke’s harrowing Elephant) provides the basis for the muted Lesley Manville-Ciarán Hinds two-hander Midwinter Break. The Troubles are the unspoken undercurrent in the relationship between long-time-Irish-marrieds Stella and Gerry, who trade the gray skies of their expat Scottish home for an off-season week in no-less-gloomy Amsterdam. Stella has ulterior motives for the journey, related to a violent incident from her past and the devout religious beliefs that resulted. Gerry, by contrast, is a drink-himself-into-a-functioning-stupor skeptic — to his mind, there is only hardscrabble life and nothing more.

They’re like Mulder and Scully (because I always bring it back to X-Files) in lightly-bickering retirement, disaffected people who feel as if they’ve squandered their potential and have little to show beyond a comfortably-uncomfortable way of life. The type of roles, in other words, that Manville and Hinds could play blindfolded and which one wishes a more tough-minded filmmaker in the vein of a Clarke (RIP) or a Leigh or a Ramsay could have shaped into something truly devastating. As is, feature-debuting theater director Polly Findlay keeps things gentle and dutiful, with even the should-be-revelatory scenes (Manville’s teary to-a-stranger confessional, particularly) curdled by senescent sentiment.

There’s little mawk in Indian director Vishal Bhardwaj’s O’Romeo, but, as befits its Bollywood pedigree, plenty of everything else. The title suggests this is another in the series of his loose Shakespeare adaptations — Maqbool (2003), Omkara (2006) and Haider (2014) — though the official source is a chapter from Hussain Zaidi and Jane Borges’s non-fiction crime novel The Mafia Queens of Mumbai (2011).

Art, in this case, is surely more fanciful and ebullient than life given that vengeful heroine Afsha (Triptii Dimri) and her slow-burn beloved Ustara (Shahid Kapoor) might be in a splashy musical number one moment and an acrobatic John Woo-like shootout the next. Though my personal favorite is a slo-mo assassination carried out during a Ganesha-honoring procession in which the characters are saturated with shimmering crimson powder while the soundtrack goes all wah-wah-wailing! Morricone.

The most obvious Bard reference is actually film-related, Afsha’s intro-via-aquarium-glass very explicitly recalling the moment DiCaprio and Danes lock eyes in Baz Luhrmann’s hyperactive, so-very-’90s take on R+J. Beyond that, Bhardwaj emphasizes his own sense of convoluted cool over any star-crossed calamity. The copious pleasures of the nearly three-hour journey between the first hazy-dawn images of Ustara’s Mumbai harbor home base and the crackpot grand finale set in a Spanish bullfighting arena opposite a very Zangief-looking/M. Bison-attired motherfucker can’t be overstated.—Keith Uhlich

Tumulty times at le cinema this week, for better and worse. On the plus side, new works by Yuen Woo-Ping and Zhang Yimou at the four-walling tippy-top of AMC “Bedbug” 25. On the negative, the within-hours-of-each-other deaths of nonagenarians Robert Duvall and Frederick Wiseman, followed by the more personally hard-hitting mortal coil shuffle-off of Tom Noonan, who I was fortunate to know and work closely with during my NYU undergrad days when, like Spaceball One, I went to plaid. Maybe more to say on me and Tom and his persistently undervalued legacy soon. Stay tuned.

The week began with the bastard offspring of a Mad Libs-’n’-Chat GPT prompt: Kind Hearts and Coronets remake set in the world of Succession and starring Glen Powell. Result: Not terrible! In part because it follows the narrative beats of the Ealing Studios classic near-completely, updating only as milieu and time period dictate. Powell also tends to be at his best when the buttermilquetoasty qualities that make him a generally tepid leading man come off, like they do here, as Clayface-esque camouflage masking a hardwired socio-/psycho-pathic venality.

For most of the running time, disavowed heir Becket Redfellow seems an astute modernization of Dennis Price’s social-striving Louis Mazzini from the 1949 original, as well as treacherously endearing kin to the identity-shifting Gary Johnson (also played by Powell) in Linklater’s Hit Man. Though as Hit Man ultimately softened its protagonist’s copious jagged edges, so does How to Make a Killing (adapted by Emily the Criminal helmer John Patton Ford) finally turn the covetous Becket into a tragic soy boy doomed to a Margaret Qualley-superintended gilded cage — presumably still a vision of Zion to many within and without the red-blooded manosphere.

Alec Guinness’s eight-character-strong tour de force in Kind Hearts, which only sharpened the material’s class-dissecting satirical blade, is sorely missed. Though old pros Ed Harris and Bill Camp, as the Redfellow family elders, can do affluence derangement in their sleep. And there is real enjoyment in seeing Zach Woods and Topher Grace, playing slightly more savvy, if still ragingly imbecilic incarnations of Eric and Don Jr., getting their spoiled-brat comeuppance.

The “Special Guest Star” Jet Li fight scene comes early in the martial arts epic Blades of the Guardians and it’s of course a gravity-defying doozy, not to mention an assured prelude to ever-escalating and giddily entertaining bedlam. Yuen Woo-ping knows how to direct wuxia action sequences, shocker, and additionally how to navigate a dizzying array of characters and locales so that any relational befuddlement becomes bliss. Précis is basically “transport most-wanted-man from here to there,” a job that can only be accomplished by bounty hunter Dao Ma (Jing Wu) and a fatefully assembled motley crew. References abound — everything from Stagecoach to Mad Max: Fury Road (because why not a swordfight in a sandy whirlwind?) — though Yuen is plenty his own man, to the point that even the expected CCP nationalism gets deferred to a last-scene throwaway line and quickly engulfed by ecstatic, resonantly individualistic what-further-adventures-await! comradeship.

More aesthetically and philosophically conflicted is Zhang Yimou’s Scare Out, a jingle-jangled Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the age of megalopolic surveillance. A botched operation puts a national security team under a glaring spotlight. As in le Carré, there’s a mole at the top of the Circus and out he must be smoked/scared, though the turncoat’s identity is fairly obvious from the jump. Not at all a problem, for the tale’s emotional/thematic crux is the soul-sickening nature of living a counter-intelligent existence in these fractured modern times, something made excruciatingly tactile by arrhythmic editing (barely a shot held for more than a second or two) that, coupled with all the rat-a-tat-tat cloak-and-dagger dialogue, suggests a paranoiac Tony Scott gloss on His Girl Friday. (Come back Enemy of the State, all is forgiv…nah, scratch that.) It often feels like Zhang is being yanked between rah!-rah! copagandistic affection and vomitous moral revulsion, a whiplash sensation that reaches its apex in the film’s nauseatingly placid closing scenes, which hint, in mutedly meta fashion, at an artist unraveling, holding a mammoth, Munch-ian howl at bay.

The pleasures of the Kabuki melodrama Kokuho are primarily on the level of pageantry (lavish costumes galore); otherwise, this near-three-hour drama dutifully absorbs yet rarely surprises. Kikuo (Ryô Yoshizawa), son of a murdered yakuza and a naturally talented stage performer, is taken under the wing of K-world grandmaster Hanjiro (Ken Watanabe), much to the chagrin of Hanjiro’s offspring, Shunsuke (Ryûsei Yokohama), whose ascenscion to his father’s theatrical throne is suddenly called into question. Dad is content to let them fight, irregardless of ebbs-’n’-flows to follow. There is triumph. There is tragedy. There is — via a much more introspective “I am Mrs. Norman Maine!”-ian gaze to the rafters — transcendence. Koan-ically: If a movie compels in the moment but fades in recollect, does it make a sound?

My husband’s love of Vanessa Redgrave (Jay Sherman voice: Buy his book!) was one of the major factors in slotting the David Koepp-penned sci-fi/horror flick Cold Storage on the viewing calendar since we were both tickled by her purported description of the project (“It’s about green goo!”) and wondered openly about her screen time. She’s before camera for five minutes, give or take, showing up in the early going as a suicidal widow who takes a few-hours-nap in a personal storage locker housed within a decommissioned military base. Later, she shoots an extraterrestrial-fungus zombie in the back of the head, sighs “I gotta get out of here” in the exhausted key of Lethal Weapon’s too-old-for-this-shit Murtaugh, and is shepherded offscreen (in a poignant Timmy Chalamet-aiding-James Ivory kind of way) by Stranger Things alum Joe Keery.

Whether the woman who gave new meaning to bone collecting in Ken Russell’s The Devils makes it out alive before the underground nuke explodes and looses a fiery hellmouth is beside the point in a movie this unabashedly B-to-Z-grade. It’s a Koepp production through and through, from the intriguing alien virus setup to the Screenwriting 101 character work that makes you “care” (gag me with a spoon) about every wisecracking personality onscreen to the reach-exceeds-grasp climax that sacrifices all the humanity built up over the prior hour-and-a-half in the name of chintzily callous apocalyptic spectacle. A fourth-wall-breaking regurgitative stinger followed by a basso-grunge cover of “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” and a deep-in-end-credits “Special Thanks” to, uh, wha, Jacques Tati?!? are the cherries on top of a shit sundae that I quite relished devouring. A comparable gaiety is evident on the faces of Keery and Georgina Campbell (as the curious and capable yutes) and Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville (as the grizzled, gun-wielding olds), all of ’em pay-checking with aplomb. And to any appalled Vanessa-heads: Hey, it’s better than Consuming Passions!—Keith Uhlich

How daring to open your Brontë adaptation with an insinuated engorged cock ’risen via town-square-execution-asphyxiation-by-noose! But then Emerald Fennell seems a fount of bad ideas, or, as her torpid Wuthering Heights goes on to epitomize, limp-dick ones. I too have a pulse, so the sight of towering Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) licking the wet, post-masturbated digits of Cathy (Margot Robbie) before lifting her by her corset strings into a lusty smooch fleetingly double doubles my toil and trouble. Yet moor (sorry/not sorry) ultimately proves much, much less.

Alison Oliver’s horndog Isabella sticking an effigy of Cathy within a miniature replica of Thrushcross Grange highlights the degree to which this is the dour, doomy-romance version of Barbie… starring Barbie. And that’s before the pulsating flesh-wallpaper and leech-festooned bed linens swallow poor Cathy whole. (Robbie’s a thousand-yard-stare snore; Elordi a raven-haired (better than goose-faced) Fabio — empty-vessel lechery and little more.) It often feels like we’re watching a mo-pic incarnation of the smutty scratchings doodled in the margins of a science textbook by a bored middle-schooler. Thought is somewhere off in the flighty ether (not necessarily a problem). Yet feeling, in the form of any erotic ardor, is next to non-existent, and, whenever it does crop up (say in the image of Cathy’s O’Keeffe-ian pudendum hairdo), is stuck frustratingly at the level of the inchoate.

Another film of (better-formed) ideas: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die tosses A.I. paranoia and Boomer condescension in a blender, sets to Liquefy, then pulses at random with 1.21 gigawatt lightning strikes. Sam Rockwell’s nameless time-traveler, decked-out in bagman finery and yammering at a synaptically unhinged clip (so…Sam Rockwell), arrives at an L.A. diner with grim news: The world is on an assured path to destruction and only a certain combination of patrons from this particular eatery can avert the apocalypse. This is his 118th-or-so go, so we’re well into same-shit/different-day territory. Girl, I feel you.

What follows is a punk-maximalist adventure very recognizably in the style of director Gore Verbinski, not ever a favorite of mine. But if all the usual irritations remain (particularly a logy narrative momentum that suggests what it must be like to drown in molasses), the unpredictable and transgressive paths down which the film goes quite often exhilarate. I got plenty jaw-dropped at a black-comic subplot involving school shootings and human cloning, and Verbinski conjures plenty of resonant imagery (a zombie army of endlessly-doom-scrolling teenagers, for one) that offsets the “these kids and their damn phones” snoot of Matthew Robinson’s screenplay.

Artie Intelligencia is the big bugbear, of course, incarnated here as a tech-obsessed problem child with an anti-establishment anarchic streak. (A throwaway moment in which he air-guitars to camera is filmed so giddily it makes you wonder if Verbinski has some affection for the little shit.) Neither human nor computer triumphs, exactly. The push-pull cycle goes on indefinitely. Nirvana just out of reach, the journey is the enduring point. Stay strong, live well, we all die. Buddha wisdom from the Budweiser: Frogs guy, who’da thunk?—Keith Uhlich

“I want to live,” whimpers the submersible-confined convict Simon late in the vid-game adaptation Iron Lung. And damned if it doesn’t feel, in that blissful moment, as if the spirit of Susan Hayward takes hold of and totally transforms the bellowy, sub-Toshiro Mifune stylings of star, writer, co-editor, producer and director Mark “Markiplier” Fischbach. To be clear, Sir ’plier’s eager-to-please-(himself) amateurishness, much like Hayward’s shameless Oscar-striving, has a certain charm. And it was quite the way to begin a week that also exposed me to bubblegum goddess Charli XCX channeling both Barbara Loden in Wanda and Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence for the brat summer epitaph The Moment, as well as Caleb Landry Jones, in Luc Besson’s risibly entertaining Dracula, playing the bloodsucker of legend like Quentin Crisp lisping through a Tom Waits vocoder.

A week of performances that crack themselves up, in movies that try hard and fail in ways both banal and bewitching. Watching them in close proximity with another Dracula — Romanian director Radu Jude’s near-three-hour provocation, a Godardian essay film in the vein of Jackass with a Henry James-esque tendency to forever orbit its ephemeral points — made them feel all of a patience-testing yet still playful piece.

As a longtime consciously-uncoupled gamer, I tend to console myself with no-commentary YouTube walkthroughs that effectively make the experience cinematic and neutralize the genocidal rage that would rise up each time I (deeply dating myself here) couldn’t get past the spiky, Medusa-head-infested rotating room in Super Castlevania IV. So Markiplier, an OG of the nothing-but-commentary walkthrough, was never on my radar until it became clear his self-distributed, only-in-theaters passion play was beating both the first lady and Sam Raimi at the box office.

The Iron Lung game (shoutout to my pal Jakob for doing an in-person walkthrough) is basically a 50-minute creepypasta prelude to a BIG FISH! jump scare. Markiplier’s lugubrious mo-pic is vanity project Tarkovsky with a soupçon of early Ridley Scott, and hell’s bells if that hodgepodge isn’t more-often-than-not impressive and effective. The INT:SUB setting has been lovingly recreated by production designer Iman Corbani down to the smallest detail and the back-forth-forward-reverse gameplay integrated into the narrative so that its maddeningly monotonous nature complements Simon’s slowly unraveling psyche. Marki Mark has a talent for the close-quarters claustrophobic, to the point that whenever the film widens scope to incorporate what the stunted kids call “lore” (blood oceans and quiet raptures and BIG FISH! again, oh my!) things fall apart.

So it goes, too, with Madame XCX, whose strenuous attempts in The Moment to cheekily bury both herself and her Vroom Vrooming pop-tart anxieties six-feet metaphorically under add up to little more than Doomscroll Spinal Tap. Though there are still the distinct pleasures of Sean Price Williams’s Here Comes the Grain Again™ cinematography and Alexander Skarsgård embodying another of his alluringly devil-in-your-ear types, sucking all comers toward him like a black hole that knows it’s hellishly hawt as fuck.

Of the Draculas: Besson’s is an engagingly sanguine if still too-digitally-scrubbed Yves Saint Laurent-ian fashion extravaganza that pompously purports to be about capital-‘L’ Love, while Jude’s is a let’s-put-on-an-AI-prompted-end-times-show that looks like ass and is all the more beautiful for it.

From the Besson, I will think frequently of C.L. Jones’s dandyish old-age-makeup that makes him resemble a runway model incarnation of Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in addition to a loyal army of CG gargoyles that feel as if they’ve psychotically sidled over from Disney’s animated Hunchback of Notre Dame. And though Jude gives us chilling and chucklesome visions of everything from rock-hard levitating penises to a gig-economy Vlad the Impaler overseeing the near-wholesale-slaughter of a hastily unionized workforce, it’s the climactic image of a garbageman keeping a discreet distance from his embarrassed daughter that cuts deepest — a character conjured in the world of the film by AI, yet played, in all his emotional complexity and sociological inscrutability, for real.

From muck we emerge, to muck we return. But, per the ever-wise Thich Nhat Hanh, no mud, no lotus.—Keith Uhlich

Full disclosure: I will never watch Melania. And my sole comment on it is that pondering fellow NYU alum and perennial no-talent Brett Ratner’s reinvention as idjit Leni Riefenstahl gets me all a-titter, with heartier guffaws if I imagine him on-set looking like semi-doppelgänger Jonah Hill in the “Married Your Cousin” scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. May Rush Hour 4 be your history-written-with-lightning moment you scum-sucking bottom feeder.

Uppity jibes aside, let me say that, at heart, I try to view all beings in the light of what the Jesuit priest Father Gregory Boyle terms, in his book Cherished Belonging, their “unshakable goodness.” This prevents him from pivoting into unhelpfully loaded, limiting and inherently condemnatory binaries like “good/bad” or “stupid/smart.” The only polar-opposite terms he elevates are “healthy/unhealthy,” which helps stoke and sustain his foundational empathic response. This is something I believe it’s important to work toward and steadfastly maintain — even with those fellow humans who would end our lives, or, perhaps more challengingly, even with those fellow humans who labor, day-in and day-out, to make our individual and collective existences an interminably living hell. We have to remember these are not healthy people. But they are people still, their behaviors guided by fearful delusions, all of them apparently in full denial that there will come a day when they, like the peers they persecute, lose everything and everyone. I strive to remember (and it’s an effort somedays, let me tell you) that I am of them and they are of me, as we are all of each other.

’Course, I also often think about the story the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg tells about the aftermath of her encounter with a belligerent drunk, who she allowed to run roughshod over her in the belief that any display of reactive force was a grievous blow to dogma and karma. “Oh, Sharon,” said her guru Munindra after she relayed the tale, “with all the lovingkindness in your heart, you should have taken your umbrella and hit that man over the head with it!”

Keep it compassionate even when thwacking with parasols. And do give Father Boyle’s books — in order of publication, Tattoos on the Heart (2010), Barking to the Choir (2017), The Whole Language (2021) and Cherished Belonging (2024) — prime places on your shelf, as well as the L.A.-based charity he helped found, Homeboy Industries (which ministers, without judgment, to the current and formerly gang-involved and incarcerated), your attention and support. He and his work are lodestars.

I suppose Sam Raimi’s Send Help fits the “return to form” that so many filmgoers crave from beloved auteurs gone to seed. For me, he peaked early with the dually-unhinged Evil Dead II (1987) and Darkman (1990), and at least followed with the worth-engaging trifecta of Army of Darkness (1992), The Quick and the Dead (1995) and A Simple Plan (1998). The rest I’m more than happy to forswear, particularly his jaunts into super-heroic matters Arachnid, Oz and Odd.

Compassion extended to those practical-F/X men doing the Headless-Chicken Trot in modern Hollywood’s trash-digital world. The key scene in Send Help sees Rachel McAdams’s punching-bag corporate cog — who turns the tables on Dylan O’Brien’s nepo boss-from-hell after his private plane crashes on a seemingly deserted tropical island — battling a hilariously unconvincing CGI boar that projectile-vomits buckets of actual stage blood. A very Raimi conceit that falls flat because the disparate aural and visual elements don’t mesh as they should, and done better besides in the exemplary Evil Dead 2 sequence that culminates with the director’s eternal muse, Bruce Campbell (whose “cameo” here is especially inspired), cackling maniacally alongside a demonically-possessed deer head and other dead-alive household objects.

Easy to revisit the hits, hard to re-up their quintessence. Raimi’s Looney Tunes nastiness has always been his best attribute, and Send Help generally tends toward that invigoratingly misanthropic ethos. Though, as evinced by a fakeout moment of gory emasculation that should really have gone full castrato, it too often pulls its punches, testicular and otherwise.

As Dave Kehr once found himself in “the ridiculous position of sticking up for The Exorcist II: The Heretic,” here am I doing the same for Return to Silent Hill. Director and co-screenwriter Christophe Gans’s pop-arthouse aesthetic stokes several pleasure centers, particularly in the way his movies — like the wonky martial-arts Harlequin horror-fantasy Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) and the original Silent Hill (2006), one of the more inspired video game to mo-pic transpositions — unfold with a taut dream logic that makes their hodgepodge absurdity sublime. Alice Krige getting ripped to shreds by tentacled barbed wire can share communal space with Radha Mitchell and Sean Bean doing a Last Year at Marienbad-esque climactic pas de deux and it strangely feels all of a high/low philosophical piece.

The Resnais vibing, bone-’n’-gristle tactility of the first Silent Hill is replaced in its twenty-years-later followup (this an adaptation of the much-beloved second game in the series) by a digi-augmented chintziness that, on the one hand, is very much a product of a reduced budget, an overseas shoot and a multiplicity of shady investors. On the other, the thought “Lady and the Duke-era Eric Rohmer doing Hellraiser” came frequently to mind. And I’d also posit Coppola’s undersung Twixt as a touchstone given both movies are about a grieving arsehat (in this case, Jeremy Irvine, an easy-on-the-eyes empty vessel) navigating the Kübler-Ross steps within Dante’s CG Inferno.

Some of the visions are plenty bargain-basement, Irvine’s pasted-on flashback beard chief among them. One would certainly be justified dinging Return to Silent Hill as a Cliffs Notes walkthrough of a PS2 peak or a monotonic scare flick that often resembles its own half-assedly pre-viz’d animatic. Yet the stressed-to-the-max, never-slacking Gans-ian ambience (truly one psychically-scarring, Fibonacci-spiraling battle after another) pervades throughout. Is that why I was giddily charmed by the scene in which Irvine’s character runs back and forth along a flame-engulfed hallway that looks like a green-screen projection trapped inside a Zoom call that’s clandestinely broadcasting from the jail-broken Volume soundstage of your Star Wars TV series of choice? To ask is to answer.

Speaking of galaxies far, far the fluck away, a throwaway moment in Bryan Fuller’s effectively straight-to-streaming feature directorial debut Dust Bunny brought to mind a similarly tossed-off instant in that godawful Obi-Wan Kenobi miniseries when Moses Ingram catapults across a rooftop in pursuit of Ewan McGregor’s in-hiding Jedi master. The young heroine of Dust Bunny, Sophie Sloan’s Aurora, does the beat-for-beat same while trailing Mads Mikkelsen’s nameless father-figure assassin, down to the from-afar camera composition and the sprawling computer-generated cityscape backdrop, though Fuller throws in a quick insert shot from below that shows the footprints Aurora leaves behind after her shoes hit a grimy glass enclosure.

That there’s the difference between heedlessly hurtling through a void and dynamically existing in a vividly conjured space. And Dust Bunny thrives for a good while on Fuller’s fertile imagination (still best-expressed in his sexually charged, sartorially spectacular TV series Hannibal), which here asks “What if Leon: The Professional but with a ravenous oversized leporid?” The first act is near-perfection, mostly silent and visually inventive (the way, for example, Aurora’s door is always left slightly ajar so that the On-Off flick of the hallway chandelier becomes nerve-rackingly perceptible). Then the twee dialogue hits, the narrative goes boggy, the deficient F/X overwhelm and the tonally dissonant register of the performances — be it Sloan’s irritating precocity or Sigourney Weaver, as Mads’s fiendish handler, running near-empty on the WTF! fumes she better huffed in Walter Hill’s The Assignment and Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener — intros nails wholly to chalkboard. Fuller’s earnest attempt at OG over IP is still, all in all, very much appreciated.

For Timur Bekmambetov’s AI-apologia sci-fi actioner Mercy, a rework of an old Gene Siskel-ism: Is this movie more interesting than a YouTube recording of Chris Pratt extolling RFK Jr. on Club Random with Bill Maher?

No.

It’s the textural qualities that most interest me in the zombie series initiated, and mostly overseen, by director-producer Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland. The original, primarily DV-shot 28 Days Later (2002) plays like a ripped-from-the-id snuff film, while 28 Years Later (2025) conjured a virtuosic view-askewniverse via multiple iPhones and a stretched-to-the-max 2.76:1 aspect ratio. No surprise they both share cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, the Gordon Willis of Stygian agita, a look that you can feel to your marrow.

I care less about the movies as narrative objects, which is why the more visually pedestrian non-Mantle/Boyle installments — 28 Weeks Later (2007) and the just-released 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple — often prove patience-testing. I’m also roundly sick of this new era, inaugurated by the exasperatingly overpraised Sinners, of Jack O’Connell as comically cavorting psycho, here the anti-charismatic leader of a Jimmy Savile-styled cult. I’ve been singing O’Connell’s praises in Andrew Haigh’s little-seen whaling-ship miniseries The North Water (2021) for years now and will just redirect readers there for an example of what he can do when he’s not being asked to madcaply, monotonously gambol like a lep’ in tha hood/come to do no good.

Director Nia DaCosta made a feeble hash of Ibsen with last year’s Hedda and is no less ill-suited to the macabre bloodletting of Bone Temple, particularly in a skin-flaying centerpiece that inspires equal parts Ick! and indifference. Though as Hedda still boasted a wondrous Nina Hoss performance, so Bone Temple features a for-the-ages turn by Ralph Fiennes, reprising his role as the iodine-doused, amiably unhinged Dr. Kelson. This post-apocalyptic medicine man spends much of the running time entertainingly working to tame the savage beast that is well-endowed undead behemoth Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry), then gets to rock out to Iron Maiden in a poorly-shot climax that’s nonetheless elevated by the actor’s wholesale commitment to the galaxy-brained bit.

A catch-up with Cover-Up, a non-fiction paean to journalist Seymour Hersh, reinforced my ambivalence to Laura Poitras’s oeuvre, specifically the way in which her movies often get gummed up by self-congratulatory certainty, which undercuts their justifiably righteous fury. My sense is she wants her crusading central subjects to be as effectively unimpeachable as possible, so whenever their ethical and philosophical complexities emerge they tend to be minimized or glossed-over. Most of the morality-muddying heavy lifting is then ceded to ambient-drone musical scores that sound like rejected cuts from Nine Inch Nails’s Ghosts period.

This edges-sanding tendency looks especially egregious nowadays in the case of the much-lauded Edward Snowden portrait Citizenfour (2014) given the mortifying ideological byways subsequently stampeded by onscreen collaborator Glenn Greenwald. Though it gives some perhaps unintended juice to the under-appreciated Julian Assange exposé Risk (2016) in which the WikiLeaks’s founder’s erratic behavior, and Poitras’s romantic involvement with one of Assange’s top lieutenants, become un-ignorable components of an exceedingly complicated text.

Cover-Up is a much more straightforward and prosaic project. Hersh has been an offscreen confidant and colleague to Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus for a number of years, so even at its prickliest the film has the feel of a friendly colloquy. Hersh is a compelling enough subject and his Herculean efforts bringing both the My Lai massacre and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib to light cannot be understated. Yet when it comes to the darker shades of his personality and pursuits, be it the Kennedy family book nearly undone by bad research or Hersh’s oft-willful eschewing of his mental well-being (and this despite a loving psychiatrist spouse), Poitras and Obenhaus tend to pull a Homer Simpson-style hedge retreat rather than probe deeper into the behavioral and psychological verdure.—Keith Uhlich

Beginning 2026 with dual Amanda Seyfrieds, she of the dreamy flying-saucer eyes that, in the Paul Feig-helmed The Housemaid, do battle with the sneeringly hooded peepers of the Great Jeaned, heretofore box-office-poisoning Sydney Sweeney. This one’s a bona fide hit, a trashy piece, at least initially, of screeching gal-on-gal violence based on a bestselling novel series penned by a practicing brain surgeon. (Would that I were Mad Libbing.) Seyfried’s at her best when her inner voices are in control, her pupils dilated to a schizoid thousand yards, her starry grin stretching well past Joker rictus. Lynch unearthed this in her scenes in Twin Peaks; Feig allows the fumes of that career high-point to permeate the gilded cage that Seyfried’s seemingly doted-on housewife, Nina Winchester, turns to her snidely whiplashing advantage.

This bitchy villainness has her reasons, which only become apparent after a sloggy, misdirection-heavy hour-and-change that features more than I’d like of the surely AI-birthed Brandon Sklenar — the human equivalent of a stubbly chin — as Nina’s besotted-to-a-fault spouse. Sweeney’s an adept foil, though better in the later scenes when she’s not required to strain for sympathy and goes as full I Spit on Your [Toxically Masculine] Grave as a modern studio with memes on the brain will allow. This pompous potboiler strives for a post-#MeToo resonance in which it hardly seems invested and never convincingly develops over a distended two-hours-plus. It’s Feig attempting Park Chan-wook’s Gone Girl and…yeah, I’m good, m’guy.

Seyfried’s alien qualities are put to more intriguing use in The Testament of Ann Lee, a movie that, in its goofier moments, brought to mind Bette Midler’s quip about the Ross Hunter-produced debacle Lost Horizon (1973): “I never miss a Liv Ullman musical!” And I never miss a Shaker one! Credit to Mona Fastvold, exchanging directorial duties with co-writer husband Brady Corbet following The Brutalist, for approaching every scene, regardless of conceptual ridiculousness, as holy writ — appropriate for a story about a religious movement and its prone-to-ecstatic-reverie female guru that are out of step with everyone beyond a fervent few.

It’s a song-and-dance film of sorts, the many choreographed numbers (courtesy Celia Rowlson-Hall, whose stellar work in the pop-world slasher sequel Smile 2 never fails to arouse a hive-minded grin) inspired by various Shaker hymns and rituals. Yet there’s an overall caution that keeps even the wildest segments — such as an early montage intercutting the sexually depraved ventures of Ann’s husband (Christopher Abbott, cast to off-putting type as usual) with her four soul-shattering failed births — at a dour distance. I personally longed for some of The Brutalist’s von Trier-like passion and prankishness, which also helped deepen that film’s sociopolitical scope. Though the endeavor here remains consistently admirable and the finale, during which Seyfried and costar Thomasin McKenzie do a gender-swapped riff on The Godfather’s Brando-Pacino garden farewell, consummately moving.—Keith Uhlich

James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third installment in his ongoing blockbuster sci-fi saga, is effectively a three-hour-plus series of climaxes. The boundless sense of finality proves unsurprisingly wearisome. And it’s also the first time one of these behemoths feels clouded by doubt, almost as if Cameron and his army of technicians are worried that the double-billion-dollar roll of the dice that paid out with both 2009’s Avatar and 2023’s Avatar: The Way of Water might finally come up snake eyes. There’s little doubt Fire and Ash will make money, but will it be enough to justify continuing a tale (two additional entries are planned) that more than a few have dismissively likened to FernGully: The Last Rainforest in space?

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Everything in Fire and Ash tends to the simplistic and palatable in ways that anyone familiar with Cameron’s oeuvre can clock immediately. He certainly has a talent for glib grandiosity, as exemplified by 1997’s Titanic, with which he turned a horrific real-life historical tragedy into the roller-coaster backdrop for a fatuous harlequin romance.

…

Cameron has gone out of his way to promote his mo-cap techniques as actor-friendly, even concocting a behind-the-scenes short that plays before the movie proper in which he and several of the cast note the many imaginative freedoms afforded by the production as well as the non-use of generative A.I. at every stage. Though, since the two Avatar sequels were primarily shot in 2017 and 2018, the no-A.I. mantra in particular comes off as a disingenuous sop that allows Cameron to appear like an unimpeachable good guy amid the entertainment world’s many villains of the moment.

Read the full review at Slant Magazine

It’s been a while since I’ve seen as egregious a piece of miscasting as Ethan Hawke in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon. He plays Lorenz Hart, a great musical talent who with Broadway composer Richard Rodgers co-created such shows as A Connecticut Yankee, Babes in Arms and Pal Joey, in addition to penning countless classics from the title track to “Isn’t it Romantic” to “My Funny Valentine.” He was also alcoholic, prickly, depressive and as openly homo as multiple closets would allow. So not someone that would make most among us go, “I know! … Ethan Hawke!”

That’s no dealbreaker, of course. (And to preemptively nip a certain perennial criticism in the bud: Straight actors playing gay? All for it, always lustily have been and will be.) Though it’s anyone’s guess why Hawke and Linklater settled on a Hart who comes off as Gay Gollum.

That’s a more apt description than you might suspect given the F/X-heavy lengths to which the film goes to shrink Hawke down to Hart’s 5-foot stature. The meticulously detailed Sardi’s restaurant set around which Hart skulks and where almost all of the action takes place — on the night Rodgers (Andrew Scott), teamed for the first time with Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney), premiered the Hart-less Oklahoma! — is reported to have had troughs in which Hawke could sidle along lower-than his costars. And in full body shots he appears to have either been digitally shrunk or had his face CG-transplanted onto a body double. Anamorphic lenses were also utilized to help, such as it is, sell the illusion.

That’s a lot of effort for what proves very little reward since Hawke’s performance is almost all indicative surface. Spitting out loquaciously catty invective from beneath a swishy, sloshed, bald-pated façade, he’s working in a similarly to-the-rafters register as Michael Douglas’s Liberace in Behind the Candelabra. Yet there, director/d.p. Steven Soderbergh’s aesthetic chilliness and Matt Damon’s gentle (and easily exploitable) warmth helped to ground the mince and make it credible. In Blue Moon, Linklater and cinematographer Shane F. Kelly do a more simplistic track-and-capture job, which allows Hawke free rein to indulge his worst instincts: Big and bullyingly broad opposite Sardi’s bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and his staff; daintily, drunkenly pathetic opposite the hilariously stone-faced, had-it-with-this-shit Rodgers.

That Scott won an acting prize at the Berlin Film Festival and Hawke did not is…telling, perhaps. At times you wish Linklater had engaged his more experimental side and shot an alternate version of Blue Moon in which Hawke and Scott switched roles — much better casting, that, at least in the mind’s eye. Though they’d still be stuck with Robert Kaplow’s embarrassingly fan-fictiony script, with its tell-don’t-show dialogue, dramaturgically suspect occurrences (Hart giving fellow barmate E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) the idea for Stuart Little), and wink-wink nudge-nudge cameos from the likes of George Roy Hill (David Rawle) and Stephen Sondheim (Cillian Sullivan)..

Credit where due: A long scene late in the picture between Hart and his protégé/beard Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley) is the one time Hawke is forced to settle down and genuinely react, in the process effectively, and affectingly, conveying the many accumulated hurts of Hart’s diminishing lifetime. But otherwise, Blue Moon engenders a robust longing for a blackout stupor.

A moody cool defines Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother, a triptych of tales in the mode of 1991’s Night on Earth and 2004’s Coffee and Cigarettes, though marked by a much more wizened (and wise) melancholy. After the fuck-the-world irascibility of Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, this feels like a comparative balm.

In “Father,” Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Biyalik) journey to the remote New Jersey home of their estranged dad (Tom Waits). In the second segment, “Mother,” Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps) head to afternoon tea with their Irish author mom (Charlotte Rampling). In the final section, “Sister Brother,” Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat), the two grown children of a recently deceased couple who we glimpse in photos, visit the Paris apartment they were raised in to close out their father and mother’s affairs.

Each of the segments opens similarly, with the two siblings in a car driving to their parents’ respective homes; in “Mother,” though, Timothea and Lilith are in separate vehicles, the former dealing with engine breakdown, the latter riding with her girlfriend, Jeanette (Sarah Greene), who she passes off as her Uber driver. Most of these introductory scenes are shot with glaringly obvious rear projection. The aesthetic falseness makes the conversations between characters feel like they’re occurring in a self-delusional bubble, which is apt considering that one of the film’s overarching themes is the ultimate unknowability of the people who birthed you.

Read the full review at Slant Magazine