BREEDER—Alex Goyette’s “B" horror movie deserves credit for being more ambitious than the usual exercise in bloodletting. Cash-strapped college student Russell (Daniel Doheny) accepts an offer of research funding from Patti (Dot-Marie Jones), an eccentric poodle breeder living on an isolated ranch. Naturally the grant money comes with strings attached, and Russell soon discovers that his benefactor’s interests extend well beyond canine husbandry. The setup allows Goyette to play with the familiar motif of an apparently respectable figure concealing something monstrous (e.g., Dr. Frankenstein). Doheny’s fiercely committed performance keeps Russell sympathetic even when the script veers between absurdity and terror. Written, directed and edited by Goyette, “Breeder” has the scrappy, occasionally undisciplined energy of a young filmmaker trying to make every dollar of his micro budget count. Its tonal shifts can feel awkward and the humor doesn’t always land, but this is a resourceful little genre divertissement that still manages to work in fits and starts. (C PLUS.)   

https://youtu.be/z9rCIhBqrn4?si=pzjvMZ_5TL-V-wNy

CHRISTMAS AT THE KRINGLES—The idea of a family of cultists that celebrate Christmas 365 days a year has a certain gonzo appeal. Unfortunately, director Kevin Lewis’ horror comedy proves considerably less entertaining than its wacky premise. When Mark (Ron Livingston) and Julie (Rachel Bilson) move into a ostensibly idyllic suburban neighborhood, their relentlessly festive neighbors (the titular Kringles) initially appear merely eccentric. But when Mark discovers that this holly-jolly clan plans to hypnotize and indoctrinate his son (Jack Jewkes), paternal discomfort morphs into something considerably more sinister. Mark’s ensuing rescue mission—with the help of an alcoholic mall Santa (Rob Riggle) and a friendly neighbor (Donald Faison)—provides opportunities for dark humor and scares that the film largely squanders. Lewis can't decide whether he’s making a satire, a horror flick or an absurdist farce. The Christmas iconography is overly broad, the menace insufficiently frightening and the jokes too often land with a thud. Livingston and Bilson do what they can as the parental protagonists while Riggle, Faison, Thomas Lennon and Beverly D’Angelo add familiar faces without providing much additional spark. There’s a potentially amusing movie buried somewhere in this tale of holiday cheer turned coercive nightmare, yet “Christmas at the Kringles” never quite finds it. For a black comedy about people who can’t stop celebrating Christmas, it’s remarkably short on either darkness or mirth. (C MINUS.)

https://youtu.be/IsGccGqcNNE?si=qaxrp6MPwkDH0Uw3

DUPLICITY—Hollywood used to make grown-up entertainments like this with a reasonable degree of regularity: star-driven, unapologetically grown-up films that assumed audiences could follow a complicated narrative without having every plot development underlined in red. Tony Gilroy’s 2009 corporate espionage comedy starring Julia Roberts and Clive Owen now feels almost wistfully old-fashioned. Not because it belongs to some distant cinematic past, but because the kind of movie it represents has become increasingly hard to find. Roberts plays Claire Stenwick, a former CIA operative now working in the lucrative world of industrial espionage; Owen is Ray Koval, her onetime MI6 counterpart, sometime lover and prospective partner in crime. Their scheme involves infiltrating rival conglomerates, manipulating corporate paranoia and engineering an elaborate swindle whose precise contours remain deliciously elusive. Gilroy, the writer-director of “Michael Clayton” and the screenwriter behind the “Bourne” franchise, treats the scenario as a crafty Rubik’s Cube of flashbacks, double-crosses and strategic omissions. The trick isn’t simply to keep us guessing, but to make guessing itself part of the fun. Roberts has rarely been more appealingly self-possessed: her famous smile is deployed like a weapon that may or may not be loaded. With his rumpled veneer and permanently hooded eyes, Owen makes an ideal foil. Claire and Ray understand that romantic attraction and professional mistrust can be virtually indistinguishable, especially when neither of them has the slightest intention of playing fair. Their banter has the polished, faintly dangerous rhythm of a screwball comedy in which love is just another opportunity to get fleeced. Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti are clearly having a ball as rival industry titans whose mutual loathing transforms the boardroom into a playground for overgrown, obscenely wealthy boys. Gilroy occasionally lets the intricacies of his script overwhelm the proceedings, and the final revelation may leave some viewers admiring the mechanics more than any emotional payoff. Yet cool intelligence is part of its appeal. “Duplicity” is a movie about people who make a living anticipating betrayal, and its grandest joke is that the only thing more difficult than trusting someone is knowing when not to. Revisiting the movie, I felt a pang of nostalgia for a Hollywood that once valued the commercial appeal of adult sophistication. Nobody needs another superhero origin story when two beautifully dressed actors can make a stolen glance, a suspicious suitcase and a conversation in a hotel bar feel like high drama. It may not be a lost masterpiece, but it’s a reminder that cleverness, glamour and genuine star wattage used to be perfectly legitimate reasons to bankroll a studio film. The KL Studio Classics’ Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with Gilroy and editor/co-producer John Gilroy; an interview with supporting actor Dan Daily; and the original theatrical trailer. 

(B PLUS.) https://youtu.be/CBVqI2P2L4A?si=8TPoFyLaYEDaajsq

THE MONGOOSE—Liam Neeson has made so many action flicks that even the mediocre ones have benefitted from his weathered authority. Sadly, former stuntman Mark Vanselow’s directorial bow is a depressingly generic exercise in automotive mayhem that wastes a decent cast on a script stitched together from the stray parts of (much) better films. Neeson plays Ryan “Fang” Flanagan, a war hero accused of murdering his ex-wife’s abusive boyfriend who leads the police on a nationally televised cross-country car chase. Ryan’s former Special Forces buddies pitch in to help while an increasingly captivated public cheers him on from the sidelines. That premise might have supported a reasonably diverting slice of populist malarkey, but Vanselow never finds a fresh or even persuasive way to capitalize on it. The chase sequences are rote, the plotting follows a hackneyed template and the obligatory emotional beats feel less earned than randomly inserted. Marisa Tomei, Ving Rhames and Michael Chiklis are all fine actors, but none of them gets much of a chance to make an impression. Neeson, meanwhile, looks like someone going through the motions which is especially disheartening considering the number of superior action vehicles he’s starred in over the years. “The Mongoose” isn’t an outright disaster, but something even more egregious: future streaming content devoid of any personality, suspense or even reason to exist. (C MINUS.) https://youtu.be/aHrMFtt40_Q?si=zpfQWqtc8uNM32vq

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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.) 

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.) 

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.)

 ---Milan Paurich