NEW THIS WEEK (11/6) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
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.)
LADY—The English aristocracy has rarely seemed as ridiculous as it does in Samuel Abrahams’ mockumentary that sends up privilege, narcissism and the modern appetite for turning private peccadillos into public entertainment. The joke is hardly new, and Abrahams (who also co-wrote the screenplay) doesn't always know when to stop piling on the absurdities. Fortunately, he has Sian Clifford as Lady Isabella, an extravagantly self-absorbed aristocrat who invites a documentary crew to her sprawling country estate. The promised Netflix backing for a reality TV series turns out to be fiction, but the cameras keep rolling as Isabella develops a mysterious affliction: first her hands disappear, then the rest of her body soon follows. Isabella's gradual disappearance is a promising conceit, but the humor occasionally gets lost amid the chaos surrounding it. A charity talent show at which Isabella contrives to become the star attraction culminates in an interpretive dance routine that make Abrahams’ satirical intentions overly broad. But Clifford, best known as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s perennially pissed-off older sister on “Fleabag,” is fabulous. With her impeccable timing and a fearlessness that makes Isabella's vanity as fascinating as it’s exasperating, she gives this deluded creature a life of her own. Beneath the grandiosity and desperate need for attention, there are fleeting glimpses of loneliness and vulnerability. Clifford finds them without asking us to mistake her character's egocentricity for nobility. “Lady” is too uneven to qualify as a fully realized comic vision, and its contrivances occasionally threaten to overwhelm the sharper observations. Yet Clifford's bravura performance supplies the film with a commanding center of gravity. (B.) AVAILABLE TO RENT OR BUY ON MOST STREAMING PLATFORMS.
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.)
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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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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
