NEW THIS WEEK (11/13) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
EBENEZER—Ti West, whose horror chops helped elevate his “X” trilogy to termite art, makes an unexpectedly smooth transition to studio filmmaking with a lavish reimagining of Dickens’ "A Christmas Carol.” West brings a macabre bent to the story by finding fresh shadows and unsettling pleasures in its familiar architecture of ghosts, guilt and redemption. Set in Victorian London, it follows miserly Ebenezer Scrooge through his supernatural visits from Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. But West isn't interested in simply ticking off the familiar archetypes. He gives the material a darker, more psychologically nuanced approach that allows its otherworldly elements to register as more than Yuletide pageantry. The Gothic flourishes are particularly welcome, and the occasional excursions into dark comedy keep Dickens’ solemnity and sanctimony from becoming oppressive. Johnny Depp, wonderfully at home in the eccentric theatricality of the proceedings, makes a delightful Scrooge. It's great seeing him back on the movie screen playing a character whose peculiarities are more than just decorative. “A Christmas Carol” has inspired countless stage, screen and TV adaptations, and this iteration doesn’t suddenly render its predecessors obsolete. But West has found enough darkness and genuine feeling in this Yuletide chestnut to make it glitter anew. (B PLUS.)
GHOST SOLDIER—This glorified “B” movie mistakes bombast for excitement and ideological posturing for dramatic conviction. A potentially serviceable action flick becomes instead a lumbering exercise in patriotic wish fulfillment. Jim Caviezel plays an ex-Green Beret living in Wyoming who defends his neighbors against a cabal of corrupt cops, foreign agents and corporate predators hell bent on poaching their land and water. It's the sort of homespun, gun-toting fantasy that practically begs for a flag-waving soundtrack and closing benediction. Caviezel, whose transformation into a MAGA culture war mascot and professional Jesus enthusiast has become something of a second career, supplies all the grim-faced determination and none of the charisma his role demands. “Ghost Soldier” is less a thriller than a recruitment video for permanently aggrieved Trump cultists. (D.)
HOW TO ROB A BANK—Whether helming “The Fall Guy,” “Atomic Blonde” and “Bullet Train” or lending his action choreography chops to other directors’ films, David Leitch has made a career out of turning mayhem into a spectator sport. “How to Rob a Bank” finds Leitch on familiar ground with a high-concept caper that mixes social media gamesmanship, generational disaffection and Old School criminality. The premise has a distinctly contemporary hook: a gang of bank robbers document their increasingly audacious heists online, turning their criminal exploits into a kind of populist performance art while attracting the attention of law enforcement. Leitch has assembled an impressively eclectic cast. Nicholas Hoult and Zoë Kravitz provide the star wattage; Anna Sawai and Rhenzy Feliz add welcome diversity; Pete Davidson supplies his trademark deadpan insolence; and John C. Reilly and Christian Slater deliver their seasoned eccentricity. Nobody appears to be taking things too seriously which is just as well. If the social commentary ultimately feels more like topical window-dressing than a penetrating examination of the zeitgeist, brisk pacing, lively setpieces and engaging performances make it the type of fun “Saturday Night Movie” Hollywood doesn’t seem terribly interested in making anymore.
MOUSE—Co-directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson—whose previous collaborations, “Saint Frances” (2020) and “Ghostlight” (2024), were among the best films of their respective years—return with another intimate study of emotional dislocation. Their new movie begins with an unimaginable tragedy. Callie (Chloe Coleman) dies in a car accident just as she and her best friend Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) are preparing to enter their senior year of high school. In the aftermath, Minnie develops an increasingly complicated relationship with Callie’s mother, Helen (Sophie Okonedo), a woman whose grief is every bit as difficult to navigate as her own. The premise offers rich possibilities for an examination of adolescent bereavement, surrogate families and the peculiar intimacies that can develop between people united by loss. O’Sullivan, who also wrote the screenplay, understands that grief rarely follows a straight line, and the film is most affecting when it allows the uneasy friendship between Minnie and Helen to take shape on its own terms without forcing it into tidy emotional beats. Okonedo brings considerable depth to a character who might otherwise have been little more than a familiar portrait of maternal devastation, and Kupferer gives Minnie a guarded, sometimes prickly vulnerability. The film's sensitivity occasionally works against it, though: some of its observations feel a bit too carefully arranged, and the emotional revelations aren't as surprising as they could have been. Still, “Mouse” has a genuine tenderness and more than a few moments of quietly persuasive feeling. It may not achieve the emotional acuity of O’Sullivan and Thompson’s earlier work, but it's a worthy addition to their growing oeuvre. (B.)
VICTORIAN PSYCHO—A homicidal Victorian-era governess wreaking havoc in a remote English manor sounds like an irresistible horror movie premise. Unfortunately, director Zachary Wigon’s film—adapted by Virginia Feito from her 2025 novel—never quite figures out how to turn those ingredients into a satisfyingly perverse whole. Set in 1858, it follows Winifred Notty (Maika Monroe), an eccentric young woman whose arrival at Ensor House coincides with the mysterious disappearance of several members of the household staff. The Pounds family, presided over by Ruth Wilson and Jason Isaacs, gradually begins to suspect that their new employee might not be entirely what she seems. There's a wonderfully unsettling quality to Monroe’s performance, a suggestion of barely suppressed madness lurking beneath her ostensibly prim exterior. Wilson and Isaacs are reliably good company, and Thomasin McKenzie contributes her usual gravitas as another member of the Pounds household. Wigon, whose previous feature (2022’s “Sanctuary’) was a slyly provocative chamber piece, clearly has an appetite for characters behaving badly in confined spaces. Unfortunately, he never achieves the same mischievous precision here. The period trappings are immaculately rendered and there are occasional flashes of wit, yet Wigon seems hesitant to embrace the source material’s core depravity. With so much talent on display, it should have been a lot more memorable. (C.)
WILD HORSE NINE—Martin McDonagh’s films have always had a knack for making the absurd feel like an entirely reasonable response to a world gone mad. This darkly comic excursion to Easter Island on the eve of Chile’s 1973 military coup is another invitation to spend time with damaged people whose conversational skills are exceeded only by their capacity for mischief. It doesn’t quite scale the heights of “The Banshees of Inisherin” or “In Bruges,” but it’s still an unalloyed delight. John Malkovich plays Chris Carlisle, a veteran CIA operative confronting terminal cancer and the accumulated wreckage of his life. When his protégé Lee Chesterfield (Sam Rockwell) accompanies him from Santiago to the remote Pacific outpost, what seemed like a routine assignment becomes an uneasy reckoning with their checkered pasts, conflicting loyalties and the dubious enterprise to which they’ve devoted themselves. McDonagh has always understood that comedy works best when civility and cruelty cohabitate. Here the geopolitical skulduggery provides an aptly disreputable backdrop for his favorite themes: masculine vanity, spiritual exhaustion and the human talent for disguising self-interest as “principle.” The Easter Island setting—with its monumental stone figures surveying the landscape—gives the movie an evocative, faintly surreal dimension. If history supplies the menace, McDonagh contributes the misanthropy, verbal fireworks and occasional flicker of tenderness. The performances are seamless across the board. A career-best Malkovich brings his patented eccentricity to a man confronting his mortality while Rockwell makes an ideal foil, balancing boyish volatility with something more troubling beneath the jocular surface. Steve Buscemi, Tom Waits and Parker Posey lend their distinctive comic personas in key supporting roles without making it seem like they dropped by simply to cash a paycheck. One musical anachronism deserves a raised eyebrow, though. Diana Ross’s “Theme from Mahogany” makes an appearance despite having been released two years after the film’s historical timeline. (A.)
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THE CAT IN THE HAT—There’s something faintly absurd about turning a 61-page Dr. Seuss book into a feature-length movie. Theodor Geisel’s tome is a model of economy with its anarchic pleasures contained in a mere handful of wonderfully economical pages. Stretching that prose into a feature-length animated adventure inevitably requires a certain amount of padding, and this latest big-screen adaptation has plenty. Written and directed by Alessandro Carloni and Erica Rivinoja, it reimagines Seuss’s mischievous feline as an employee of the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration (LLC) dispatched to cheer up two children struggling with their move to a new town. As the titular Cat, Bill Hader brings comic brio to the role, and Quinta Brunson, Giancarlo Esposito and America Ferrera contribute amiable vocal support. The animation is colorful, occasionally inventive and sufficiently hectic to hold the attention of even the youngest viewers. Unfortunately, the screenplay is more interested in elaborate mythology, workplace comedy and sentimental family drama than the anarchic simplicity of its literary inspiration. Still, one shouldn't overlook the film's most salient achievement: it's vastly preferable to the ghastly 2003 live-action travesty starring Mike Myers. This version has its problems, but at least it understands that the Cat should be fun. (C PLUS.)
DRUMMER BOY—The American Revolution gets the Angel Studio treatment in a musical drama that seems to think the founding of a nation should be depicted as a combination of cliched family melodrama and strenuous Christian uplift. Directed by Ben and Joel David Smallbone, it follows two brothers (Joel David Smallbone and Lucas Leach) divided between the British Crown and Patriot cause and an enslaved woman (India Brown) seeking her freedom. The Smallbone’s pile on enough suffering and spiritual redemption to keep several community theater productions of “Les Misérables” busy for the next millennium. The Revolutionary War becomes less a complex struggle over liberty than a convenient backdrop for declarations of faith, forgiveness and family reconciliation. Furthermore, the tin ear dialogue has the portentous quality of inspirational greeting cards with characters announcing their moral positions rather than inhabiting them. The insipid songs by Christian pop act King & County do little to enliven a historical Sunday School pageant that mistakes earnestness for drama. “Drummer Boy” is so determined to proselytize that it forgets to entertain. (D.)
GODZILLA MINUS ZERO—Takashi Yamazaki, the Japanese filmmaker who gave us 2023’s “Godzilla Minus One,” one of the most gratifyingly old-fashioned monster movies in decades with, stomps all expectations with this exuberant sequel. Set in 1949, two years after the original’s cataclysmic events, "Minus Zero” finds a battered Japan struggling to rebuild when another colossal menace (Ghidorah, the three-headed dragon of everyone’s worst nightmares) arrives. Godzilla himself is back: bigger, angrier and apparently not interested in letting anyone else handle the heavy lifting. Yamazaki, who also oversees the special effects, knows that the pleasures of a kaiju picture are both primitive and surprisingly sophisticated. Buildings crumble, trains fly and gravity itself becomes an instrument of destruction as Ghidorah unleashes its apocalyptic fury. Godzilla, meanwhile, brings a certain saurian indignation to the proceedings as if the interloper has violated some unwritten monster covenant. Their increasingly bloody confrontations are spectacularly staged with a tactile sense of weight and devastation that makes most contemporary CGI look like expensive screensavers. But Yamazaki’s secret weapon remains his investment in the humans scurrying beneath all that thunderous destruction. Still wrestling with survivor’s guilt, Ryunosuke Kamiki returns as former kamikaze pilot Kōichi while Minami Hamabe’s Noriko and the couple’s adopted daughter Akiko (She Nagatani) give the looming apocalypse a personal dimension. The scars of war remain everywhere, and the prospect of another national catastrophe carries more weight than mere franchise bookkeeping. Yamazaki understands that Godzilla movies work best when the spectacle has something human to protect. “Minus Zero” delivers the goods with old-school conviction, visual wizardry and an unapologetically oversized heart. (A MINUS.)
JIMMY—There are plenty of things to admire about James Stewart, an actor whose modesty, decency and unmistakable screen presence were matched by his extraordinary record of military service during World War II. Unfortunately, this biopic—covering the period from Stewart’s Oscar-winning performance in “The Philadelphia Story” through his wartime experience and eventual return to Hollywood in “It's a Wonderful Life”—seems less interested in the man than in making sure we know that he was a Christian. Clumsily directed by Aaron Burns and starring KJ Apa as Stewart, it has the look and feel of a bargain-basement historical pageant with production values suggesting a basic cable movie. The supporting cast includes some recognizable faces (including Jason Alexander, Christopher McDonald and Neal McDonough), but they're largely wasted in a procession of stiffly staged waxworks tableaux. The more serious problem is Burns’ relentless proselytizing. Stewart's Presbyterian upbringing and fractious relationship with his father are certainly legitimate subjects, but “Jimmy” approaches them with such evangelical fervor that the religious messaging overwhelms Stewart himself. The filmmakers seem to regard the Hollywood legend as little more than a vehicle for a Sunday School lesson. Stewart deserves a much better movie than this amateurish exercise in hagiography. Even George Bailey would have trouble finding something wonderful about it. (D.)
RAMAYANA: RISE OF A LEGEND—A $420-million Bollywood monument to the proposition that money can’t buy taste, imagination or a functioning visual aesthetic. Nitesh Tiwari’s adaptation of the ancient Hindu myth is less a movie than an interminable computer-generated screensaver. The allegedly “spectacular" imagery is so relentlessly synthetic and drenched in digital excess (much of it reportedly AI-generated), that it often resembles a video game designed by an algorithm who discovered religion. Not even the combined musical firepower of Hans Zimmer and A. R. Rahman can breathe life into this obscenely expensive 185-minute exercise in cinematic hubris. The story of Rama, Sita and Ravana has survived for centuries; hopefully it will survive this bleating eyesore, too. (E.)
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.)
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.)
---Milan Paurich
