NEW THIS WEEK (10/9) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
ANGEL AND THE BADMAN—There are worse things a contemporary western can do than remake an old John Wayne movie, but the latest Angel Studios’ release makes a persuasive case for leaving well enough alone. Zachary Levi plays gunslinger Quirt Evans who staggers onto a Quaker ranch with a bullet in his back and discovers that the rancher’s daughter (Meg Fraser) is more interested in saving his soul than finishing him off. As the lawman tracking Quirt, Tommy Lee Jones lends the proceedings a welcome gravitas simply by being, well, Tommy Lee Jones. Director Julio Quintana is hardly an unknown quantity in faith-based filmmaking. His previous credits include “Blue Miracle” and “The Long Game,” earnest dramas built around perseverance, redemption and overcoming adversity. That résumé makes him a logical choice for this material, though hardly an inspired one. It moves competently enough, but the action setpieces have the anonymous efficiency of network television and its moral conflicts are stated rather than dramatized. The most glaring problem is that the 1947 original is readily available on streaming platforms, and vastly more entertaining. This new “Angel and the Badman” isn't terrible, it’s just hard to fathom why it needed to exist in the first place. (C MINUS.)
CONVOY—Sam Peckinpah’s 1978 trucker romp was never a great movie. It’s too shaggy, episodic and pleased with its own diesel fumes and CB-radio patter to achieve the kind of epic grandeur associated with the auteur of “The Wild Bunch” and “Straw Dogs.” But it's a wonderfully odd film to have been directed by Peckinpah at all: a big, commercial, late-’70s road flick that seems to be having more fun than its famously embittered director reportedly had while making it. Adapted from C. W. McCall’s novelty song, it turns a truckers’ rebellion against a sadistic Arizona lawman into a rollicking folk epic. Kris Kristofferson’s Martin “Rubber Duck” Penwald is less a character than a movie star silhouette: laconic, handsome and vaguely outlawish with the easy authority of someone who's discovered that the best response to bureaucracy is to simply keep driving. Following him is a caravan of truckers, civilians and fellow travelers, their big rigs stretching across the American Southwest like a blue-collar parade. Peckinpah, whose films are generally associated with bloodshed, violence and moral exhaustion, discovers something almost lyrical in eighteen-wheelers moving through the desert. “Convoy” has the loose, impudent energy of a movie that knows its plot is basically an excuse to keep those trucks moving. Peckinpah’s direction is surprisingly playful: the master of balletic carnage seems almost relieved to be helming an action movie in which the destruction is comic rather than apocalyptic. There are wrecks, shootouts and explosions, but the overall tone is closer to “Hee Haw” than “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” Ernest Borgnine brings his usual authority to the role of the villainous sheriff while Ali MacGraw adds a welcome romantic diversion that keeps Kristofferson’s “Rubber Duck” from being just a truck-stop philosopher. What ultimately makes the film so engaging is its utter lack of pretension. Peckinpah may have been cynically trying to make a populist crowd-pleaser, but there’s something endearing about watching one of cinema’s great pessimists make a movie about people simply hitting the highway. While no one will ever confuse “Convoy” with a masterpiece, it’s definitely Peckinpah at his most carefree. There are three separate commentary tracks on Kino Classics’ Blu-Ray by, respectively, Peckinpah historians Paul Seydor, Nick Redman and Garner Simmons, filmmaker Steve Mitchell, and Peckinpah scholar Mike Siegel; the mini-doc “Passion and Poetry: Sam’s Trucker Movie;” “The Last Convoy,” Siegel’s video essay; deleted scenes; four standalone featurettes; image galleries; the theatrical trailer; and TV and radio spots. (A MINUS.)
NICKELS—The premise of this supernatural drama—how grief can make even the most improbable explanations seem weirdly plausible—never quite makes the leap to become as affecting as it wants to be. Tom (Rob Riggle) is a successful businessman and devoted family man who has spent three decades carrying the emotional baggage of his older brother’s death in a motorcycle accident. When Mitch (Aaron Holliday, suitably haunted), the son of Tom’s neighbor, survives a similarly catastrophic motorcycle crash, Tom begins to suspect that his brother’s spirit has somehow returned. What follows is less a ghost story than a meditation on the possibility of second chances. Spencer King directs with an aptly sober hand, though the material announces its themes rather than letting them emerge organically. The spiritual dimensions are intriguing without being especially profound, and the domestic drama feels overly familiar. Riggle, better known for comic roles, makes a sincere attempt to give Tom emotional weight, but the film’s chief attribute is Odessa (“Marty Supreme,” HBO’s “I Love L.A.”) A’zion. As Tom’s daughter, she brings an alertness and emotional specificity that the screenplay often lacks, giving even the more conventional family scenes a pulse. “Nickels” ultimately settles for being earnest and well-intentioned instead of revelatory, but its sincerity is appealing and A’zion gives it a welcome spark. (C PLUS.)
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 routine 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 spooky Blumhouse throwaway. (B MINUS.)
PETER ASHER: EVERYWHERE MAN--This deeply affectionate music bio-doc unfolds less like a career retrospective than a warm, rambling catch-up with an old friend who just happens to have lived several lifetimes in pop history. Co-directed by Dan Geller ad Dayne Goldfine, it follows Peter Asher from his early days as half of Peter & Gordon through his quietly monumental second act as a producer and industry consigliere. What makes the film so memorable is its sense of proximity, not just to Asher who remains a gently self-effacing guide but to the constellation of talent that orbits him. The parade of talking heads feels like guests dropping by a particularly storied living room. Paul McCartney turns up, of course, a reminder of Asher’s front-row seat to the The Beatles phenomenon. But the emotional core lies in its revisiting of Asher’s work with artists like Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and Carole King, each relationship sketched with a mixture of admiration, humor and lived-in familiarity. The movie wisely resists deifying its subject. Asher emerges not as an attention hog but a facilitator of other people’s brilliance, someone whose instincts and taste helped shape the sound of an era without ever demanding center stage. That modesty becomes Geller and Goldfine's central thesis, positing that Asher's true legacy isn’t just his catalog of hits but a web of creative partnerships that remain very much alive. By the end, you don’t feel like you’ve watched a documentary so much as spent an afternoon in some very good company. And that’s the highest compliment a movie like this could hope for. The Greenwich/Kino Lorber Blu-Ray includes additional scenes with Asher, King, Natalie Merchant and many more. (A MINUS.)
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.)
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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.)
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.)
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.)
TWO PROSECUTORS--Sergei (“Donbass,” “The Kiev Trial”) Loznitsa’s severe, hypnotic and chillingly alive historical drama makes the past feel like a nightmare someone has neglected to wake you from. Set at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937, it turns bureaucracy into an instrument of suspense and moral courage into an almost unimaginable act of rebellion. A young Soviet prosecutor, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), receives a letter written in blood by Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), an old Bolshevik who claims he’s been tortured and unjustly imprisoned. Kornyev, still idealistic enough to believe that the Soviet legal system might actually be capable of correcting an injustice, decides to investigate. What follows is a journey through an increasingly impenetrable maze of officials, corridors, waiting rooms and evasions, eventually leading Kornyev to Moscow and the formidable General Vyshynsky (Anatoliy Beliy). Loznitsa, whose films have repeatedly examined the machinery of political violence, understands how much more frightening oppression can be when nobody raises their voice. “Two Prosecutors” is constructed from long, meticulously choreographed takes in which doors close, telephones ring, officials confer and seemingly innocuous conversations acquire the menace of death sentences. The system doesn’t merely punish dissent, it makes truth itself administratively impossible. Kuznetsov gives a beautifully restrained performance, playing Kornyev not as a conventional heroic dissident but as something more complicated and tragic: a decent man whose faith in the principles of the system haven’t caught up with the reality of the system itself. And Filippenko gives Stepniak an almost spectral authority, a man already half-destroyed by the machinery he once served. Their encounters have the eerie quality of two men speaking across the widening abyss between ideology and experience. The austere compositions, Oleg Mutu’s boxy Academy-ratio cinematography and Danielius Kokanauskis’s razor sharp editing help create a world in which physical space seems to contract around Kornyev. The result is at once political thriller and Kafkaesque black humor—the comedy of a nation in which absurdity has become indistinguishable from terror. Criterion Premieres’ Blu-Ray includes an interview with Loznitsa, notes by critic Beatrice Loayza and the theatrical trailer. (A.)
VERITY—Adapted from Colleen (“The Housemaid”) Hoover’s best-selling novel, Michael Showalter’s glossy, unapologetically disreputable thriller wisely never takes itself too seriously. A tale of literary deception, domestic peril and sexual intrigue, it has enough twists to keep you guessing, even when the most outrageous revelations threaten to overwhelm the psychological dimensions. Dakota Johnson plays Lowen, a struggling novelist hired by Jeremy (Josh Hartnett) to finish the remaining book in a lucrative series written by his wife Verity (Anne Hathaway) who’s been incapacitated by a mysterious accident. Installed in the Crawfords’ lakeside Vermont McMansion, Lowen discovers an unpublished manuscript that casts disturbing light on Verity’s marriage, medical history and a possible connection between her fiction and private life. What begins as a literary assignment soon becomes a dangerous exercise in voyeurism with Lowen increasingly unsure whom to believe or trust. Showalter (whose credits include “The Big Sick,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “Hello, My Name is Doris”) creates a suitably sinister atmosphere with the understanding that a certain amount of trashy excess is all part of the fun. An actress of remarkable subtlety, Johnson makes even the most passive-seeming characters quietly absorbing. Her slightly detached, almost drowsy screen presence proves ideal for Lowen whose curiosity gradually turns into something approximating obsession. Johnson never overplays Lowen’s mounting anxiety, letting uncertainty flicker across her face and making the character’s shifting alliances more persuasive than some of the screenplay’s more baroque flourishes. Hathaway clearly relishes her more flamboyant role, and Hartnett imbues Jeremy with an aptly unsettling charm. If some of the plotting feels more engineered than earned, “Verity” still manages to deliver an entertainingly nasty slice of pop filmmaking. (B.)
---Milan Paurich
