NEW THIS WEEK (2/20) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
I CAN ONLY IMAGINE 2--Directed by Andrew and Jon Erwin, 2018's "I Can Only Imagine" was an earnest, modestly scaled account of MercyMe frontman Bart Millard’s bruised childhood and meteoric rise to stardom culminating in the hymn-like tune that gave the film its title. Whatever one thought of its pieties, the original at least possessed a clean dramatic line and a sense of purpose. This sequel--once again shepherded by the Erwins--arrives with the cockiness of a brand extension and the hesitancy of a sermon
unsure of how loudly to preach. J. Michael Finley reprises his role as Millard, and Dennis Quaid returns as his volatile, repentant father (now functioning more as a sanctified memory than a combustible presence). The story picks up after the song’s success, following Millard as fame complicates his faith, marriage and sense of calling. Touring schedules strain domestic life; creative drought prompts spiritual anxiety; old wounds reopen in new, softer lighting. The plot proceeds less by conflict than by reassurance, stacking episodes of doubt only to resolve them with foregone conclusions. Finley remains an appealing screen presence, open-faced and vocally capable, but he's asked to carry long stretches that mistake repetition for depth. Quaid, reduced to a symbolic anchor, lends gravitas without friction. The filmmaking is curiously inert, content to underline its themes rather than dramatize them. What made the first movie mildly appealing was its specificity: one man, one song, one reckoning. “Imagine 2” broadens the canvas while thinning the paint, offering uplift without discovery. It wants to testify, but cinema, even devotional cinema, needs more than affirmation; it needs the risk of not already knowing the answer. (D PLUS.)
PSYCHO KILLER--Veteran producer Gavin Polone, best known for genre fare like "Panic Room" and "Zombieland," steps into the director’s chair with a script by "Se7en" auteur Andrew Kevin Walker that cleverly straddles the line between procedural grit and visceral spectacle. A compelling Georgina ("Cold Storage") Campbell anchors the film as a Kansas highway patrol officer whose quiet life collapses when her trooper husband is savagely slain. Her ensuing hunt for the killer propels the narrative, not merely as an investigation but as a meditation on grief and obsession. James Preston Rogers looms menacingly as the enigmatic “Satanic Slasher” whose inscrutable violence gives the movie its macabre charge while the dependably quirky Logan ("The Flash") Miller provides an intriguing counterpoint to Campbell's moral righteousness. Polone’s visual language is at its best in the quieter moments: tracking shots that suggest isolation as much as pursuit, and a muted color palette that underscores the moral ambiguity at the story’s center. Yet for all its procedural mechanics (stakeouts, interrogations, blood-soaked confrontations), it's most resonant when gesturing towards the unknowable depths of human trauma. In an era of horror saturated with familiar tropes, the deliberate pacing and thoughtful performances offer a steady, if somber rhythm that leaves a haunting aftertaste. (B MINUS.)
THIS IS NOT A TEST--By refusing to choose between earnest character study and visceral undead spectacle, Aden MacDonald’s adaptation of Courtney Summers’ novel disappoints on both counts. Sloane (Olivia Holt) and a handful of high school peers are under literal siege when an apocalyptic outbreak drives the infected into their school. The first act feels almost thesis-driven: claustrophobic interiors, unrelenting knocks on bolted doors and survival distilled to whispered strategy sessions in fluorescent hallways. The threat of the infected becomes both a plot engine and a thematic mirror for the characters’ internal struggles, forcing a typically bleak YA conceit into something that's only intermittently resonant. Rather than fist-pumping bravado, Holt's Sloane is shaped by an emotional inertia which aligns with MacDonald's decision to explore the characters' psychological limbo as zombies shuffle ever closer. Technically it's competent but unremarkable: tight framing and abrupt bursts of gore punctuated by long stretches of adolescent ennui. But uneven pacing and formulaic narrative beats undercut any real sense of cumulative dread. (C.)
TRIFOLE--A warm, delicately observed drama that folds family memory, rural ritual and the earthy mystique of truffle hunting into a quietly affecting tale. Set in the wooded hills of southwestern France, director Gabrielle Fabbro's film follows Léa (Ydalie Turk), a young woman who returns to spend time with her ailing grandfather, Giovanni (Umberto Orsini), a once-legendary trufficulteur whose sense of purpose is fading along with his health. Their relationship--at first tentative, even awkward--becomes the emotional ballast of a movie that prefers understatement over sentimentality and finds its resonance in gestures, landscapes and half-remembered histories. Fabbro builds the drama around Giovanni’s belief that one last priceless truffle lies hidden in a grove he can no longer reach on his own. Léa, equal parts skeptical and devoted, agrees to help his search, and the film uses the hunt as both narrative spine and metaphor. The trek takes them across terrain thick with family lore: old stone walls, abandoned paths and the ruins of a long-ago partnership between Giovanni and Léa’s late grandmother. Through these excursions, Turk and Orsini develop a touching intergenerational rapport, the veteran actor’s weathered gravity balancing the ingenue’s restless energy. What might have collapsed into pastoral cutesiness instead benefits from Fabbro’s careful compositions and feel for the rhythms of rural life. She treats the landscapes not as postcard idylls but as lived-in spaces shaped by labor and memory. The pacing mirrors the search for something elusive: an object, a bond, a sense of continuity. "Trifole" ultimately succeeds because it treats its modest stakes with sincerity. The truffle is both a treasure and a pretext, a way for grandfather and granddaughter to acknowledge the distance between them and gently close it. By the final scenes, Fabbro achieves a satisfying emotional richness that’s tender without being cloying and grounded without losing its sense of wonder. The Cohen Media Blu-Ray includes standalone interviews with Fabbro, Orsini and Turk; featurettes on the film's production and recording of its soaring orchestral score; and the theatrical trailer. (B PLUS.)
NOW AVAILABLE IN THEATERS, ON HOME VIDEO AND/OR STREAMING CHANNELS:
COLD STORAGE--Liam Neeson lends his familiar gravitas to a grim, icebound horror flick that seems determined to freeze its audience into submission. Directed by Jonny Campbell, the film aspires to a spare, wintry dread, but too often mistakes tonal austerity for emotional or narrative rigor. Set in a remote Arctic research facility scheduled for decommissioning, the story follows a security contractor (Neeson) hired to oversee the final shutdown. What begins as a routine assignment quickly goes south when an experiment long buried in subzero isolation begins to reassert itself. Campbell stages much of the action in narrow corridors and cavernous freezers, and the cinematography makes elegant use of monochromatic blues and grays. Yet the horror remains more implied than felt, and the stakes--personal, ethical or existential--never quite thaw. Neeson, whose late-career gravitation toward stoic roles is by now a genre unto itself, delivers a performance of weary professionalism. It's solid but unsurprising, and the script gives him little room to explore anything beyond grim resolve. Like the frozen setting, it's an emotionally distant exercise in controlled chill that forgets to let the blood flow. (C.)
CRIME 101--Adapted from a Don Winslow novella, Bart ("American Animals") Layton's film has the swaggering confidence of a genre exercise that knows exactly how much glitter it needs--and when to withhold it. Layton treats the modern heist flick not as an occasion for swaggering machismo but as a procedural puzzle whose pleasures lie in discipline, patience and the quiet authority of pros who believe they've outsmarted the system. In present-day Los Angeles, a series of high-end jewel robberies appear to obey an unwritten code: no unnecessary violence, no attention-seeking flourishes, no mistakes. That modus operandi becomes known as “Crime 101,” drawing the single-minded focus of a veteran L.A.P.D. detective (Mark Ruffalo) whose rumpled intensity suggests a Millennial Columbo. On the other side of the chessboard is a sleek, self-possessed master thief (Chris Hemsworth) whose icy demeanor masks an ever-narrowing margin for error. Thriving on ambiguity, Layton directs with a restraint that feels almost radical in a genre prone to excess. The camera lingers on process (the casing of a storefront, the timing of traffic lights, the geometry of escape routes) which allows tension to accrue incrementally. When the action arrives, it's sharp, purposeful, never merely ornamental. This isn't a film seduced by glamour so much as it is by logic and the brittle rules that promise order in an inherently chaotic universe. Layton frames the duel between cop and thief as a study in obsession, suggesting that both men are driven by codes that are equally self-defeating. In its cool surfaces and simmering undercurrents, “Crime 101” offers a reminder that the smartest crime movies are less about the score than the human cost. (B PLUS.)
DRACULA--Luc ("La Femme Nikita," "The Fifth Element") Besson’s latest film arrives with the usual baggage accompanying any new screen iteration of Bram Stoker’s immortal tale. What distinguishes Besson's version is a renewed sincerity and willingness to treat the Count less as a monster than a wound that refuses to heal. As Dracula, Caleb Landry Jones’ nervy physicality and spectral gaze give the character a fragile volatility. He's a vampire who seems to be throbbing with centuries of unresolved longing. Christoph Waltz brings dry wit to the Count's priest nemesis, grounding his florid gestures with a wry sense of human proportion. Together they anchor a narrative that might otherwise drift into purely decorative excess. The plot cleaves broadly to tradition. Dracula, cursed with immortality and bound to the memory of a lost love, emerges from his Carpathian isolation and sets his sights on a woman in 19th century France who appears to be the reincarnation of his former bride. Blood is spilled, alliances are formed and the machinery of pursuit grinds forward. Besson, more interested in atmosphere than mythological housekeeping, efficiently streamlines the narrative and it moves with an unhurried, nocturnal logic. Gothic arches loom, candlelight glows with painterly intensity and digital effects are deployed less for shock than a kind of melancholic pageantry. At times, the aesthetic threatens to overwhelm the drama. Yet when it works, it does so by embracing its own romantic excess, trusting that sincerity can still pass for daring. “Dracula” isn't a radical reinvention, but a handsomely mounted, intermittently affecting meditation on love, memory and eternal damnation. (B.)
GOAT--Arriving with the confident sheen of an all-ages-friendly franchise wannabe, this brisk, brightly colored 'toon never finds the creative spark that could elevate it beyond the status of a mild diversion. The story centers on a stubborn young goat, voiced with earnest pep by Caleb ("Stranger Things") McLaughlin, who dreams of escaping his pastoral confines for the glare of a high-stakes urban sports league. When a fluke opportunity presents itself, he leaves his farm and moves to the city where athletic glory is both commodified and cruelly fleeting. Along the way, he encounters a fast-talking mentor (Nick Kroll), a steely but sympathetic rival (Gabrielle Union) and a parade of comic sidekicks whose primary function is to keep the pace lively and the jokes family-friendly. Director Tyree Dillihay, whose television background shows in the punchy rhythms, keeps the narrative moving efficiently if predictably. The animation favors clean lines and saturated colors over tactile detail, lending the movie a slightly airless look. The screenplay dutifully checks off lessons about perseverance, teamwork and self-reliance that won't surprise anyone over the age of 10. Less a passion project than a corporate product engineered to be as inoffensive as possible, the glossy images drift away like chalk dust after the final whistle. (C.)
GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE--The first feature in nearly a decade by "Pirates of the Caribbean" auteur Gore Verbinski feels like the work of a director liberated by creative audacity. A science-fiction adventure blending anarchic setpieces with surprisingly empathetic moments, it's one of the most distinctive genre-benders in recent memory. The film opens with Oscar-winner Sam Rockwell as a disheveled man who insists he comes from the future and that a rogue A.I. threatens humanity. He commandeers a late-night L.A. diner, urging patrons to join him in averting imminent disaster. What follows is part high-concept recruitment narrative, part kinetic ensemble odyssey. Among the recruits are two high school teachers played by Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz whose weary but sharp-eyed chemistry provides much of the emotional gravitas. Haley Lu Richardson rounds out the core ensemble as another diner customer, both skeptical and quietly resilient, drawn into the mission. Verbinski stages the action with gleeful exuberance, allowing time loops, absurd obstacles and moments of slapstick chaos to unfold with balletic precision. Yet beneath the pyrotechnics lies a quietly affecting theme about connection and commitment: what does it take for ordinary people to act when the future of the world is at stake? Verbinski's willingness to invest in his characters’ interior lives while hurtling them through interlocking setpieces helps distinguish it from most contemporary sci-fi comedies. Rockwell, Peña, Beetz and Richardson bring a grounded sincerity to their roles that keeps the more outlandish plot twists from spinning out of control. The result is a richly textured, exhilaratingly unpredictable joy ride, a reminder that even in the most extreme circumstances humanity is what truly matters. (A MINUS.)
I KNOW WHERE I'M GOING--Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1945 masterpiece occupies a singular position within their extraordinary oeuvre, a film seemingly modest in scale yet profound in emotional resonance. Nestled chronologically between the wartime grandeur of "A Canterbury Tale" and the operatic intensity of "Black Narcissus," it stands as a transitional work that shows the filmmaking duo at their most playful, humane and deceptively daring. What begins as a romantic fable becomes a meditation on fate, desire and the subtle magic of place. The Archers were always fascinated by the interplay between inner longing and external environment, and "I Know" distills that theme with exquisite clarity. Rather than the stylization they'd later embrace, Powell and Pressburger craft a narrative built on wind, sea, mist and the rugged rhythms of the Hebrides. Yet their stylistic signatures--unexpected moments of fantasy, symbolic visual motifs and wry humor--appear in fully formed miniature. Both grounded and enchanted, it confirms that their artistry derived from the acute sensitivity with which they observed human nature. At the center of this enchantment stands Wendy Hiller whose performance is essential to the magic of the film. Playing Joan Webster, a fiercely determined young woman convinced she knows exactly what she wants, Hiller brings not only fierce intelligence but an emotional transparency that allows us to see Joan’s inner shift long before she consciously senses it herself. Hiller’s radiant presence anchors the movie’s spiritual and romantic journey. Her Joan is not merely an archetype of modern ambition, she's a woman discovering that certainty can be a trap and that deeper forms of happiness require vulnerability, humility and an openness to forces beyond one’s control. Hiller’s chemistry with Roger Livesey helps enrich this transformation, but it's her gradual surrender to the allure of landscape and community that gives the film its beating heart. Powell’s camera regards Hiller with admiration, never objectifying her but instead capturing the quick flashes of doubt and wonder that mark Joan’s awakening. In the broader context of Powell and Pressburger’s collaborations, this is a crucial work precisely because of its hushed intimacy. It demonstrates their ability to craft movies as emotionally expansive as their more visually lavish efforts while encapsulating the thematic concerns (romantic destiny, cultural collision, the mystical property of locations) that would echo throughout their latter pairings. Effortlessly charming yet deeply affecting, this remains one of The Archers’ most enduring achievements, a testament to their storytelling brilliance and to Wendy Hiller’s unforgettable luminosity. The Criterion Collection set features both 4K UHD and Blu-Ray copies as well as myriad extras including a demonstration of the painstaking restoration process by Powell enthusiast Martin Scorsese; an audio commentary featuring historian Ian Christie; Mark ("The History of Film") Cousins' 1994 documentary, "'I Know Where I'm Going' Revisited;" behind the scenes stills narrated by Powell's widow, editor Thelma Schoonmaker; Nancy Franklin's photo essay exploring locations used in the film; home movies from one of Powell's Scottish expeditions; and an essay by author/critic Imogen Sara Smith. (A PLUS.)
IRON LUNG--The YouTube-to-cinema migration has produced curiosities before, but "Iron Lung" suggests the particular perils of translating a minimalist video game into a feature-length film. Directed by Mark Fischbach--who also stars under his online moniker Markiplier--it approaches a claustrophobic premise with sincerity and technical skill, yet emerges curiously airless. Adapted from David Szymanski’s stark indie game, the story strands a lone prisoner (Fischbach) inside a rusting submersible tasked with charting a vast ocean of blood on a distant moon. The vessel can't see outside, and navigation is conducted by instruments, grainy photographs and the dull terror of metal stressed past its limits. As missions accumulate, the submarine descends deeper while hints of something vast and sentient press against the hull. As director, Fischbach shows an evident command of sound design and production detail. The submarine set is tactile and convincingly grimy, and the best moments rely on noise, vibration and sudden silence rather than visual spectacle. Yet what works in short, player-driven YouTube bursts proves exhausting over two-plus hours. The script leans heavily on repetition, mistaking sustained tension for narrative development and the metaphysical gestures arrive with a thud of portentousness rather than dread.
Fischbach’s performance is earnest but limited, pinned to a narrow band of anxiety that rarely modulates. While aiming for cosmic horror, it lands closer to industrial malaise: an admirable experiment whose ambitions exceed its expressive range. (C.)
SEND HELP--Sam ("The Evil Dead," "Spider-Man") Raimi’s stripped-down survival thriller arrives with the deceptive modesty of a two-hander and the mischievous assurance of a director who knows exactly how much tension he can wring from a palm tree, a broken ankle or a stray glance held a beat too long. it’s a wryly humane study of how people behave when there’s no one left to impress but the sea. The premise is elegantly simple. After their small plane goes down in the Pacific, two coworkers wash up on a remote island: a mousy office worker (Rachel McAdams) and her arrogant corporate fixer boss (Dylan O’Brien). With no hope of immediate rescue, they must ration supplies, tend to injuries and learn how to coexist in a place that offers neither privacy nor mercy. Raimi wastes no time on spectacle. The crash is over almost as soon as it begins; what matters is the aftermath and the slow, grinding work of staying alive. Raimi, returning to leaner productions after years of studio maximalism, stages the island as both physical trap and psychological arena. His camera finds unease in the ordinary mechanics of survival: opening a coconut, stitching a wound, deciding who gets the last mouthful of water. His predilection for jump-scares is still evident, but it’s tempered with patience. Suspense accumulates through character, not contrivance. McAdams gives a performance of flinty intelligence, letting control escalate in increments so small they’re almost imperceptible. O’Brien, playing against his usual affability, reveals a talent for quiet desperation, his toxic braggadocio slowly eroded by hunger and fear. Their chemistry is less romantic than adversarial, a chess match conducted under a merciless sun. “Send Help” is ultimately less about rescue than reckoning--about the stories people tell themselves to survive, and the harder truths they’re forced to confront when stories no longer suffice. (B PLUS.)
SOLO MIO--Kevin James takes a welcome vacation from the broad physical comedy of his Paul Bart franchise into subtler dynamics of the human heart. Directed with a light touch by brothers Chuck and Dan Kinnane, it's an unlikely romance set against Italy's sun-drenched backdrops that transforms a familiar rom-com premise into something quietly reflective. James plays Matt, a well-intentioned Everyman whose meticulously planned destination wedding collapses when his fiancée strands him at the altar. Instead of scurrying home, Matt decides to press forward with his prepaid honeymoon, turning his grief into a scenic odyssey through Rome, Florence and Tuscany. Along the way he encounters an ensemble of vividly drawn companions: Nicole Grimaudo’s Gia, whose easy confidence and local insight nudge him out of his self-pity; Alyson Hannigan and Kim Coates as fellow American tourists whose misadventures mirror his own; and Jonathan Roumie who helps Matt rediscover joy in small gestures. The Kinnanes frame these encounters with a gentle visual rhythm, allowing the Italian vistas to act as more than postcards--they become metaphors for Matt’s emotional thaw. James, who also co-wrote the screenplay, balances his natural comic instincts with a surprising vulnerability that keeps Matt from seeming like a caricature. Without reinventing the genre, it reminds us why stories of second chances remain so darn irresistible. (B MINUS.)
THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER THREE--The third and concluding installment of Renny ("Die Hard II," "The Long Kiss Goodnight") Harlin’s rebooted horror trilogy once again trades the claustrophobic terror of its 2008 forebear for increasingly calculated sequences of violence. At the center is Maya, played once again with steely resolve by Madelaine Petsch whose transformation from victim to avenger anchors the emotional through-line. Maya is once again pitted against the enigmatic masked trio that's dogged her since the first film--the culmination of a relentlessly brutal odyssey that sees her literal and psychological wounds brought to the surface. The plot moves briskly enough: isolated settings and desperate gambits blur into one another as the film pursues a full-circle reckoning between prey and predator. While delivering the predictable visceral beats, Harlin too frequently sacrifices depth for shock, and his attempts at mythologizing the killers is more perfunctory than revelatory. Petsch’s performance remains the series' highlight, lending the material a somber gravity that its thin narrative fails to sustain. (C MINUS.)
A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE--John Cassavetes' 1974 magnum opus stands not only as a towering achievement within its director’s singular oeuvre, but as one of the defining American films of the twentieth century. To claim that it's Cassavetes’ best movie is not to diminish "Faces," "Husbands" or "Love Streams," but to recognize the extraordinary degree to which his aesthetic, ethical and emotional concerns mesh with a force and clarity found nowhere else in his cinema. It's the work in which his fascination with love as a social contract, marriage as sanctuary and battleground and performance as a form of lived-in truths reaches its most devastating realization. At the film's center is Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands), a housewife whose fragile mental state places her at odds with the rigid expectations of domestic normalcy. Cassavetes refuses every easy framework--pathology, melodrama or social diagnosis--that might explain her behavior. Instead he situates Mabel within a dense web of relationships: her well-meaning but volatile husband Nick (Peter Falk), their children, Nick’s coworkers and an extended family that oscillates between concern and barely concealed embarrassment. The movie’s brilliance lies in its insistence that Mabel’s “problem” cannot be isolated from a social environment that demands conformity. "Madness" is not an aberration but a pressure point where love, fear and repression collide. Cassavetes' famously loose, improvisatory style is deployed with remarkable structural discipline. The handheld camera work and raw sound design create an intimacy that borders on the invasive, implicating the viewer in the same uneasy spectatorship practiced by the characters themselves. Few American films have so unflinchingly examined the violence latent in ordinary gestures of care. Yet the movie ultimately belongs to Gena Rowlands whose performance constitutes one of the supreme achievements in screen history. To call it the greatest performance by an American actress is not mere hyperbole, but a recognition of its unprecedented range, vulnerability and moral complexity. Rowlands doesn't “play” mental illness, she embodies a woman whose emotional expressiveness is perpetually out of sync with the world around her. Her Mabel is alternately radiant, awkward, seductive, childlike and terrifying, often within the same frame. Rowlands exposes Mabel’s neediness and excesses without asking for pity, allowing dignity to emerge through her character’s utter lack of social armor. It's acting as a form of existential risk. The film demands that its actors relinquish control, vanity and safety in pursuit of something closer to reality than representation. No performance in cinema so completely collapses the distance between character and actor, observation and participation. In "A Woman Under the Influence," Cassavetes achieves his most profound synthesis of form and feeling, and Rowlands single-handedly redefines what screen acting can be: not illusion, but exposure. The Criterion Collection Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with composer Bo Harwood and camera operator Michael Ferris; a conversation between Rowlands and Falk; an archival audio interview with Cassavetes conducted by historians Michel Ciment and Michael Wilson; a stills gallery featuring behind-the-scenes photos; Kent Jones' essay,' "The War at Home;" and a 1975 interview with Cassavetes. (A PLUS.)
WUTHERING HEIGHTS--Emerald ("Promising Young Woman," "Saltburn") Fennell’s latest film arrives bearing the weight of a century’s worth of adaptations, yet feels bracingly alive and contemporary. If William Wyler’s celebrated 1939 version cloaked Emily Brontë’s novel in plush romantic fatalism and Andrea Arnold’s feral 21st-century interpretation stripped it down to mud, wind and bruised bodies, Fennell splits the difference. Her movie is sumptuous without being polite, psychologically acute without mistaking severity for insight. Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi), an orphan taken in by the Earnshaw family, grows up alongside Catherine (Margot Robbie), forming a bond that curdles into something corrosive once class, pride and wounded ego intervene. Catherine’s decision to marry the respectable Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) becomes the original sin from which the tale's long revenge spiral unfolds, stretching across generations and leaving few unscarred in its wake. Elordi’s Heathcliff is a volatile, watchful presence, less Gothic monster than social weapon forged by humiliation. Fennell uses Elordi's physicality shrewdly, making him feel perpetually out of place in rooms designed to exclude him. And Robbie gives Catherine a brittle radiance that illuminates the character’s contradictions: her yearning for freedom, terror of social erasure and the fatal arrogance that convinces her she can have both. Visually Fennell leans into heightened artifice--lush interiors, rigorously composed frames, a sense of emotional excess bordering on the operatic--yet never loses sight of the source material's intrinsic cruelty. This isn't a love story embalmed in mist but a study of how desire metastasizes when denied oxygen. In that sense, the movie seems in conversation with its predecessors rather than beholden to them. Fennell reclaims Bronte's classic as a story not of doomed romance, but of class, resentment and the high cost of mistaking possession for love. (A MINUS.)
YI YI--Edward Yang’s "Yi Yi" (2000) is not only the crowning achievement of his tragically curtailed career, but also one of the clearest articulations of Yang's worldview--an approach to cinema in which the textures of ordinary life are allowed to accumulate into profound insight. Its recent appearance near the very top of the New York Times survey of the best movies of the first quarter-century of the 2000's simply formalizes what cinephiles have long recognized: "Yi Yi" is a masterwork of modern humanist filmmaking. Yang had already established himself as a central architect of the Taiwanese New Wave before "Yi Yi," and it synthesizes many of the thematic concerns that run through his previous works. From "Taipei Story"’s anxiety about a rapidly globalizing urban landscape to "The Terrorizers"’ intricate, multi-perspective narrative design, Yang consistently probed the friction between private aspiration and social constraint. Yet it was with A Brighter Summer Day "(1991) that he demonstrated the full breadth of his ambition. That expansive, nearly four-hour portrait of 1960s youth steeped in political unrest, cultural hybridity and generational conflict revealed Yang’s fascination with the forces that sculpt identity across time and space. "Yi Yi" distills that scope into a more focused, intimate register: the life of a single Taipei family across a year marked by births, deaths and ethical reckonings. What makes the film so extraordinary is its balance of narrative precision and philosophical openness. Yang structures it around the perspectives of three family members (NJ, the middle-aged father reconnecting with a lost love; Ting-Ting, the teenage daughter navigating first heartbreak; and Yang-Yang, the young son whose photographs of the backs of people’s heads become emblematic of Yang's epistemological curiosity). Each character’s storyline could function independently, yet Yang interlaces them with such emotional coherence that the mosaic structure feels inevitable. The result is a cinematic world that radiates empathy, acknowledging that every life contains its own rhythms, secrets and disappointments. In this sense, the movie converses deeply with Yang’s oeuvre: the emphasis on personal responsibility, the difficulty of communication and the subtle but persistent encroachments of modernity are all motifs carried forward from his earlier work. But "Yi Yi" tempers the often-adversarial social environments of those films with a gentler, more contemplative sensibility. Even moments of pain are handled with an unhurried delicacy, inviting viewers not to judge but to observe. Its enduring legacy can be attributed to this profound generosity. Yang’s refusal to sensationalize struggle or simplify emotion produces a rare cinematic experience: a work that grows over time, offering new insights with each return. Not merely a summation of Yang’s career, it's a testament to what cinema can achieve when it treats human experience with patience, clarity and profound respect. The Criterion Collection release includes both 4K UHD and Blu-Ray copies of the film; Yang and critic Tony Rayns' audio commentary; a featurette with Rayns discussing Yang's career and his pivotal role in the New Taiwan Cinema movement; critic/director Kent Jones' essay, "Time and Space;" and Yang's posthumous notes about his filmmaking process. (A PLUS.)
---Milan Paurich
