NEW THIS WEEK (10/16) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN’—James McAvoy makes a confident directorial debut with this shaggy, funny and surprisingly sweet musical biopic about two Scottish brothers who decide that the quickest route to rap stardom is to become “American.” Based on Gavin Bain’s memoir, the movie follows Bain (Samuel Bottomley) and Billy Boyd (Séamus McLean Ross) who reinvent themselves as Silibil N’ Brains, manufacture elaborate California backgrounds and spend three years fooling an industry apparently desperate to be fooled. The joke, of course, is that the fraud worked as long as it did. McAvoy understands that the absurdity of the scheme is inseparable from the depressing truth behind it. Gavin and Billy aren’t merely con artists, but talented young musicians who discover that authenticity is considerably less marketable than American accents and good backstories. Bottomley and McLean Ross make an appealingly scruffy team surviving ego, deception and their increasingly elaborate lie. McAvoy keeps things moving with the energy of a good pop single. The musical numbers are integrated into the narrative rather than pasted on as obligatory production numbers, while the period atmosphere and deliberately heightened comedy give it a pleasingly mischievous personality. There’s genuine affection for its protagonists, even when they’re being spectacularly dumb. It’s hard not to think of 2024’s “Kneecap," another film about rebellious musicians from the British Isles turning cultural marginalization into a dubious route toward stardom. “California Schemin’” is vastly superior, though; funnier without straining for laughs, and more interested in character development. Where “Kneecap” confused provocation with personality, McAvoy finds both. What begins as a cockeyed scam eventually becomes a touching story about brotherhood, ambition and the strange things people do when they simply want to be heard. (B.)
CRAWLERS—Eight-legged and venomous, spiders have a considerable advantage over the usual cinematic assortment of masked slashers and supernatural malcontents. The problem is there have already been a bevy of spider flicks in recent years, and director Angel Gómez Hernández brings little appreciably new to the party. After a mysterious death at an apartment complex, building supervisor Serena (Matilda Lutz) discovers an infestation of spiders spreading with alarming speed. Thanks to her knowledge of the structure’s architecture, residents are able to fend off the multiplying menace while under quarantine. Personal fears, interpersonal friction and the usual assortment of questionable decisions complicate matters, but the biggest obstacle is over-familiarity. From “Arachnophobia” (1990) and “Eight-Legged Freaks” (2002) to the more recent “Infested” (2023) and “Sting” (2024), previous killer-spider movies have already explored most of the obvious possibilities of the genre from creepy-crawly comedy to full-scale infestation panic. Jayson Rothwell’s screenplay relies heavily on familiar survival-horror mechanics while Hernández’s direction does little to distinguish the material from its numerous predecessors.“Crawlers” is less a fresh bite than a mildly irritating itch. (C MINUS.)
KIM NOVAK’S VERTIGO—Alexandre O. Philippe’s bio-doc arrives with an irresistible subject and a title that promises a film about the making of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” Hitch’s 1958 masterpiece is certainly its gravitational center, and Novak’s dual performance as the elusive Madeleine and earthy Judy receives the expected cinephiliac devotion. But Philippe is ultimately more interested in the woman who played those roles than in “Vertigo” itself, and the 92-year-old Novak proves an engaging guide to her own legend. The movie ranges well beyond “Vertigo,” touching on Novak’s unlikely ascent from working-class Chicago to Tinseltown stardom, battles with Columbia chief Harry Cohn and her eventual retreat from the industry. Novak’s later life as a painter, and her determination to reclaim an identity that was packaged and sold as “Kim Novak” are particularly revealing. Philippe makes good use of personal photographs, memorabilia and film clips, turning Novak’s Oregon home into something like a private museum of a vanished era. That breadth of material is also its central flaw. “Kim Novak’s Vertigo” never quite discovers a strong through line connecting the actress’s career, “Vertigo,” eventual disillusionment with Hollywood and her post-show biz years.The connections are certainly there—identity, image, spectatorship and the uneasy business of being looked at—but Philippe tends to gesture toward rather than develop those themes. The result can feel less like a sustained argument than a collection of memories and observations. Novak herself makes it worthwhile, though. Her recollections have the authority of someone who spent decades inside the Hollywood echo chamber, and Philippe wisely gives Novak room to reminisce rather than just surrounding her with the usual chorus of talking heads. At a brisk 76 minutes, it’s affectionate without requiring us to regard every memory as a revelation. Philippe may not tell us everything we want to know about Novak—or even everything we’d like to know about “Vertigo”—but he offers something rarer: the opportunity to spend 78 minutes with a former movie star looking back at the strange, beautiful, sometimes brutal world that made her famous. For TCM buffs, that’s more than enough. No extras on Kino Lorber’s DVD. (B PLUS.)
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY—The problem with remaking “Sense and Sensibility” isn’t that Jane Austen’s novel has suddenly become dated. It’s that Ang Lee’s 1995 adaptation with Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant remains such a beautifully mounted work that any successor arrives carrying a burden of proof. Director Georgia Oakley, coming off the acclaimed 2022 lesbian drama “Blue Jean,” takes a noticeably earthier approach. Her Regency England is less picture book prettified than lived-in: muddy hems, windswept landscapes and natural lighting replace Lee’s elegant romantic sheen. Daisy Edgar-Jones gives Elinor an appealingly contained emotional intelligence, and Esmé Creed-Miles’s Marianne is less a porcelain doll than a young woman whose emotions are almost too overwhelming to bear. George MacKay brings an appealing diffidence to Edward Ferrars; Frank Dillane is aptly seductive without overplaying Willoughby’s ultimate transition into villainy; and the wonderful Fiona Shaw enlivens any drawing room she enters as Mrs. Jennings. There’s a perfectly legitimate argument for revisiting Austen: different generations inevitably find new emphases in familiar texts. Oakley and screenwriter Diana Reid concentrate more heavily on sisterhood, repression and the material circumstances underlying the romantic complications. Yet they never quite discover a reason for their iteration to exist. Lee's version, which found the precise temperature of Austen’s wit, romance and social observation, remains the gold standard. This “S&S” merely reminds us just how difficult that was. (B.)
STREET FIGHTER—The appeal of the latest big-screen adaptation of Capcom’s durable video-game franchise lies in its almost heroic indifference to good taste. It’s loud, preposterous, fitfully amusing and considerably longer than the material can comfortably sustain. Yet there are moments when its very absurdity becomes a virtue, and the spectacle of grown men beating one another senseless has an undeniable, if disreputable appeal. Set in 1993, the film assembles a motley assortment of martial artists for the World Warrior Tournament where estranged fighters Ryu (Andrew Koji) and Ken Masters (Noah Centineo) are recruited by Chun-Li (Callina Liang) to battle the formidable M. Bison (David Dastmalchian). There are demons to be faced, scores to be settled and enough elaborate fighting moves to have kept a small army of stunt coordinators gainfully employed. Director Kitao Sakurai has a fondness for the ostentatiously ridiculous, and his sprawling cast supplies a procession of familiar faces and unexpected personalities. Dastmalchian brings his usual intensity to Bison while professional wrestlers Roman Reigns and Cody Rhodes, rapper 50 Cent, comedian Eric André and Jason Momoa add to the atmosphere of a party to which seemingly everyone has been invited. The action has its pleasures, particularly when Sakurai stops pretending that any of this requires a coherent explanation. He seems to understand, at least intermittently, that video-game characters are most enjoyable when allowed to be larger than life. The tournament takes its sweet time to get where it’s going, though, and the succession of fights, flashbacks and dramatic pronouncements eventually start feeling like an endurance test. Even a guilty pleasure should know when to call it quits. (C PLUS.)
TRUST ME, I’M A DOCTOR—The strangest thing about Thane Economou’s biographical comedy-drama is that its unbelievable story is true. Economou recounts the ordeal of Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, the physician whose association with Anna Nicole Smith turned his life into a tabloid nightmare after the model and reality TV celebrity died of an accidental overdose in 2007. Accused of participating in a conspiracy to obtain illegal prescription drugs, Kapoor found himself not only fighting for his freedom but his reputation amid the media circus surrounding Smith’s death. The film is closer to television than cinema—its visual language and procedural elements have the familiar texture of a prestige cable movie—but the Ripley’s Believe It or Not quality of the material keeps it watchable. Kal Penn gives Kapoor a nicely understated quality, playing him less as a crusading martyr than an ordinary man increasingly bewildered by the extraordinary legal mess into which he became entangled. Linda Hamilton brings welcome authority and dry humor to the role of his defense attorney while David Julian Hirsh and Elon Gold add colorful support. Even Abbie Cornish, who initially seemed an unlikely choice for Smith, makes her performance work. Economou finds room for some playful meta touches, acknowledging the absurdity of trying to turn such a lurid saga into a conventional courtroom drama. By casting an incredulous eye on American celebrity culture, “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor” understands that truth needs little embellishment when the real-life story is so fantastical. (B MINUS.)
WHALEFALL—The biblical story of Jonah and the whale has never seemed as amenable to the tropes of a modern thriller as it does in director Brian Duffield’s adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s 2023 novel. This ingenious survival yarn follows Jay (Austin Abrams), a scuba diver searching for the remains of his estranged father (Josh Brolin) who finds himself in a pretty pickle when a sperm whale swallows him alive. The set-up is gloriously preposterous, but the movie has the good sense to play its outlandishness relatively straight. In the offbeat sci-fi romance “Spontaneous” and home-invasion thriller “No One Will Save You,” Duffield established his flair for genre flicks that take unexpected detours from cliche. Here he turns a high concept premise into an unexpectedly compelling exercise in claustrophobia, bodily injury and psychological endurance. The underwater imagery provides its share of spectacularly queasy moments, although the most effective scenes are when the spectacle of the whale’s grody interior gives way to the desperate arithmetic of survival. Jay's troubled relationship with his dad helps give the ordeal a personal dimension beyond the obvious struggle to stay alive. Abrams—who’s enjoying a banner year after his standout turn in “Resident Evil”—makes a resourceful and sympathetic protagonist, conveying panic without reducing Jay to a collection of terrified reaction shots. “Whalefall” may not entirely escape the limitations of its belly-of-the-beast setting, but the combination of pulp ingenuity and visceral suspense makes for an enjoyable deep sea excursion. (B.)
YOUR MOTHER, YOUR MOTHER, YOUR MOTHER—Action movies have frequently smuggled in ideas about faith, family and mortality, and Bassam (“Mogul Mowgli”) Tariq’s film is an unusually thoughtful example of the form. Following the death of his wife, Latif (two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali), a devout Muslim and professional hitman, criss-crosses Houston on a desperate mission to protect his children. The men pursuing him are dangerous enough, but Tariq is more interested in the forces inside Latif’s head: grief, guilt and a crisis of faith that makes his journey as spiritual as it is physical. Tariq directs with an eye for the textures of contemporary Houston rather than merely treating the city as a generic backdrop. While the violence carries seismic weight, it isn’t really the point. Latif’s profession supplies the expected tropes of a well-tooled actioner, but his religious convictions give those familiar plot mechanics an unexpectedly contemplative dimension. It’s less interested in whether a man can kill his way out of trouble than what happens when killing becomes incompatible with the person he believes himself to be. Besides Ali’s impressively subtle lead performance, what most distinguishes “Your Mother” is its refusal to separate the personal from the political and the spiritual from the visceral. If the film occasionally strains under the weight of Tariq's ambitions, its moral seriousness is bracing. Rather than just another hitman saga, this is a bruised and bruising family drama that just happens to be carrying a gun. (B PLUS.)
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ANGEL AND THE BADMAN—There are worse things a contemporary western can do than remake an old John Wayne movie, but the latest Angel Studios’ release makes a persuasive case for leaving well enough alone. Zachary Levi plays gunslinger Quirt Evans who staggers onto a Quaker ranch with a bullet in his back and discovers that the rancher’s daughter (Meg Fraser) is more interested in saving his soul than finishing him off. As the lawman tracking Quirt, Tommy Lee Jones lends the proceedings a welcome gravitas simply by being, well, Tommy Lee Jones. Director Julio Quintana is hardly an unknown quantity in faith-based filmmaking. His previous credits include “Blue Miracle” and “The Long Game,” earnest dramas built around perseverance, redemption and overcoming adversity. That résumé makes him a logical choice for this material, though hardly an inspired one. It moves competently enough, but the action setpieces have the anonymous efficiency of network television and its moral conflicts are stated rather than dramatized. The most glaring problem is that the 1947 original is readily available on streaming platforms, and vastly more entertaining. This new “Angel and the Badman” isn't terrible, it’s just hard to fathom why it needed to exist in the first place. (C MINUS.)
THE ELEPHANT MAN--David Lynch's 1980 masterpiece has long occupied an unusual place in his storied oeuvre. On paper, it seems almost anomalous: a period biography commissioned by a major studio, adapted from existing source material and based on the documented life of Victorian-era celebrity Joseph/"John" Merrick. There are no red curtains, no cryptic FBI agents, no uncanny doubles or dream logic to announce themselves in obvious fashion. Yet with each passing year, "The Elephant Man" has come to seem less like an outlier in Lynch's career than one of its purest expressions. That paradox began with one of Hollywood's most inspired leaps of faith. Mel Brooks--hardly a filmmaker associated with Victorian tragedy--recognized something extraordinary after seeing Lynch's micro-budget 1977 freak out "Eraserhead." Rather than dismissing it as the work of an eccentric provocateur, Brooks perceived an artist capable of rendering interior experience with startling emotional force. His decision to entrust Lynch with the material remains one of the great producer's gambles in American cinema, a reminder that genuine artistic patronage occasionally flourished within Hollywood's sausage factories. Brooks was wise enough to keep his own name largely out of the marketing, fearing audiences would expect a comedy. What emerged instead was a work of overwhelming compassion. Merrick's story had already passed into modern myth before Lynch arrived. Born with severe physical deformities and exploited as a carnival attraction before finding refuge under the care of surgeon Frederick Treves, Merrick became a symbol of both Victorian cruelty and human dignity. Lynch approaches that familiar narrative without sentimentality. His Merrick, embodied with astonishing delicacy by John Hurt beneath Christopher Tucker's extraordinary prosthetic makeup, is never reduced to an object of pity. Instead, he becomes the emotional and moral fulcrum of a world whose supposedly "normal" inhabitants are frequently revealed as the true grotesques. It's here that "The Elephant Man" unmistakably reveals itself as a Lynch film. His lifelong fascination with outsiders, hidden suffering, industrial landscapes and the fragile boundary separating civilization from barbarism was already fully formed. Freddie Francis's luminous black-and-white cinematography transforms smokestacks, steam and Victorian machinery into landscapes every bit as uncanny as the factories of "Eraserhead." Sound design--always one of Lynch's secret weapons--creates an oppressive, dreamlike atmosphere where mechanical noise becomes psychological music. Even moments of conventional narrative unfold with the strange dream logic that would later define "Blue Velvet," "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive." More than four decades later, it's lost none of its capacity to move audiences. The humanism never curdles into sanctimony nor does the visual beauty overwhelm the pain at its center. If anything the movie has only grown richer with time, revealing that Lynch's greatest subject was never mystery for its own sake but empathy. That may explain why this seeming curio now feels indispensable. It's not merely one of the finest biographical dramas ever made, but one of the essential works in the Lynch canon: a masterpiece whose tenderness proves every bit as radical as his nightmares. The Criterion Collection 4K Blu-Ray includes archival interviews with Lynch, Hurt, Brooks, Francis, Tucker, co-producer Jonathan Sanger and stills photographer Frank Connor; a 1981 audio recording of an interview/audience Q&A with Lynch at the American Film Institute; "The Terrible Elephant Man Revealed," a 2001 documentary about the film; a 2005 featurette, "Joseph Merrick: The Real Elephant Man," with archivist Jonathan Evans; Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna reading excerpts from their 2018 book, "Room to Dream;" excerpts from an interview with Lynch from the 2005 edition of Chris Roley's book, "Lynch on Lynch;" and an 1886 letter to the editor of the London Times concerning Merrick by the chairman of the London Hospital. (A PLUS.)
FORGOTTEN ISLAND—Joel Crawford’s latest CGI ‘toon arrives with an appealing premise, but promptly forgets what to do with it. Crawford, director of the wonderful “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” (2022), remains an accomplished stylist. But his latest DreamWorks feature is a dispiritingly formulaic exercise in 21st-century animation pieties: overweening multiculturalism, obligatory empowerment messaging and the increasingly familiar insistence that every emotional beat should come equipped with maximum wholesomeness. Set in the 1990’s Philippines, it follows Jo and Raissa (voiced by H.E.R. and Liza Soberano), childhood friends who vowed to remain BFFs. Graduation threatens that arrangement when Raissa’s parents send her to the U.S. for college, prompting Jo to cling desperately to their original childhood bond. A mysterious portal deposits the girls on Nakali, a fantastical island where visitors gradually lose their memories the longer they stay. It’s a potentially touching conceit: forgetfulness as a literal manifestation of the fear that growing up means losing the people and places that defined us. Unfortunately, the movie treats the idea less as a source of genuine melancholy than an excuse for an increasingly noisy succession of life lessons about friendship, family, identity and female empowerment. The Filipino setting, which might have provided genuine cultural specificity, too often feels like another item on the checklist of contemporary animation virtues. Diversity is announced rather than inhabited, and the Girl Power rhetoric is so slavishly deployed you half expect a corporate slogan to appear over the end credits. Crawford and co-director Januel Mercado give Nakali the requisite candy-colored design elements, but visual inventiveness can only distract so long from a screenplay that mistakes earnestness for emotional depth. Most frustratingly, the memory-loss premise never produces the emotional resonance it promises. Forgetting someone should be devastating, yet here it mostly becomes another mechanism for delivering prepackaged affirmations. “Forgotten Island” may click with its core demographic of tween girls, but the heavy-handed messaging and synthetic sentiment make it feel less like an adventure than a diversity seminar with talking animals. (C MINUS.)
HEART OF THE BEAST—David (“Fury,” “End of Watch”) Ayer has spent his career making movies about men who live by codes they can no longer sustain: cops, soldiers, criminals, damaged professionals whose emotional vocabulary is more physical than verbal. “Heart of the Beast” pares that familiar Ayer territory down to its essentials. There aren’t any urban labyrinths or armies of interchangeable bad guys here: just a wounded man, an injured dog and several dozen miles of unforgiving wilderness. The result is one of Ayer’s most elemental and unexpectedly tender films. Brad Pitt plays James Belmont, a retired Special Forces veteran whose plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness while traveling with Odin, his former combat dog. Injured, under-supplied and increasingly exhausted, the two begin an arduous trek toward civilization. The survival mechanics are efficiently handled, but Ayer's true subject is the extraordinary bond between these two war vets. Stripped of the movie-star polish that can sometimes make even his most bruised characters seem invulnerable, Pitt allows James to look tired, frightened and genuinely hurt. Much of the performance is physical: the stiff movements, the accumulating wounds, the moments when sheer stubbornness is all that keeps him going. Yet Pitt also finds real tenderness beneath his character’s taciturn exterior. His scenes with Odin are remarkably intimate without becoming cute. And then there’s Uber, the German shepherd who plays Odin and may be the film's breakout star. He isn't simply a well-trained animal executing cues; he has a soulful screen presence that makes the relationship feel entirely reciprocal. A cock of the head, a wary glance, the quiet insistence with which he stays beside James—those little gestures communicate an astonishing amount. The movie depends on our belief that these two creatures understand one another, and Pitt and Uber make that seem effortless. Working amid spectacular New Zealand landscapes standing in for Alaska, Ayer gives the wilderness grandeur without turning it into postcard scenery and the action has a blunt, tactile immediacy. Most importantly, Ayer resists even a shred of irony. This is a film about loyalty, sacrifice and companionship, and it believes in all three without apology. After some impersonal studio assignments, “Beast” feels like a director rediscovering the simple pleasures of characterization and genuine emotion. Pitt is terrific, Uber is extraordinary and together they make this modest survival tale unexpectedly moving. (A MINUS.)
OTHER MOMMY—The most unnerving thing about director Rob Savage’s movie is how easily Jessica Chastain can make a familiar face seem unfamiliar. The Oscar-winning actress essentially plays two roles here: a loving mother and the supernatural impostor who assumes her identity. Chastain is a skilled enough performer to make the conceit more than a horror trick by finding tiny gradations in posture, expression and vocal inflection that suggest something has gone subtly, horribly wrong. Adapted from Josh Malerman's novel, the tale centers on Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark), a young girl whose mother (Chastain’s Ursula) is being stalked by an otherworldly entity that calls itself Other Mommy. Clark gives Bela a credible mixture of vulnerability, suspicion and dawning independence, making the girl's attachment to her mother—and the fear of losing her—the emotional core of the film. Savage handles the material with admirable restraint, allowing the house to become an increasingly hostile presence without drowning every scene in ominous music and frantic jump scares. Chastain's impressive dual performance, however, remains the principal draw. As Ursula, she conveys exhaustion, protectiveness and the panic of realizing that her daughter is frightened of something she can’t see. And Other Mommy frighteningly turns those same maternal qualities inside out. The movie eventually becomes more cliched than frightening, but Chastain and Clark keep it from becoming just another Blumhouse throwaway. (C PLUS.)
RESIDENT EVIL—The good news about Zach Cregger’s reboot of the long-running franchise is that it’s actually (and finally!) a watchable “Resident Evil” movie. The slightly less auspicious news is that Cregger, after the deliriously inventive “Barbarian” and spectacularly nasty “Weapons,” has elected to spend his newfound collateral adapting somebody else’s material. One can’t help imagining what fresh nightmare he might have cooked up on his own. Still, if Hollywood insists on feeding its up-and-coming auteurs existing I.P.s, this is the way to do it. Cregger takes the basic machinery of the series—Raccoon City, a viral outbreak, infected monsters, sundry corporate nightmares—and gives it something the previous films lacked: an actual personality. Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier making a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital when the outbreak occurs, turning an ordinary workday into a prolonged exercise in not getting eaten, infected or otherwise horribly dismembered. Bryan isn’t some prepackaged action hero: he’s an ordinary guy thrown into an extraordinary mess which makes his increasingly desperate survival attempts more involving than the usual videogame avatar machismo. Cregger is particularly adept at keeping his audience off balance. A scene that begins as straightforward horror can suddenly veer into grotesquerie, black comedy or something genuinely disturbing. The monsters are suitably repulsive, but the real pleasure lies in Cregger's delight in toying with our expectations. Zach Cherry and Paul Walter Hauser contribute neatly calibrated comic relief without making the whole thing feel like a spoof. All the previous “Resident Evil" movies treated their source material as either fanboy obligation or an excuse for digital mayhem. Cregger doesn't erase the game's DNA, he simply makes it cinematic. It isn't as personal, audacious or flat-out weird as his previous films, but maybe that's the price of renting rather than owning the house. (B.)
SHOAH--There are documentaries that record history, some that interpret it and Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” which seems to demand that history surrender its corpse. Released in 1985 after more than a decade of research, shooting and editing, this nine-and-a-half-hour magnum opus about the Nazi extermination of European Jewry isn’t merely a documentary about the Holocaust. It’s one of the rare films that fundamentally alters our understanding of what cinema can do, and what it may be morally required to do. Lanzmann’s radical conceit was also a rebuke to conventional historical filmmaking. There would be no newsreel footage of liberated camps, no photographs of corpses, no omniscient narrator explaining what we already know. Instead, it returns to the sites of extermination as they exist in the present and asks the living to summon the dead. Survivors—former Nazis, Polish bystanders, railway workers, resistance figures and historians—reconstruct piece by piece the machinery that murdered six million Jews. The effect is almost perversely cinematic. A train moves through the Polish countryside. Grass ripples where a killing center once stood. A barber named Abraham Bomba describes cutting the hair of women who were moments away from entering the gas chamber. A former railwayman recalls transporting Jews toward their deaths. Simon Srebnik, one of the few survivors of Chełmno, returns to the landscape where he’d been forced as a boy to dispose of Jewish corpses. Nothing announces itself as spectacle; everything becomes spectacle because Lanzmann refuses to manufacture it. This is where “Shoah” becomes something more than oral history. Lanzmann understands that memory isn’t a transparent window onto the past, it’s a landscape of wounds, hesitations, repetitions and silences. He allows people to struggle for words, sometimes pressing them. He’ll let an anecdote circle back upon itself until an apparently ordinary detail becomes unbearable. The work's extraordinary duration isn’t self-indulgence; time itself becomes an ethical instrument. We're not allowed the comforting compression by which mass murder becomes a chapter in a textbook. Nor does Lanzmann permit the Holocaust to remain an abstraction called "history." His subject is the physical process of extermination: the trains, the selections, the gas chambers, the Sonderkommando, the cremation of bodies, the destruction of evidence. The Nazis sought not only to murder their victims but erase all traces of their crimes. Lanzmann answers that campaign of erasure with an almost ferocious act of cinematic remembrance. His most extraordinary achievement may be the way he makes absence visible. There aren’t any bodies because there were no bodies to film. Instead there are landscapes, forests, railway lines, fields, villages, rivers. The banality of those images is precisely what makes them so terrifying. The killings happened here. People lived here. People still live here. The world didn’t become visibly different after the crimes. And Lanzmann's camera never allows us the easy consolation of distance. His compositions are often austere, even beautiful, but beauty is never permitted to become prettification. The present day images and the voices from the past exist in an unnerving collision. What we see is ordinary; what we hear is almost impossible to comprehend. That collision is the movie’s great formal invention. Lanzmann doesn’t illustrate testimony, he creates a tension between image and voice in which neither can fully contain the other. A face speaks; a landscape listens; a train passes; a memory returns. Cinema becomes an encounter rather than an explanation. The result is exhausting, hypnotic and ultimately overwhelming not because Lanzmann assaults the viewer with images of atrocity, but because he withholds them. He understands that imagination, confronted with precise testimony and empty space, can be more devastating than any archival footage. Nearly a century after the Holocaust, “Shoah” has lost none of its terrible immediacy. If anything, its refusal to turn atrocity into safely concluded history has become even more important. By transforming testimony into presence and absence into evidence, it’s an investigation of the past that refuses to ever become the past. Calling it "great" makes the word sound absurdly inadequate. Yes, it’s monumental, but monuments can become objects one simply admires from a distance. Lanzmann made something more demanding: a monument that speaks, remembers, accuses and insists that we listen. He doesn’t ask us to imagine what happened, he makes forgetting impossible. The Criterion Collection box set includes three supplementary Lanzmann films (“A Visitor from the Living,” “Sobibor, October 14, 1943” and “The Karski Report”); a 2003 interview with Lanzmann; a conversation between Lanzmann and critic Serge Toubiana; an interview with director Arnaud (“A Christmas Tale,” “Kings and Queen”) Desplechin and Caroline Champetier who worked as an assistant camera person on “Shoah;” Guillaume Ribot’s 2025 film “All I Had Was Nothingness” about “Shoah”’s production; and an essay by critic/filmmaker Kent Jones. (A PLUS.)
THE SOCIAL RECKONING—You can almost hear the gears turning in an Aaron Sorkin movie. Ideas collide, sentences accelerate and people who spend their entire lives thinking too much suddenly find themselves talking faster than anyone else in the room. At his best, Sorkin makes argument itself a form of action. This follow-up to 2010’s “The Social Network” is Sorkin at his best. The protagonist this time is Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), a data engineer who, after discovering the extent to which the company understands the damage its platforms can cause, enlists Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) to help expose them. Sorkin’s screenplay turns an accumulation of documents, testimony and algorithmic minutiae into something akin to a conspiracy thriller with information functioning as the weapon and journalism as the counterattack. It’s also a remarkably organic continuation of Sorkin’s career-long fascination with institutions: the White House in “The West Wing,” major league baseball in “Moneyball,” Steve Jobs and Apple, the courtroom and now the dangers of social media. His films and TV shows have frequently been accused of making everyone sound like “Aaron Sorkin,” but characters who believe that words still have the power to change things is never a bad idea. That faith seems quaint and almost touching here. Madison, coming off her Oscar-winning performance in “Anora,” helps give the movie a center of gravity. She plays Haugen as an intensely private, analytical woman whose insider knowledge gives her an obligation she can’t escape. White’s journalist is appealingly rumpled, and Jeremy Strong essays a bone-chilling study in corporate malfeasance as Mark Zuckerberg. Wunmi Mosaku, Betty Gilpin, Bill Burr and Billy Magnussen contribute sharp supporting, each finding their own individual space within Sorkin's verbal ecosystem. What makes "The Social Reckoning” uniquely satisfying is that Sorkin isn't merely revisiting “The Social Network,” he's answering it. The first movie was about the creation of an empire; “Reckoning” is about living with the nightmare it eventually became. (B PLUS.)
TWO PROSECUTORS--Sergei (“Donbass,” “The Kiev Trial”) Loznitsa’s severe, hypnotic and chillingly alive historical drama makes the past feel like a nightmare someone has neglected to wake you from. Set at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937, it turns bureaucracy into an instrument of suspense and moral courage into an almost unimaginable act of rebellion. A young Soviet prosecutor, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), receives a letter written in blood by Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), an old Bolshevik who claims he’s been tortured and unjustly imprisoned. Kornyev, still idealistic enough to believe that the Soviet legal system might actually be capable of correcting an injustice, decides to investigate. What follows is a journey through an increasingly impenetrable maze of officials, corridors, waiting rooms and evasions, eventually leading Kornyev to Moscow and the formidable General Vyshynsky (Anatoliy Beliy). Loznitsa, whose films have repeatedly examined the machinery of political violence, understands how much more frightening oppression can be when nobody raises their voice. “Two Prosecutors” is constructed from long, meticulously choreographed takes in which doors close, telephones ring, officials confer and seemingly innocuous conversations acquire the menace of death sentences. The system doesn’t merely punish dissent, it makes truth itself administratively impossible. Kuznetsov gives a beautifully restrained performance, playing Kornyev not as a conventional heroic dissident but as something more complicated and tragic: a decent man whose faith in the principles of the system haven’t caught up with the reality of the system itself. And Filippenko gives Stepniak an almost spectral authority, a man already half-destroyed by the machinery he once served. Their encounters have the eerie quality of two men speaking across the widening abyss between ideology and experience. The austere compositions, Oleg Mutu’s boxy Academy-ratio cinematography and Danielius Kokanauskis’s razor sharp editing help create a world in which physical space seems to contract around Kornyev. The result is at once political thriller and Kafkaesque black humor—the comedy of a nation in which absurdity has become indistinguishable from terror. Criterion Premieres’ Blu-Ray includes an interview with Loznitsa, notes by critic Beatrice Loayza and the theatrical trailer. (A.)
VERITY—Adapted from Colleen (“The Housemaid”) Hoover’s best-selling novel, Michael Showalter’s glossy, unapologetically disreputable thriller wisely never takes itself too seriously. A tale of literary deception, domestic peril and sexual intrigue, it has enough twists to keep you guessing, even when the most outrageous revelations threaten to overwhelm the psychological dimensions. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen, a struggling novelist hired by Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) to finish the remaining book in a lucrative series written by his wife Verity (Anne Hathaway) who’s been incapacitated by a mysterious accident. Installed in the Crawfords’ lakeside Vermont McMansion, Lowen discovers an unpublished manuscript that casts disturbing light on Verity’s marriage, medical history and a possible connection between her fiction and private life. What begins as a literary assignment soon becomes a dangerous exercise in voyeurism with Lowen increasingly unsure whom to believe or trust. Showalter (whose credits include “The Big Sick,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “Hello, My Name is Doris”) creates a suitably sinister atmosphere with the understanding that a certain amount of trashy excess is all part of the fun. An actress of remarkable subtlety, Johnson makes even the most passive-seeming characters quietly absorbing. Her slightly detached, almost drowsy screen presence proves ideal for Lowen whose curiosity gradually turns into something approximating obsession. Johnson never overplays Lowen’s mounting anxiety, letting uncertainty flicker across her face and making the character’s shifting alliances more persuasive than some of the screenplay’s more baroque flourishes. Hathaway clearly relishes her more flamboyant role, and Hartnett imbues Jeremy with an aptly unsettling charm. If some of the plotting feels more engineered than earned, “Verity” still manages to deliver an entertainingly nasty slice of pop filmmaking. (B.)
---Milan Paurich
