NEW THIS WEEK (10/2) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
BEWARE BOIUNA—A humanitarian medical mission along the Curuçá River runs afoul of a colossal mythical serpent who’s none too pleased about their intrusion into its territory. While a decent enough premise for a series of chases, attacks and increasingly frantic attempts to get out alive, the film’s imagination seems to have gone missing somewhere along the way. Director Mike P. Nelson, who helmed the surprisingly effective 2021 “Wrong Turn” reboot, knows his way around a grisly setpiece, and there are intermittent flashes of nasty fun. But he fails to make the most of the Amazon setting’s atmospheric possibilities, and the titular snake's appearances lack any sense of terror or owe. At a time when micro-budgeted horror flicks (e.g.“Obsession” and “Backrooms”) are reinventing the genre, “Beware Boiúna” is merely content to recycle the most hackneyed conventions. (C MINUS.)
DIGGER—Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s grandiose end-of-the-world satire seems determined to remind us just how important it is while struggling to be funny, moving or even remotely coherent. The Oscar-winning director of “The Revenant,” “Birdman” and “Babel” has never been accused of thinking small, and his latest film is certainly ambitious. Unfortunately, ambition is pretty much the only thing it has going for it. Tom Cruise stars as Digger Rockwell, an obscenely wealthy oil baron whose environmental recklessness has precipitated a global catastrophe. With civilization teetering on the edge of collapse, Digger embarks on an increasingly desperate campaign to remake himself as humanity’s savior. A formidable supporting cast (including Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller and Michael Stuhlbarg) strains under the weight of a movie that mistakes its excesses for insight. Iñárritu has previously demonstrated a gift for combining technical bravura with emotional and intellectual substance: “Birdman” turned thespian vanity into a dazzling exercise in cinematic illusion, and “Babel” found compelling human drama in a mosaic of global interconnectedness. But “Digger” feels like an overextended sketch in search of a punch line, and the scattershot approach leaves little room for either genuine wit or outrage. Cruise is almost unrecognizable beneath elaborate old-man prosthetics which are more distracting than convincing. (His exaggerated Southern accent doesn’t help matters.) For all its lofty intentions, this is a remarkably dispiriting misfire: a would-be comic apocalypse that leaves its audience impatiently waiting for the end credits to arrive. (C MINUS.) https://youtu.be/job8V254NAE?si=yPq-fxZvbeNrB8dn
JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR—In 1973, “Jesus Christ Superstar” seemed like the apotheosis of hippy-dippy posturing: Jesus as rock star; Judas as the aggrieved manager; apostles wandering around the desert in jeans and peasant blouses; and Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s “Gospel According to FM Radio” score. Yet viewed today, this irreverent collision of Broadway, Christianity and the 1970’s counterculture looks considerably better than it did at the time. Adapted from the stage hit and even more successful concept album, it’s actually a rather savvy feat of adaptation. Instead of disguising the theatrical origins, director Norman Jewison explodes them into the landscape. The production was shot entirely on location in Israel, and Douglas Slocombe’s widescreen cinematography makes the desert, caves and ancient ruins into a natural sound stage. Thanks to the passage of time, a dated exercise in countercultural self-consciousness has magically transformed into a nostalgic period piece/cultural artifact. The jeans, flowing hair and bare feet remain unmistakably ‘70s, but they also give the movie a personality that an antiseptically “timeless” Biblical epic could have never achieved. Jewison’s anachronisms aren't merely meta jokes; they help establish a deliberate distance between “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and the iconography surrounding it. The performances are better than remembered, too. Ted Neeley’s Jesus is aptly beatific without becoming overly precious; Carl Anderson gives Judas an impressive combination of wounded intelligence and volcanic energy; and Yvonne Elliman’s Mary Magdalene remains the emotional center, especially in “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.” Jewison understood that his real subject wasn't theology but celebrity: what happens when a charismatic young man acquires a following so enormous that his message becomes inseparable from the spectacle surrounding him. The crucifixion story becomes a cautionary tale about fame, political paranoia and the machinery of public adoration. There are still moments when “Superstar” threatens to tip into camp—particularly during Josh Mostel’s flamboyant King Herod number—and the hippie trappings haven't become less hippie-ish. But the film’s intrinsic sincerity has outlived its dated fashions. What felt like a pretentious exploitation of a pop phenomenon fifty-plus years ago turns out to be one of Jewison's most accomplished, visually striking works. The KL Studio Classics’ Blu-Ray comes with three separate audio commentary tracks with, respectively, Jewison and Neeley, historian Gary Gerani and critic Simon Abrams; an interview with Rice; the theatrical trailer; and a new audio mix by renowned musician/engineer Brian Kehew. (A MINUS.)
JOHNNY HANDSOME--Walter Hill has always been a classical filmmaker who understood that westerns, crime dramas and action flicks were all variations on the same lonely American themes. By the time “Johnny Handsome” arrived in 1989, however, the film industry had begun drifting toward flashier, more self-conscious entertainments, and Hill's austere professionalism seemed unfashionably Old School. Adapted from John Godey's novel, it follows New Orleans career criminal Johnny (Mickey Rourke) whose severely disfigured face has made him an object of ridicule since birth. Betrayed during a robbery by fellow thieves (Ellen Barkin and Lance Henriksen), Johnny survives prison and undergoes experimental reconstructive surgery. With a new face and the ministrations of a sympathetic social worker (Elizabeth McGovern), he attempts to escape his past. Unfortunately, vengeance proves every bit as seductive as redemption, much to the chagrin of a veteran police lieutenant (Morgan Freeman) who doubts that Johnny’s changed face can alter his damaged soul. Hill directs with the economy that's always distinguished his work: there isn't a wasted camera movement or extraneous line of dialogue. Working with cinematographer Matthew F. Leonetti, he transforms New Orleans into a humid nocturnal dreamscape of steel blue shadows, rain-slicked streets and anonymous industrial spaces that feel suspended somewhere between classic noir and the exhausted hangover of the Reagan era. Rourke gives one of his best late-'80s performances, suppressing his Method mannerisms beneath layers of wounded pride and cautious optimism. Freeman supplies his usual understated gravitas while Barkin and Henriksen relish their reptilian amorality without lapsing into caricature. Unfortunately, the movie never quite reconciles its competing impulses. The psychological drama occasionally yields to familiar revenge tropes, muting the emotional complexity of its haunting premise. But in today's landscape of franchise uniformity, Hill's commitment to muscular storytelling, moral ambiguity and visual precision feels almost radical. While it doesn’t rank alongside "The Driver," "The Warriors," "Southern Comfort," "The Long Riders" or "48 Hrs.," it stands as an elegiac reminder of a director whose kind of lean, literate American genre cinema was already becoming an endangered species. Included on the KL Studio Classics’ Blu-Ray are two commentary tracks, one featuring filmmaker Edgar Pablos with historians Howard S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson, and the other by critics Alain Silver and James Ursini; interviews with screenwriter Ken Friedman, makeup artist Michael Westmore and stuntman Allan Graf; a featurette (“Codes to Live by”) with Hill’s reflections on the film; and the original theatrical trailer. (B PLUS.)
ROLLING LOUD: THE MOVIE—A familiar sitcom premise—an overprotective father tries connecting with his teenage son—is dropped into a Miami hip-hop festival. The results are intermittently amusing and, at 90-odd minutes, quasi-tolerable. Inspired by a true story, director Jeremy Garlic’s movie follows a dad (Owen Wilson) who sneaks his 13-year-old son (Christian Convery) into the sprawling, decidedly adult Rolling Loud festival hoping to bridge the generation gap. Naturally things go spectacularly wrong. Wilson, whose amiable befuddlement has sustained much better comedies, remains an appealing screen presence even if the screenplay gives him precious little to work with. The festival setting ultimately proves more distracting than liberating, and the parade of musical guests (including Ski Mask the Slump God and Travis Scott) feel like promotional interruptions in search of a film. The attempts to find humor in the collision between parental anxiety and contemporary hip-hop culture are similarly hit-or-miss. There’s a reasonably sweet father-son story buried somewhere beneath all the noise, and Wilson's understated comic instincts intermittently bring it into focus. But “Rolling Loud” is less interested in developing its central relationship than piling on increasingly frantic festival mishaps. The movie’s heart is in the right place, even though its funny bone is frequently absent. (C.)
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.)
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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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
---Milan Paurich
