NEW THIS WEEK (10/23) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
BLUEBEARD—Edward Dmytryk had already made “Crossfire,” “Murder, My Sweet,” “The Caine Mutiny” and “The Young Lions” by the time he directed 1972’s “Bluebeard.” In other words, the man responsible for those classic Hollywood movies had no business helming something this gloriously bonkers. Based very loosely on the old French folktale, Dmytryk relocates the action to 1930's Austria where Baron Kurt von Sepper, a World War I flying ace with a preposterous blue beard, marries beautiful women and then—well, let's just say the honeymoons come with a limited warranty. Pillar of society Von Sepper was also a political reactionary and instigator of anti-Jewish violence. (Dmytryk apparently decided that one nasty secret wasn't enough when you could give your villain an entire smorgasbord of them.) The film nominally fits under the ‘horror” rubric, playing its murderous business fairly straight. Nobody seems to be winking at the audience; the camp factor arises from its sheer excess. The lurid Gothic décor, parade of doomed wives, Baron Kurt’s grotesque beard and his increasingly deranged psychology are presented with a solemnity that only makes everything seem more deliciously absurd. Dmytrk’s principal attraction is Richard Burton, caught at the most scenery-chewing phase of his career. Burton attacks the role as though he were simultaneously auditioning for “The Ruling Class,” a Hammer horror flick and a drunken Shakespeare production, bellowing, sneering, preening and glowering with magnificent abandon. As the international beauty pageant that keeps wandering into the Baron's castle, Raquel Welch, Virna Lisi, Nathalie Delon, Marilù Tolo, Karin Schubert and Agostina Belli all contribute varying degrees of glamour, hysteria and doomed romantic fatalism. Sybil Danning gets in on the fun as a prostitute while Joey Heatherton—yes, that Joey Heatherton—douses the proceedings with another shot of high-voltage ‘70s kitsch. It’s a cast assembled less according to logic than the Hellzapoppin’ spirit of, "Who else could make this even more ridiculous?” It’s pretty much impossible to defend “Bluebeard” as a good movie. Dmytryk's direction is pedestrian when it isn’t inept, the production values resemble an ABC Movie-of-the-Week and the screenplay keeps piling up melodramatic atrocities until the whole thing resembles an absinthe-fueled Gothic fever dream. But "good" is beside the point. Burton's eyebrows and booming voice seem to have their own billing, and every actress was apparently informed that the volume dial had been permanently broken. It’s tasteless, absurd and completely irresistible. The KL Studio Classics’ Blu-Ray contains an audio commentary track by historians Nathaniel Thompson and Howard S. Berger; two featuretttes (an interview with Dmytrk’s widow, Jean Porter-Dmtryk, and a deep-dive into the film with critic Anna Bogutskaya); and the original theatrical trailer. (B.)
CLAYFACE—The trouble with this latest attempt to extract a feature-length movie from the DC Comics archives is that its ambitions are considerably more interesting than the execution. Conceived as a body-horror tragedy rather than another exercise in superhero franchise maintenance, the tale of an actor who loses his face, identity and eventually his mind has the makings of a nasty little parable about the price of fame. Tom Rhys Harries plays Matt Hagen, an aspiring star whose career and appearance are destroyed after a violent attack. Desperate to recover what he lost, Hagen turns to a scientist (Naomi Ackie) whose experimental treatment transforms his body into malleable clay. The miracle comes with a catch, natch, and Hagen's inability to recognize the person he’s become leads him down an increasingly grotesque path. The metaphor isn't exactly subtle. Hollywood has always been a business of manufactured identities, and the entertainment industry's obsession with surfaces gives this particular monster a potentially rich psychological dimension. Matt’s physical deterioration has its queasy moments, and Harries throws himself into the role with an earnestness that deserves a better vehicle. Ackie brings a welcome degree of seriousness while the supporting players—including Max Minghella and Eddie Marsan—help establish a world in which scientific ambition and personal desperation make uneasy bedfellows. But director James (“Eden Lake,” “Speak No Evil”) Watkins' commitment to grimness eventually becomes a liability. Its horror is more unpleasant than genuinely unsettling, and the psychological dimension never quite catches up with the grisly special effects. Hagen's crisis of identity should give the movie an emotional center; instead, the character too often seems like a collection of symptoms in search of a tragedy. As the third entry in James Gunn's new DC Universe, “Clayface" at least attempts to broaden the IP's tonal range. Yet a willingness to get dirty isn't the same thing as having a distinctive vision. (C.)
DEAD SOULS—Alex Cox has always been drawn to films that seem to have wandered into the wrong century, the wrong country or possibly the wrong universe. Loosely adapted from Nikolai Gogol, this western could be his most characteristically perverse misplacement yet. Gogol’s 1842 novel, a grotesque satire of Russian provincial life, becomes a 19th century frontier tale with Cox himself playing Strindler, a mysterious stranger who arrives in a small Arizona town looking for the names of dead Mexican laborers. That premise is both an adaptation and an act of vandalism—which, coming from Cox, is intended as a compliment. The connection to Gogol is less a matter of faithfully transferring the plot than preserving a certain comic morbidity. “Dead Souls” was always about bureaucracy, greed, social performance and the peculiar usefulness of people who are no longer alive. Cox shifts those concerns into the American West where dead Mexican workers become commodities in another system of exploitation. The change of setting consequently feels less arbitrary than it initially seems: the American frontier, like Gogol’s Russia, is a place where official records and human realities can exist in entirely separate dimensions. For anyone who remembers Cox as the director of “Repo Man” and “Sid and Nancy,” this can feel like a distant relative who inherited the same family eccentricities after moving several states away. Yet the connection is unmistakably there. “Repo” turned punk nihilism and alienation into a sci-fi comedy that seemed to have been assembled from discarded pop-culture fragments; “S&N” transformed Sex Pistols’ mythology into a feverish rock tragedy without surrendering Cox’s taste for abrasive humor. His subsequent oeuvre has refused the tidy boundaries between exploitation movies, political cinema, literary adaptation and personal essay. “Dead Souls” feels like the western chapter of that same ongoing argument. What makes it uniquely Coxian is its handmade, outsider quality. This isn’t the classical western as heritage object, nor a revisionist western carefully announcing its revisionism. Cox has little interest in reassuring us that we’re watching a “serious” genre film. Instead, he treats the western as a kind of junk-shop mythology, rummaging through its conventions for whatever strange, damaged and funny pieces remain useful. The result can feel deliberately ragged, but that’s part of his aesthetic. Cox has never been especially interested in smoothing out the edges, and the roughness here becomes almost a declaration of independence from contemporary filmmaking norms. Casting himself as Strindler is even more revealing. Cox isn’t pretending to be some latter day Gary Cooper: his performance has the appealingly odd quality of an auteur stepping into his own movie and refusing to distinguish between director, actor and character. Around him are familiar Cox collaborators and fellow travelers including Zander Schloss and Dick Rude, giving the film the atmosphere of an extended reunion among members of a particularly outré cinematic society. Cox takes Gogol and the western genre seriously, but without treating them like sacred texts. His film is strange, funny, political and conspicuously homemade—a western filtered through Russian satire and the sensibility of a director who spent his career happily operating several degrees outside the mainstream. At this stage of his career, Cox’s outsider position is no longer a limitation, it’s the entire point. “Dead Souls” feels less like an adaptation than an auteur leaving his fingerprints all over somebody else’s grave. The Kino-Lorber Blu-Ray includes Cox’s audio commentary; a documentary featurette; and behind the scenes footage. (B PLUS.)
DEATH ON THE NILE—When “Death on the Nile” premiered in 1978, the most obvious thing about it was that it wasn’t “Murder on the Orient Express.” Sidney Lumet’s 1974 Agatha Christie adaptation was an event as much as a mystery, a gorgeously upholstered exercise in old-Hollywood star power that made murder among the wealthy seem impossibly glamorous. While hardly shabby, “Nile” felt lesser somehow. Viewed today, it can finally be appreciated for what it actually is: a handsome piece of pop entertainment whose virtues were obscured by its predecessor’s brilliance. The setting is certainly irresistible: a luxurious paddle steamer gliding along the Nile, carrying an assortment of rich people who have every reason to dislike one another. John (1976’s “King Kong,” “The Towering Inferno”) Guillermin directs with considerably more visual freedom than the rather stagebound “Orient Express,” taking full advantage of Egyptian landscapes and monuments. And what a cast! Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, Angela Lansbury, David Niven, Jack Warden, George Kennedy and Jane Birkin comprise the sort of thesping bench strength that modern studio filmmaking seems incapable of replicating. As Hercule Poirot, Peter Ustinov attacks the role with the subtlety of a man performing for the back row of a theater. Still, the performance has warmth and comic authority, and Ustinov ultimately makes the part his own. The one glaring exception to an otherwise seamless ensemble is a strained and shrill Mia Farrow. Rather than embodying romantic desperation shading into obsession, Farrow’s Jacqueline de Bellefort seems trapped inside emotional punctuation marks. Yet Christie’s mystery still evinces its retro charms, the scenery dazzles and the pleasure of watching gifted performers bounce off each another remains considerable. After Kenneth Branagh’s lackluster 2022 remake, this ’78 iteration seems almost quaint: a studio production for grown-ups that trusts its stars, setting and audience. Four decades later, that may be ultimate compliment. KL Studio Classics’ Blu-Ray features a commentary track with historians Nathaniel Thompson, Steve Mitchell and Howard S. Berger; a making-of featurette; interviews with Ustinov and Birkin; and the original theatrical trailer and teaser. (B PLUS.)
FRANZ—Agnieszka (“Europa, Europa,” “Green Border”) Holland has spent much of her career exploring the way individuals struggle against the suffocating pressures of history, politics and social convention. Franz Kafka, whose life and work seem almost tailor-made for Holland’s sensibility, makes an irresistible subject. Yet her portrait of the great Czech writer is less revelatory than an intelligent, occasionally unwieldy encounter with a man whose anxieties have become part of our cultural vocabulary. Beginning in early 20th-century Prague, the movie follows Kafka (Idan Weiss) from his difficult adolescence under a domineering father (Peter Kurth) through his dispiriting employment at an insurance company and increasingly urgent attempts to establish himself as a writer. His friendship with Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz), the publisher who would ultimately preserve Kafka’s manuscripts after his death, provides an essential counterweight to the troubled author’s solitude. His complicated relationships with women further illuminate the contradictions of a man who craved intimacy while seemingly terrified of its consequences. Weiss is quietly compelling, conveying Kafka’s nervous intelligence and wounded reserve without reducing him to a collection of Wikipedia entries. Peter Kurth is equally effective as the father whose disapproval seems to have furnished his son with an inexhaustible supply of psychological torment. Holland understands that her subject’s literary imagination can’t be separated from the humiliations and private fears that nourished it. Her film is most provocative when it abandons conventional biography for something more unsettling. A sequence recreating Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony" with its elaborate apparatus of punishment plunges us into the physical horror lurking beneath the cool, meticulous prose. These moments suggest how thoroughly cinematic Kafka’s nightmarish vision remains even if Holland occasionally makes her points a little too emphatically. At times “Franz” seems burdened by a determination to encompass an entire life into one movie, and the episodic structure never quite achieves the cumulative force its subject deserves. Despite those flaws, Holland still manages to achieve an empathetic portrait of Kafka as an anxious outsider struggling to reconcile the demands of his daily existence with a compulsion to transform it into art. The Cohen Media Group/Kino Lorbr Blu-Ray includes a 2025 interview with Holland conducted at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the theatrical trailer. (B.)
THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE—Wilford Leach’s 1983 film really isn’t much of a “movie.” Leach, a distinguished Broadway director making his motion picture debut, seems content to simply make a recording of a theatrical production. There’s precious little cinematic invention, and the artificiality of the sets only reinforce the impression that the camera was invited to watch rather than participate. Adapted from Joseph Papp’s hit revival of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 comic operetta, Leach still managed to preserve an extraordinary group of performances that deserve to outlive the production that gave them birth. The plot, as anyone familiar with G&S knows, is an elaborate mechanism of comic absurdity. Frederic (Rex Smith), mistakenly indentured as a child to a band of unusually tenderhearted pirates, believes he’s completed his apprenticehsip on his 21st birthday. Unfortunately, Frederic’s nursemaid (Angela Lansbury) misunderstood her instructions. He was actually born on Leap Day, making him technically only five years old. Frederic’s obligation to the pirates is thereby extended to 1940, complicating his romance with Mabel (Linda Ronstadt), daughter of the hapless Major-General Stanley (George Rose). Swaggering, preening and utterly committed to the ridiculous majesty of his position, Kevin Kline’s Pirate King is a comic creation for the ages. His physical exuberance and impeccable timing are matched by an infectious delight in the material. Rose delivers “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” with the precision and escalating desperation the number requires; Lansbury brings seasoned authority to her role; Smith makes an appealingly boyish Frederic; and Ronstadt, is a lovely, generous screen presence. (Her crystalline soprano voice is, of course, magnificent.) This was Ronstadt’s only acting role which makes the performance all the more precious: a fleeting glimpse of an alternative career that might have been. Universal’s ill-fated decision to release the film simultaneously in theaters and on (primitive) PPV doomed its commercial prospects, but box-office failure is a poor measure of its value. “The Pirates of Penzance” remains a delightful time capsule and a chance to revisit a glorious stage production. Extras on KL Studio Classics’ Blu-Ray include an audio commentary with writers Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff; an interview with Smith; and the 1983 theatrical trailer. (B PLUS.)
RE-CREATION—Jim Sheridan returns to the courtroom with this modestly absorbing exercise in cinematic déjà vu that revisits one of Ireland’s most notorious murder cases. The focus is the 1996 killing of French filmmaker Sophie Toscan du Plantier whose death near her holiday home in West Cork remains unsolved. Rather than reconstructing the crime, Sheridan and co-director David Merriman imagine a jury deliberating the evidence against Ian Bailey, the journalist long suspected (but never convicted) of the murder. The setup invites comparisons with Sidney Lumet’s “12 Angry Men,” and it closely follows that esteemed predecessor’s template. Conflicting interpretations of the evidence, personal prejudices and competing notions of reasonable doubt gradually complicate what initially appears to be a straightforward exercise in determining guilt or innocence. The jury room becomes a miniature battleground of personalities where the desire for certainty repeatedly collides with the uncomfortable possibility that certainty is unattainable. Vicky Krieps provides the central dramatic anchor as Juror 8, the skeptical voice encouraging her fellow jurors to examine their assumptions and prejudices. The ensemble cast (including Colm Meaney’s Bailey) brings sufficient friction to the deliberations although the overly determined reversals occasionally feel more schematic than the unpredictable workings of actual human judgment. There’s something inherently noble about a film that takes seriously the distinction between suspicion and proof, particularly in a case whose notoriety has often threatened to overwhelm its unresolved facts. “Re-creation” makes an intriguing, if necessarily speculative attempt to imagine how ordinary people might confront the ambiguities of a case that’s resisted definitive resolution for decades. Sheridan explored the intersection of justice, institutions and individual conscience with greater dramatic force in 1993’s “In the Name of the Father,” and his greatest movie, “In America” (2003), suggests how emotionally nuanced his filmmaking can be. This is a respectable, occasionally thought-provoking chamber drama that earns a pass without quite achieving the conviction of its title. No extras on the Kino Lorber DVD. (B.)
A TALENT FOR MURDER—Anton Corbijn has spent much of his career finding the shadows lurking behind celebrity. In films like “Control,” "The American” and “A Most Wanted Man,” Corbijn has shown a natural affinity for men and women who’ve made a profession of concealing themselves. Adapted by Joanna Murray-Smith from her stage play, Corbijn’s latest gives him another suitably murky subject in Patricia Highsmith, the novelist whose literary creations made a fine art of duplicity. Helen Mirren plays Highsmith, living in Switzerland and enjoying the solitude of her later years when Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) arrives from New York with a proposition. Would she consider writing one more book in her celebrated Tom Ripley series? The visit gradually assumes a more sinister tone, and Edward’s professional courtship becomes a contest of wills in which the distinction between literary and murderous intention grows increasingly ambiguous. Olivia Cooke and Juliet Stevenson lend strong support, but the movie belongs to the two leads engaged in an increasingly dangerous negotiation. Mirren approaches Highsmith with a formidable arsenal of theatrical tricks. The novelist’s prickliness, vanity and appetite for provocation provide her with ample opportunity to chew scenery. There’s something fitting about Mirren’s over-the-top performance given Highsmith’s fascination with characters who treat people like pawns in a private chess game. Whether Mirren truly captures the actual Highsmith beneath her treasure trove of eccentricities is debatable, but the spectacle remains highly entertaining. And Ehrenreich continues to display the gifts that have made his career so tantalizingly difficult to categorize. He memorably announced himself in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Tetro “(2009), holding his own in a demanding role that required both youthful openness and an awareness of the family secrets gathering around him. Ehrenreich’s subsequent screen roles have offered repeated evidence of his range, though he’s never quite achieved the recognition he deserves. The derisive critical reception to “Solo: A Star Wars Story” did him no favors. Ehrenrich's take on the young Han Solo—genial and resourceful without becoming a slavish Harrison Ford imitation—was actually that Ron Howard movie’s chief pleasure. Here Ehrenreich makes a virtue of understatement. His carefully modulated attentiveness proves an excellent counterweight to Mirren’s flamboyance by keeping us guessing about Edward’s intentions. Is he an earnest admirer, an opportunist or something considerably worse? Ehrenreich makes the uncertainty feel organic rather than simply a plot device . The theatrical origins of Murray-Smith’s screenplay occasionally show in the carefully framed confrontations, but Corbijn gives the material a cool visual elegance and persistent sense of unease. “A Talent for Murder” understands that psychological thrillers are most effective when the characters are as fascinated by one another as they are frightened. (B.)
WICKER—In Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s enchanting film, a woman’s desire for companionship becomes an act of rebellion against a society that deemed her unworthy of love. The premise sounds like a fairy tale, but this strikingly original romantic fantasy has sharper things on its mind than the usual business of happily-ever-after. Adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story, the movie finds a rich vein of comedy in the absurdities of conventional courtship and the tyranny of respectability. Oscar winner Olivia Colman plays a reclusive fisherwoman in a medieval village whose inhabitants regard her persistent fishy odor and refusal to marry as sufficient grounds for social exile. Their ridicule eventually prompts her to commission a husband made of wicker from the local basket weaver (Peter Dinklage). What begins as a gesture of defiance takes an unexpected turn when the creature comes to life. Alexander Skarsgård’s Wicker Husband proves attentive, industrious and uncommonly devoted to his bride whose happiness quickly becomes a source of alarm to the neighbors. The joke, of course, is that a husband fashioned from reeds proves a more thoughtful companion than the flesh-and-blood men who presume to regulate a woman’s existence. Fischer and Wilson make the most of this topsy-turvy arrangement, balancing the story’s absurdity against its quietly radical challenge to patriarchal authority. The villagers’ discomfort is delicious: nothing threatens an established social order quite so much as the spectacle of someone discovering that she doesn’t need its approval. Colman, with her marvelous capacity for making eccentricity both funny and heartbreaking, is ideally cast as a woman whose prickliness conceals a perfectly understandable longing for acceptance and love. Skarsgård brings an appealing earnestness to his Wicker hubby while Dinklage lends the proceedings an appropriately otherworldly dimension. As the tailor’s rhymes-with-witch wife, Elizabeth Debicki adds another welcome note to the gallery of small-town busybodies. What makes “Wicker” so uniquely satisfying is its refusal to confuse sweetness with sentimentality. Its fantasy is gently subversive, its humor occasionally wicked and its romance rooted in the simplest of propositions: love should enlarge a person’s life, not diminish it. In a culture forever prescribing how women should behave, this offbeat fable offers a bracing alternative. The heart, it turns out, doesn’t need to be made of flesh to be genuine. (B PLUS.)
WILDWOOD—Laika Studios has already made a fairly persuasive case that animation is a medium capable of accommodating the grotesque, the uncanny and the genuinely sublime. Travis Knight’s adaptation of Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s 2011 fantasy novel is another triumph for the Oregon production house’s particular brand of handcrafted wonder: an enchanted woodland where childhood adventure shades into something considerably darker and imagination is permitted to grow wild. Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a Portland teenager, ventures into a forbidden forest with a classmate (Jacob Tremblay) after her infant brother is abducted by crows. Their search leads them into a strange, self-contained world of talking creatures, sinister forces and ancient rivalries where a mysterious woman carries the sorrow of a mother who lost her son. The impending conflict gives Prue’s rescue mission a mythic dimension, transforming a familiar adventure yarn into a meditation on grief, courage and the terrible obligations that accompany love. Knight, whose “ParaNorman” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” demonstrated an uncommon gift for combining visual inventiveness with emotional depth, is an especially apt interpreter of this material. He understands that fairy tales are most potent when their enchantments retain a little danger, and when the beautiful and frightening spring from the same root. Chris Butler’s screenplay provides the narrative architecture, but the deepest pleasures lie in the textures of its imagined world, the eccentricity of its inhabitants and the painstaking physicality that help distinguish Laika’s stop-motion productions from the increasingly frictionless surfaces of computer-generated animation. Director of photography Caleb (“The Black Stallion”) Deschanel, one of cinema’s great image-makers, brings his live-action pedigree to a medium in which lighting, composition and atmosphere can make the impossible feel tangible. With a wonderfully eclectic vocal cast that includes Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Tom Waits and Richard E. Grant, “Wildwood” has talent to spare. More importantly, it’s something increasingly precious: a children’s fantasy that respects the darkness of its own imagination. (A MINUS.)
YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING—Nathan Fielder remains fascinated by the distance between the person we present to the world and the person we might actually be. In "Nathan for You,” he transformed business advice into an elaborate exercise in social embarrassment, and in “The Rehearsal” Fielder constructed increasingly baroque simulations in an effort to prepare people for life's unpredictability. His feature directorial debut takes those themes into considerably more unsettling territory with disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as his subject. Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans invited Fielder and co-director Lance (“Primetime”) Oppenheim to document their lives before she entered prison for defrauding investors. Shot over three years, what follows becomes something vastly more complicated than a tale of Silicon Valley hubris. Holmes is afforded an opportunity to tell her story, but the filmmakers' presence introduces an irresistible complication. Can someone whose public identity was built on deception ad fraud really provide an honest account of themselves? And what happens when the camera becomes an instrument not merely of observation but intervention? The affinities with Fielder's cable work are unmistakable. Like “The Rehearsal,” it continually unsettles our confidence in what we're watching, making the act of performance part of the drama itself. Yet the implications are more troubling than comic. Holmes's determination to micro-manage her image, the dynamics of her relationship with Evans and the directing duo’s own uncertain position within the household create a hall of mirrors in which the distinction between sincerity and manipulation becomes increasingly opaque. Oppenheim, whose 2020 documentary “Some Kind of Heaven” explored the carefully constructed lives of residents in a Florida retirement community, brings a complementary sensitivity to the private worlds people inhabit. He and Fielder have made a genre-defying whatzit that’s both a psychological interrogation and a sly interrogation of doc filmmaking itself. The title promises transparency while the movie delivers ambiguity: that’s its triumph. Rather than simply rehash the Theranos scandal, “You Can See Everything” makes the familiar story ambiguous, exposing the uneasy relationship between truth and self-invention. Fielder found a true-life subject capable of matching his most audacious experiments in human behavior, and fashioned a bracingly original film from that encounter. (A.)
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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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
---Milan Paurich
