NEW THIS WEEK (9/25) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
CAREFUL—Guy Maddin’s 1992 cult classic may be the most perfect introduction to this Winnipeg fabulist imaginable. For newbies, it offers nearly everything that makes his cinema so peculiar and irresistible: the deliberately antiquated black-and-white imagery, the painted theatricality of the sets, the hysterical melodrama, the sudden eruptions of Surrealism and the sensation that a lost film has been unearthed from a damaged archive and was somehow developed yesterday. Yet “Careful” isn't some highfalutin art school exercise in retro style. Beneath the lovingly restored antique surface beats a serious romantic imagination. The story takes place in the Alpine village of Tolzbad where silence isn’t just a social courtesy, but a condition of survival. The inhabitants have learned to suppress speech, laughter and other forms of emotional expression lest an avalanche be provoked. From this wonderfully absurd premise, Maddin constructs a world in which repression becomes both existential joke and a governing metaphysic. Love and desire are naturally dangerous; even mild displays of happiness seem capable of bringing the mountain down. The result is a Gothic fairy tale filtered through the visual grammar of silent cinema and early sound melodrama. Maddin shoots and edits as though cinematic modernism never happened—or more precisely, as though it happened somewhere else and he decided to resurrect an alternative history of motion pictures from its most feverish fragments. His images possess the formal stiffness of old studio pictures while continually threatening to dissolve into dream. Painted backdrops, exaggerated performances, iris effects, abrupt intertitles and aggressively artificial landscapes don't disguise the movie's unreality; they make unreality its subject. That’s what makes it such a useful Maddin entry point. The eccentricities are instantly apparent, but they’re never just eccentricities. His films are built around the strange proposition that artificiality can produce emotional truth better than realism. The more obviously fabricated his worlds become, the more intensely they express jealousy, longing, shame and grief. “Careful” understands melodrama as a language of extremity, then pushes that language until it begins to resemble hallucination. There’s also something wonderfully Canadian about Maddin's particular brand of Gothic: the snowbound isolation, the claustrophobic communities, the sense of civilization perched precariously above some vast wilderness. Tolzbad feels like a village preserved in aspic, except that the gelatin mold is beginning to crack. It’s funny without being merely whimsical, beautiful without feeling precious and grotesque without ever becoming nihilistic. And beneath all those improbable surfaces is a director who had already discovered his great subject: the perilous distance between what people feel and what they’re permitted to say. Once you’ve entered Tolzbad’s fractured fairytale universe, it begins to feel an awful lot like home. Kino Lorber’s new Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary track with Maddin and screenwriter George Toles; “Odilon Redon, or The Eye a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity,” a 1995 Maddin short; an hour long featurette, “Guy Maddin: Waiting for Twilight;” and the 2026 re-release trailer. (A.)
CHARLIE HARPER—Harper (Emilia Jones) and Charlie (Nick Robinson) are a young couple who meet, leave their old lives behind and try to make a go of it in a new city. Harper pursues a career as a chef while Charlie struggles to find his footing. Naturally the relationship suffers. The film has a rooting interest in the messy transition from youthful romance to adult responsibility, but its observations never rise above the merely trite. Harper and Charlie’s problems are relatable, they’re just not very compelling. Directors Mac Eldridge and Tom Dean’s low-key approach contributes to a general feeling of ennui. The result is earnest and instantly forgettable, a love story that confuses understatement with depth and sincerity with insight. Jones and Robinson try giving it a pulse: maybe they would have been better served by a movie with something more interesting to say. (C MINUS.)
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.)
HA-CHAN, SHAKE YOUR BOOTY!—Director Josef Kubota Wladyka leaves behind the hard-edged urban crime dramas of “Manos Sucias” and “Catch the Fair One” for something looser, warmer and more interested in emotional recovery than narrative urgency. It’s a modest character study set against Tokyo’s ballroom dance culture where movement becomes both social outlet and a means of processing grief. Haru (Rinko Kikuchi) and Luis (Alejandro Edda) are fiercely competitive friends and fellow dancers whose lives revolve around the ballroom scene. After a personal tragedy sends Haru into early retirement, Luis and the other dancers gradually persuade her to return to the studio. She soon becomes infatuated by a new instructor (Alberto Guerra), forcing her to confront feelings she’s been keeping at arm’s length. Wladyka sensibly resists turning Haru’s recovery into a conventional inspirational arc. The dancing is energetic without becoming a substitute for characterization, and the film is most persuasive when observing the social rituals by which people form makeshift communities. If "Shake Your Booty!” occasionally feels slight, Wladyka’s palpable affection for his characters and the conviction that pleasure can be a form of healing makes this a modestly agreeable divertissement.
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.)
PRIMETIME—In Lance Oppenheim’s riveting docudrama, Robert Pattinson’s performance is one of those supremely unnerving pieces of thespian shape-shifting that makes you wonder where the actor ends and the character begins. As a semi-fictionalized version of Chris Hansen, the TV journalist who turned the exposure of would-be child predators into appointment television, Pattinson gives the role an almost ghoulish charisma (think Jerry Maguire crossed with Count Dracula). Documentary filmmaker Oppenheim has chosen an appropriately slippery subject for his narrative feature debut. It’s loosely based on the real-life machinery behind NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” and, more specifically, the disastrous 2006 sting operation that culminated in the death of Texas assistant district attorney Bill Conradt. The movie compresses and fictionalizes events, but its basic trajectory is chillingly recognizable. Hansen and his producers devise increasingly elaborate traps, recruit young decoys, collaborate uneasily with an online vigilante organization and pursue ratings as aggressively as they do the predators. What begins as a righteous crusade against pedophiles gradually acquires the queasy logic of ratings-driven entertainment: that palpable tension gives the movie its sardonic brio. Oppenheim isn't merely asking whether Hansen's methods were ethical, he's interested in the peculiar American appetite that transformed his show into must-see TV. Merritt Wever is terrific as the show’s ratings-obsessed producer, and Skyler Gisondo brings a discomfiting innocence to the young actor recruited for the stings. Most impressive is the way Oppenheim refuses to turn the material into either a sermon or lurid procedural. His film has the observational alertness of a documentary but the exhilarating freedom of pulp fiction. Pattinson's Hansen becomes less a portrait of a celebrity journalist than a walking embodiment of television's ability to convert moral certainty into exploitation. At 110 minutes, it moves with unusual confidence: funny when it should be, disturbing when it needs to be and increasingly disturbing when those two registers start overlapping. It’s not simply a movie about “To Catch a Predator,” it’s about why we watched in the first place. (A MINUS.)
THE STUNT DRIVER—The improbable career of Canadian daredevil Ken Carter is the subject of director Michael (“Goon,” “Stuber”) Dowse’s genial comedy about a particular kind of lunacy that passes for ambition when there’s a camera running. Set in the 1970’s, it follows motorcycle stuntman Carter (Jay Baruchel) whose latest harebrained scheme is considerably more ambitious than his previous brushes with death: driving a rocket-powered car across the Saint Lawrence River from a 90-foot-high ramp. Carter is appealingly foolish, and Baruchel plays him with the right mix of nervous energy and wounded pride. Ed Helms, Ben Foster and Dan Bakkedahl provide able comic support while Laurence Leboeuf gives the proceedings much-needed emotional ballast. The movie treats Carter’s grandiose schemes as both ridiculous and oddly heroic: his obsession with performing the impossible has less to do with glory than a stubborn refusal to accept the ordinary limits imposed on him. Dowse has a good eye for the absurd spectacle of a man preparing to risk his life for an idea that everyone else regards as insane. The period details are pleasingly nostalgic, the jokes mostly land and the inevitable setbacks arrive with clockwork precision. While hardly a daredevil piece of filmmaking, it has enough personality, good humor and affection for its reckless protagonist to make this eccentric Canuck footnote to stunt history worth the ride. (B MINUS.)
YOU HAD TO BE THERE--The sheer improbability of an early ‘70s Toronto production of “Godspell” is enough to make hindsight seem like cheating. Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Victor Garber and Andrea Martin were all in the same cast, long before any of them became household names—and that’s only the beginning of the talent roll call. Nick Davis’s documentary lovingly recounts the brief, improbable moment when a bunch of young Canadian actors discovered they might actually be onto something. The movie is steeped in the kind of affection that can make even the most modest theatrical anecdote feel momentous. Davis captures the peculiar exhilaration of being young, ambitious and surrounded by people who weren’t just talented but genuinely, riotously funny. The 1972 Toronto “Godspell” becomes less a footnote in Canadian theater history than a petri dish for an astonishing amount of future comedy stars. Short, Levy, Garber and Martin are delightful interview subjects because they can still summon the sensation of those halcyon days: the friendships, rivalries and improvisations. The original production's lack of surviving visual material makes Short's old audio recordings especially precious. (Photographs and other archival material help Davis evoke an event we can’t actually see.) The film's principal drawback is one of timing. Lawrence Kasdan’s recent doc, “Marty: Life is Short,” covered a considerable amount of this territory, particularly Short's Toronto years and his remarkably talented circle of friends. Accordingly, “You Had to Be There” feels less like a discovery than a return visit. But return visits can still be immensely pleasurable when the company is this charming. Davis reminds us that, once upon a time, something truly magical happened in a Toronto theater. The title may sound like a boast, but by the end it feels more like a fond invitation. (B PLUS.)
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COYOTE VS. ACME--There's something deliciously apt about a movie in which an abused little guy takes on a vast corporation nearly being a corporate casualty itself. Three years after Warner Brothers shelved "Coyote Vs. Acme" for a tax write-off, Wile E. Coyote and director Dave Green get the last laugh. Green's film takes its inspiration from Ian Frazier’s wonderfully deadpan 1990 New Yorker story that imagined a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation. After another futile attempt to catch the Road Runner ends with the usual plethora of explosions, anvil droppings and bodily deformation, Wile E. hires down on his luck attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to sue Acme for defective merchandise. Forte's Kevin is an amiably schlubby sad sack whose professional humiliations parallel Wile E.’s endless physical humiliations, and the two make an unexpectedly touching odd couple. Lana Condor (Kevin’s idealistic niece) and John Cena (a slickster Acme lawyer) provide able human support, while Eric Bauza’s multiple Looney Tunes voices remind us that these characters still possess comic DNA that no corporate rebranding can ever vanquish. Green also understands an essential rule: don't over-explain Wile E. who remains silent throughout, communicating entirely through gestures and facial expressions. The slapstick shenanigans occasionally achieve the glorious lunacy of the Chuck Jones originals, and the integration of animation and live action is remarkably seamless. In fact, it may be the wittiest and arguably best live-action/animation hybrid since "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." It's not as revolutionary as that 1988 landmark, but it has something increasingly rare in family entertainment: jokes written for grown-ups that don't ignore children. (A 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.)
THE ODYSSEY--Christopher Nolan has never mistaken moderation for a virtue, and the Oscar-winning director scales Homer's foundational text with the grit and determination of a filmmaker convinced that every myth should be experienced at maximum volume (and length). The result is frequently spectacular, intermittently exhilarating and, at nearly every turn, exhausting: a monument to cinematic ambition that's easier to admire than love. Matt Damon brings a weathered
intelligence to Odysseus, the battle-scarred king of Ithaca whose decade-long voyage home after the Trojan War becomes a gauntlet of monsters, shipwrecks, seductive goddesses and divine interference. Back in Ithaca, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) fends off increasingly aggressive suitors while her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), searches for news of the father he scarcely remembers. Around them swirl gods, kings and mortals played by a cast so lavishly stocked with marquee names (Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theon, et al) that one eventually stops trying to keep score. Indeed, Nolan's parade of celebrity cameos becomes its own unintended spectacle. Every few minutes another recognizable face materializes for a scene or two before vanishing again, producing the same distracting effect as John Wayne turning up as a Roman centurion at the Crucifixion in George Stevens' "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Instead of enriching Homer's world, the procession of stars repeatedly nudges viewers out of it. No one stages large-format spectacle with Nolan's technical assurance, though. The sea battles roar, the cyclopean landscapes dwarf humanity and the practical effects possess a tactile grandeur that computer-generated fantasy often lacks. Yet the movie remains oddly resistant to emotional intimacy. Nolan is forever explaining destiny, honor and memory while rarely allowing his characters to inhabit them as flesh-and-blood people rather than ideas in armor. It's difficult not to be reminded of 2024's "The Return" in which Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche distilled the same source material into a lean, deeply human drama that proved more moving at a fraction of this film's budget (and nearly three-hour run time). For Nolan acolytes, "The Odyssey" will doubtless confirm his status as modern cinema's reigning architect of gigantism. For everyone else, it may feel like another reminder that bigger canvases don't automatically produce deeper emotions. Homer survives the treatment but just barely, emerging from beneath layers of IMAX grandeur and directorial self-regard nearly as formidable as the trials faced by Odysseus himself. (B MINUS.)
PRACTICAL MAGIC 2--There are bad ideas for movie sequels, and then there’s “Practical Magic 2.” The 1998 original was hardly some beloved classic awaiting rediscovery. It was actually pretty terrible: a tonally confused supernatural romantic comedy that failed to make much of a dent at the box office. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman reprise their roles as sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, and the always
welcome Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing return as their witchy aunts. The story picks up with the Owens women confronting another chapter in their family's centuries-old curse after Sally's daughter Kylie (Joey King) discovers secrets about the origins of their magic and begins evincing dangerous abilities of her own. The resulting quest takes the family from Massachusetts to Great Britain where apparently the solution to generations of supernatural dysfunction has been waiting all along. Susanne (“Brothers,” “After the Wedding”) Bier, a director capable of considerably more emotional acuity, seems hamstrung by a screenplay that substitutes mythology for character and CGI for atmosphere. New additions to the cast (King, Lee Pace and Maisie Williams) don’t leave much of an impression while Bullock and Kidman are left to manufacture chemistry on demand. The first movie at least had the advantage of being weirdly sincere about its sisterhood themes even if it was a schizophrenic mess. The follow-up seems less like a continuation than a corporate séance: summon two recognizable stars, exhume a quarter-century-old I.P. and hope that nostalgia will perform the magic the filmmakers didn't. Considering the dubious artistic quality and modest commercial legacy of the original, the most mysterious thing about this sequel is how it was ever conjured in the first place. (C MINUS.)
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.)
RUNNER--Hank Malone (Alan Ritchson), a former soldier turned delivery driver, is handed the task of transporting a life-saving liver to a sick little girl. Along the way, he’s obliged to escort Ben Bishop (Owen Wilson), the twitchy, mysterious fellow who brought him the precious cargo while a gang of mercenaries tries to make off with the organ. The liver, naturally, becomes the most valuable piece of luggage in the Western Hemisphere. Directed by former stuntman Scott Waugh who’s made a career out of turning kinetic mayhem into marketable concepts (“Act of Valor,” “Need for Speed,” “Hidden Strike”), “Runner” is professionally assembled but depressingly generic. The chases are loud, the bullets plentiful and the geography of the action semi-incomprehensible, but the movie never discovers the manic comic energy it promises. Instead it has the mechanical efficiency of a theme-park ride whose operator keeps checking his watch. Worse, the script treats its absurd premise with such solemnity
that you begin hoping someone will accidentally trip over the liver. As Hank’s reluctant partner, Wilson supplies some of his trademark deadpan eccentricity but seems stranded in a film that doesn't know what do with him. Ritchson remains an enormously appealing screen presence: handsome, physically imposing and blessed with the kind of easygoing affability that even survives bad dialogue and worse explosions. He’s been knocking around for years, and this only reinforces the suspicion that Ritchson is still waiting for that one big screen role capable of turning him into a genuine movie star. (D PLUS.)
SHAUN THE SHEEP: THE BEAST OF MOSSY BOTTOM—Shaun and his sheep pals may be mute, but they’ve never had trouble communicating. “The Beast of Mossy Bottom” proves once again that a good sight gag can travel farther than reams of dialogue. The third feature starring the resourceful little troublemaker after “Shaun the Sheep Movie” (2015) and “Farmageddon” (2019) is a modestly scaled delight: sweet, silly and just spooky enough to make Halloween seem like a suitable occasion for livestock mischief. When the Farmer accidentally destroys the flock’s pumpkin patch, Shaun decides he can fix everything by adopting the guise of a mad scientist to manufacture replacements. Soon a mysterious beast begins prowling the woods around Mossingham, turning a gourd problem into a mini monster movie. Directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker keep the animation impressively tactile with every woolly body, muddy field and handmade contraption possessing the slight imperfections that make stop-motion feel so alive. It can’t, however, escape the long shadow of its predecessors. The first two films had a freshness and comic momentum that made Shaun’s leap from television to the big screen feel almost miraculous while “Mossy Bottom” is smaller and more familiar. The jokes occasionally seem recycled, and the story is content to hit the expected beats. But familiarity isn’t fatal when the execution is this amiable. This might not be the best big-screen “Shaun,” but it’s an agreeable little Halloween treat with enough wit, craftsmanship and charm to leave you smiling. (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.)
SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY--Destin Daniel Cretton’s "Brand New Day" arrives with the soft thud of a franchise refusing to acknowledge how tired it's become, and how tired we've become of it. Cretton, who brought a welcome tensile restraint to "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" (2021) again demonstrates a sure hand for staging action that actually registers as space rather than noise. But even his calm efficiency can’t fully counteract the sense that this is a series running on contractual obligation rather than narrative necessity.
Tom Holland returns as Peter Parker, and the performance--once spry, boyish, even genuinely affecting--now feels locked into a kind of unctuous autopilot: dutiful, perennially earnest and increasingly difficult to take seriously as anything more than Marvel’s most carefully managed mascot. The film leans hard on his supposed relatability, though it increasingly resembles a corporate talking point rather than a character trait. The story finds Peter attempting, once again, to reconstruct a life in fragments after the fallout of multiverse chaos and trying to reconnect with MJ (Zendaya) in a relationship strained into narrative convenience. Jacob Batalon returns as Ned, though the role has been reduced to a kind of narrative pressure valve to release jokes whenever the emotional circuitry starts to flicker. Cretton’s direction briefly steadies the machine. A sequence set in an abandoned transit hub has a clarity and spatial logic that suggests what these movies might look like if they trusted less in spectacle overload. But the script, assembled with the usual committee impersonality, keeps collapsing back into obligation: setup, quip, escalation, multiverse tease, repeat. What remains is a sequel that's competently made but emotionally airless, another entry in a saga that mistakes continuity for momentum. By the end, “Brand New Day” feels less like a promise than a corporate scheduling memo. (C.)
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.)
THE WEIGHT—Set 1933 Oregon, director Padraic McKinley’s film initially seems like it’s going to be another grim Depression-era drama about good men being ground down by an unforgiving system. Part prison picture, survival adventure and morality tale, it’s instead a gripping, beautifully acted cross between “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Deliverance.” McKinley has made precisely the type of movie Hollywood used to make, adding to its bittersweet quality. Ethan Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, a father torn from his young daughter and sentenced to a brutal work camp on trumped-up charges. The warden (Russell Crowe) offers Murphy a tantalizing proposition: smuggle gold through 100 miles of dangerous wilderness and earn an early release. Murphy chooses three fellow prisoners to accompany him—Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen)—and the expedition becomes an increasingly precarious alliance. An Indigenous woman, Anna (Julia Jones) joins them along the way, further complicating the already fragile group dynamics. The wilderness isn't merely picturesque scenery but an antagonist in its own right, and the work camp has the institutional brutality of a classic prison flick. Once the men enter the wild, hunger, fear and greed begin eroding whatever bonds of fellowship they once possessed. Murphy's determination to get back to his daughter increasingly collides with the moral compromises demanded by his mission. Hawke is terrific, bringing his customary wounded decency and simmering stubbornness to the role. Crowe is equally solid in a nicely restrained turn as a warden whose authority has become inseparable from his capacity for cruelty. “The Weight” has the unfashionable virtue of believing that a serious adult film can simply tell a good story and let its cast do the rest. Thirty-odd years ago, this would have been a major-studio release and a potential awards contender. Now it's merely “content” that’s being given a brief multiplex detour before (hopefully) finding its true audience on VOD and streaming. It deserves better, and so does the type of moviemaking it represents. (B PLUS.)
---Milan Paurich
