NEW THIS WEEK (3/13) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
THE HI-LO COUNTRY--Stephen ("The Grifters," "Dangerous Liaisons") Frears’ 1998 film has all the trappings of a traditional Western, but the temperament of something more unsettled. It's less interested in frontier myth-making than the moral static that hums beneath it. Set in the ranch lands of post-war New Mexico, Frears adapted Max Evans’ novel into a loosely structured tale of friendship, desire and the slow erosion of moral codes that once seemed resolute. Billy Crudup and Woody Harrelson play Pete Calder and Big Boy Matson, boyhood friends recently returned from World War II, eager to reclaim a simpler life herding cattle and honoring a gentlemanly code of the West. Pete is bookish, soft-spoken and quietly principled; Big Boy is garrulous, charming and instinctively reckless. Their bond is tested when they become entangled with two very different women. Patricia Arquette is Mona, the weary wife of a tyrannical rancher (Sam Elliott, radiating menace beneath a veneer of patriarchal calm). Penélope Cruz, in an early English-language role, plays Josepha, a free-spirited young woman whose sexuality and independence unsettle the men around her. Frears stages the action as a series of ethical crossroads rather than a conventional rise-and-fall plot. Pete’s attraction to Mona draws him into an adulterous affair that is less romantic than fatalistic, while Big Boy’s pursuit of Josepha curdles into possessiveness and violence. The conflicts unfold gradually, almost diffidently, as if Frears was wary of the genre’s usual explosions of violence. Gunfights and showdowns occur, but feel less like climaxes than grim inevitabilities. What gives "The Hi-Lo Country" its enduring power is the attention to atmosphere and character. Working against the expectations of muscular Western bravado, Frears favors melancholy pacing and moral ambiguity. Crudup brings a fragile decency to Pete that makes his compromises quietly devastating. By contrast, Harrelson leans into Big Boy’s volatility, crafting a portrait of charm slipping into cruelty. Arquette lends Mona a bruised intelligence while Cruz injects the proceedings with flashes of impulsive vitality that sometimes strain against the script’s restraint. The result is a movie that doesn’t fully cohere as tragedy or revisionist epic, but whose intelligence and performances linger. Without redefining the Western genre, it thoughtfully suggests that the frontier’s greatest conflicts were always internal and rarely resolved. Writer Julie Kirgo and filmmaker Peter Hankoff share duties on KL Studio's Blu-Ray stellar audio commentary track. (B PLUS.)
https://youtu.be/ssjyGNU4ppY?si=HnCZhXgRk-IQ3tKs
LITTLE TROUBLE GIRLS--In her remarkable feature debut, director Urška Djukić orchestrates a sensuous, quietly destabilizing coming-of-age drama structured around a deceptively simple narrative (a shy 16-year-old’s induction into new emotional and spiritual terrain) that unfurls with a patient, lyrical assurance belying its modest 90-minute running time. At the center of this evocative memory piece is Jara Sofija Ostan as Lucia, an introverted tween reluctantly coaxed by her mother into joining her Catholic school’s all-girls choir. On the surface, this sounds like familiar terrain--academy, hierarchy, youthful awkwardness--but Djukić’s lens treats every ritual and silence with subtext and psychological nuance. When the choir decamps to a secluded countryside convent for an intensive weekend retreat, the cloistered setting becomes both sanctuary and crucible, echoing sacred music and unspoken yearnings in equal measure. Opposite Ostan, Mina Svajger’s Ana-Maria embodies a poised yet unpredictable counterpart: confident, alluring and frequently inscrutable. Their friendship fluidly shifts from tender to competitive, mirroring the larger emotional oscillations at play. Djukić’s film is as much about the textures of adolescence as it is about rites of passage (longing glances, hushed jokes over lipstick and quiet battles over inherited beliefs). Visual compositions are meticulously calibrated, with the convent’s hushed corridors and sun-dappled landscapes suggesting inner states of doubt and desire. Underneath its surface homogeneity, "Little Trouble Girls" confronts the dissonance between spiritual instruction and corporeal curiosity, faith and rebellion, conformity and individuality. The result is a work that feels both comfortably familiar and defiantly original, a contemplative, evocative portrait of youth in flux and a striking announcement from a director with a singular voice. No extras on the Kino-Lorber Blu-Ray. (A MINUS.)
A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON--William ("Winter Kills") Richert’s 1988 teen dramedy now plays less like a modest coming-of-age curio than a small, aching shrine to the late River Phoenix who was just beginning to reveal the full, restless scope of his talents. The movie itself is slight, even ramshackle at times, but Phoenix’s presence gives it a gravity that far exceed its modest trappings. Set over the course of a single Chicago day, the story follows Jimmy Reardon (Phoenix), a smart-mouthed high school graduate desperate to escape the gravitational pull of his working-class family. Jimmy believes he's destined for something bigger, but lacks the discipline and courage to commit to any single path. As he ricochets between confrontations with his long-suffering parents (Meredith Baxter Birney and John P. Ryan), flirtations with two very different young women (Ann Magnuson and Ione Skye) and a day job he treats with open contempt, Jimmy slowly comes to understand that freedom demands responsibility, not just rebellion. Richert directs with a loose intimacy, allowing scenes to wander and conversations to sprawl. That looseness can verge on shapelessness, but it also creates space for Phoenix to do what he did best: listen, react and quietly transform a scene from the inside out. As Jimmy, Phoenix is by turns cocky, petulant, tender and achingly vulnerable, often within the same scene. His face--open, searching, already etched with an old soul’s melancholy--does all the work the script leaves undone. What makes "Jimmy Reardon" endure is not the narrative structure but its emotional honesty. It understands the distinctive pang of late adolescence: the sense that the world is both impossibly large and suffocatingly close, that adulthood is calling but offering no clear direction. Phoenix captures that inchoate longing with heartbreaking immediacy, embodying a young man who knows he's capable of more but fears the cost. Watching the film now, it's impossible not to feel a sense of loss. Phoenix would go on to give performances of astonishing depth and empathy ("Running on Empty," "Dogfight," "My Own Private Idaho," et al), but even here—raw, unfinished, luminous—he feels singular. "A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon" may be slight, but it stands as a tender paean to a talent that burned briefly, brightly and much too fast. KL Studio Classics' new Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary track by historians Perri Cummings and Paul Anthony Nelson. (B PLUS.)
REMINDERS OF HIM--The latest screen adaptation of a Colleen ("It Ends With Us," "Regretting You") Hoover best seller arrives with built-in expectations of swooning heartbreak and cathartic reconciliation. Under the steady hand of director Vanessa Caswill, however, it trades some of the novel’s feverish emotionalism for a cooler, more observant tone. Maika ("Longlegs") Monroe plays Kenna, newly released from prison after serving time for a drunk-driving accident that killed her boyfriend--who was also the father of her unborn child. Returning to the Colorado town she once fled, Kenna’s singular aim is to reconnect with her daughter now being raised by the child’s paternal grandparents (Lauren Graham and Bradley Whitford). Hoover’s narrative hinges on whether contrition, however sincere, can outweigh irreparable damage. Monroe gives a performance of striking restraint. Rather than leaning into overt displays of anguish she lets Kenna’s remorse register in halting speech patterns and a watchful stillness. As Ledger, the hunky bar owner who cautiously enters into Kenna’s orbit, Tyriq ("Him") Withers provides a welcome steadiness. His chemistry with Monroe is tentative and believable, built on shared silences and incremental trust rather than grand declarations. Caswill doesn't entirely sidestep the source material’s fondness for tidy emotional resolutions, and the final act leans toward uplift that feels more studio-mandated than earned. The film is most affecting in its quieter moments, suggesting that redemption is less a thunderclap than a slow, uneasy negotiation. Sometimes that's enough. (B MINUS.)
SLANTED--Director Amy Wang's 2025 festival breakout is a high-school satire with a serrated edge, announcing itself as a comedy of assimilation before revealing deeper, more discomfiting ambitions. The film centers on Joan (Shirley Chang), a Chinese American teenager at an elite suburban school who's grown increasingly weary of being the minority mascot praised for her grades but sidelined socially. When a controversial medical procedure offering “racial realignment” begins circulating online, Joan makes a rash decision to literally reinvent herself. The transformation grants her entrée into the school’s inner sanctum, presided over by queen-bee senior Harmony played with lacquered charm by Elaine Hendrix. But passing as white comes at a psychic cost, and Joan soon discovers that proximity to power doesn't dissolve its innate cruelty. Wang stages her premise with visual wit and tonal agility. The early scenes crackle with adolescent absurdity--guidance counselors speak in corporate euphemisms, pep rallies resemble nationalist pageants--yet the humor is never merely decorative. Chang gives a performance of impressive dexterity, toggling between Joan’s brittle ambition and her dawning unease. And Hendrix resists easy caricature, making Heather less a villain than an avatar of a system that flatters even as it excludes. While occasionally leaning too heavily into its allegorical machinery by telegraphing themes that might have landed more forcefully with restraint, it remains a striking debut. Wang has crafted a teen flick where American high schools are laboratories of identity and the desire to fit in can become its own kind of body horror. (B PLUS.)
SOMEWHERE IN TIME--There's a beguiling gentleness to 1980's "Somewhere in Time," a film that seems to drift into view rather than announce itself. Released at the dawn of a decade obsessed with high-speed velocity and glittery surfaces, it proposed that longing could be quiet, romance might unfold as an inward ache and the most radical special effect was sincerity. Directed by Jeannot ("Jaws 2") Szwarc, the movie follows Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve), a playwright who becomes entranced by a photograph of turn-of-the-century actress Elise McKenna and wills himself--through obsession, self-denial and belief--into her era. The premise is fanciful but the storytelling remains grounded. Time travel here isn't a whirring machine but a state of mind, achieved through concentration and love as if romance itself were the most powerful technology. Reeve's performance is a study in open-hearted vulnerability defined by hesitation and wonder. Richard isn't a conquering hero but a listener whose devotion deepens as he gradually sheds his modern irony. As Elise, a quietly luminous Jane Seymour captures a woman constrained by circumstance, yet alive to the possibility of a love that arrives impossibly late and exactly on time. The most enduring pleasures here are tactile: the sweep of period costumes, the hush of the Grand Hotel, the melancholy lift of John Barry’s score which helps carry the story more than dialogue. They create a mood that feels less like narrative propulsion than emotional suspension. The film has endured because it trusts its audience to believe that love can bend chronology, devotion can outlast reason and unabashed, unfashionable romanticism can be its own form of bravery. In an age seemingly devoid of sincerity, that feels more bracing than merely quaint. The KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes three separate audio commentary tracks (by, respectively, Szwarc, critic Tim Lucas and writers Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff); Laurent Bouzereau's documentary, "Back to 'Somewhere in Time;'" a featurette ("Inside Insite" about the "Somewhere in Time" fan club); and the original theatrical trailer. (B.)
UNDERTONE--The familiar grammar of the haunted-house movie is pared down to something raw and malignant in director Ian Tuason's feature debut which favors atmospherics over spectacle, trusting suggestion, negative space and the expressive unease of a largely unknown cast to do its heavy-lifting. The story follows Evy (newcomer Nina Kiri), a graduate student in acoustic ecology who decamps to a remote Appalachian town to document so-called “undertones”--low-frequency vibrations residents claim to hear beneath the natural soundscape. She rents a dilapidated farmhouse whose previous occupant, a reclusive amateur scientist, vanished after conducting experiments into infrasound and its physiological effects. As Evy begins recording the area’s ambient noise, she detects a persistent, sub-audible hum embedded in her tapes. The more she isolates and amplifies the frequency, the more her sleep fractures into night terrors and waking hallucinations. Tuason keeps the proceedings rigorously grounded. There are no florid mythologies or elaborate backstories; instead the horror accrues through incremental sensory disturbance (a door vibrating ever so slightly; a glass of water rippling on an otherwise still table; etc.). The sound design becomes a subterranean presence that feels at once geological and sentient. Kiri carries the film with a performance of credible mounting dread while her co-stars lend the rural community an authenticity that resists folksy caricature. “Undertone” doesn’t aim to shock so much as unsettle. It lingers like a pressure change in the air: subtle, invasive and finally inescapable. (B.)
VIRIDIANA—Among the most provocative achievements of Luis Buñuel’s storied career, this 1961 masterpiece occupies a pivotal slot in the director’s filmography: a work that fuses the anticlerical fury of his early surrealist provocations with the cool, observational satire of his later European works. Winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (and banned in Spain), it stands as one of Buñuel’s most unsettling critiques of charity, piety and bourgeois morality. Produced after Buñuel’s long Mexican exile and during his tentative return to Spanish-language filmmaking, "Viridiana" represents a moment of creative reorientation. While the anarchic dream logic of "Un Chien Andalou" and the savage blasphemy of "L'Age d'O" hover in the background, the tone is more controlled, its provocations delivered with a quiet, almost clinical precision. By this point, Bunuel had refined a method in which surrealist disruption no longer appears as shock montage but as moral paradox embedded within narrative realism. The story follows Viridiana, a novice nun (played with luminous severity by Silvia Pinal) who visits the estate of her uncle before taking her vows. What begins as a conventional melodramatic setup gradually curdles into a meditation on spiritual idealism confronted by human perversity. The uncle, played by future Bunuel muse Fernando Rey, becomes obsessed with Viridiana’s resemblance to his late wife, setting in motion an episode of coercion that permanently unsettles her faith in the moral order she wishes to serve. What distinguishes it within Buñuel’s oeuvre is his refusal to position virtue as a stable counterweight to corruption. Viridiana’s attempt to practice Christian charity by sheltering a group of beggars on the estate leads not to redemption, but grotesque collapse. The infamous sequence in which the beggars stage a drunken parody of the Last Supper remains one of Buñuel’s most audacious images: a moment where sacred iconography becomes carnivalesque spectacle. Yet its power lies less in the scandalous surface than structural irony. Charity, in Buñuel’s formulation, becomes a form of narcissism, an attempt to impose moral order on a world that stubbornly resists it. The beggars themselves are neither romanticized nor demonized; they simply embody the unruly materiality that Viridiana’s spiritual ideals cannot withstand. Seen alongside "Belle de Jour" and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie," it forms the core of Buñuel’s late-period triumphs. All three dismantle social institutions--religion, sexuality, bourgeois civility--with a mixture of deadpan humor and philosophical skepticism. But "Viridiana" remains the most austere of the trio, its narrative unfolding with the stark inevitability of a parable gone wrong. In retrospect, the film appears as a harbinger of Buñuel’s mature style. The surrealist iconoclast had evolved into a master ironist, capable of revealing the absurdity of moral systems without raising his voice. If Buñuel’s cinema repeatedly exposes the fragile illusions that sustain social order, this was the moment where that revelation achieves its most devastating clarity.The Criterion Collection’s 4K Blu Ray edition includes interviews with Pinal and scholar Richard Norton; excerpts from a 1964 episode of “Cineastes de notre temps” about Bunuel’s early career; an interview with Bunuel conducted by Mexican critics Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez taken from their book, “Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Bunuel;” and Princeton University professor Michael Wood’s essay. (A.)
SOMEWHERE IN TIME--There's a beguiling gentleness to 1980's "Somewhere in Time," a film that seems to drift into view rather than announce itself. Released at the dawn of a decade obsessed with high-speed velocity and glittery surfaces, it proposed that longing could be quiet, romance might unfold as an inward ache and the most radical special effect was sincerity. Directed by Jeannot ("Jaws 2") Szwarc, the movie follows Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve), a playwright who becomes entranced by a photograph of turn-of-the-century actress Elise McKenna and wills himself--through obsession, self-denial and belief--into her era. The premise is fanciful but the storytelling remains grounded. Time travel here isn't a whirring machine but a state of mind, achieved through concentration and love as if romance itself were the most powerful technology. Reeve's performance is a study in open-hearted vulnerability defined by hesitation and wonder. Richard isn't a conquering hero but a listener whose devotion deepens as he gradually sheds his modern irony. As Elise, a quietly luminous Jane Seymour captures a woman constrained by circumstance, yet alive to the possibility of a love that arrives impossibly late and exactly on time. The most enduring pleasures here are tactile: the sweep of period costumes, the hush of the Grand Hotel, te melancholy lift of John Barry’s score which helps carry the story more than dialogue. They create a mood that feels less like narrative propulsion than emotional suspension. The film has endured because it trusts its audience to believe that love can bend chronology, devotion can outlast reason and unabashed, unfashionable romanticism can be its own form of bravery. In an age seemingly devoid of sincerity, that feels more bracing than merely quaint. The KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes three separate audio commentary tracks (by, respectively, Szwarc, critic Tim Lucas and writers Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff); Laurent Bouzereau's documentary, "Back to 'Somewhere in Time;'" a featurette ("Inside Insite" about the "Somewhere in Time" fan club); and the original theatrical trailer. (B.)
NOW AVAILABLE IN THEATERS, HOME VIDEO AND/OR STREAMING CHANNELS:
BRIDE!--In the wake of Guillermo del Toro’s sumptuous 2025 take on Frankenstein's monster, the Gothic laboratory is beginning to feel less like a site of dread than a well-trod soundstage. Into this crowded crypt shuffles Maggie ("The Lost Daughter") Gyllenhaal’s new movie which aspires to reclaim the monster’s mate as a figure of feminist fury, but ultimately succumbs to the very grandiosity it wants to critique. Set principally in 1936 New York City, the story follows Ida (Jesse Buckley), a dead gangster's moll resurrected by mad scientist Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) as a possible mate for Christian Bale's Frank(enstein). Ida, infused with a flicker of her old self, develops a will that's feral, erotic and
ncreasingly political. Buckley's intensely physical Method performance (jaw clenched, shoulders contorted, vowels stretched as if pulled from fresh sutures) dominates nearly every frame and not always to the film’s advantage. Her choices are bold but so overstated that Eva’s dawning consciousness feels less sui generis than merely affected. The character’s volatility eventually curdles into mannerism. Gyllenhaal directs with brio, favoring baroque production design and a throbbing modernist score. Yet for all its technical bravado, “Bride!” rarely escapes the shadow of its progenitors. In a moment when the Frankenstein myth is enjoying yet another renaissance, this version proves that resurrection alone is not the same as reinvention. (C PLUS.)
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.)
DOLLY--By simultaneously honoring and subverting the conventions of backwoods fright flicks like "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and "The Hills Have Eyes," Rod Blackhurst’s shocker is a laudably ambitious riff on the "abduction as domestic terror" subgenre. Fabianne Therese anchors the movie with a taut, emotionally grounded performance as Macy whose idyllic woodland sojourn with her partner (Seann William Scott) devolves into a macabre struggle for autonomy when she's kidnapped by an almost mythic figure. This monster, brought to life by the fearsome presence of Max the Impaler, is at once grotesque and chillingly earnest in its warped desire to raise Macy as a child within its own demented domicile. What begins as a seemingly benign escape into nature quickly reveals a landscape littered with uncanny signs--dolls dangling from trees, eerie melodies drifting through the woods--and culminates in Macy’s confinement in a grotesque enclosure that feels like a fatalistic inversion of the nuclear family. Her ensuing journey is one of psychological endurance as much as physical survival with the forest itself becoming both prison and judge. Visually and tonally, Blackhurst channels the lo-fi grit of '70s American horror classics while incorporating the unforgiving intensity of New French Extremity. The use of Super 16mm photography and practical effects adds an unsettling physical texture, rendering every shadow and scream with palpable menace. By infusing genre tropes with a kind of mythic irrationality, Blackhurst pays homage to his cinematic forebears while exploring the porous boundary between nurture and nightmare. In its unflinching brutality and eerie emotional logic, this visceral nightmare stands as a testament to what independent horror can achieve when rooted in craft, atmosphere and a fearless commitment to originality. (B PLUS.)
EPiC: ELVIS PRESLEY IN CONCERT--Baz ("Moulin Rouge," "The Great Gatsby") Luhrmann has never been accused of thinking small, and "EPiC" confirms that his maximalist tendencies remain ideally suited to pop colossus Elvis Presley. If Luhrmann’s 2022 Presley biopic was a feverish act of mythmaking, this concert movie feels like the director stepping aside to let the music, the body and the voice do their own undeniable work. Constructed from restored performance footage and presented with Luhrmann’s trademark editorial bravura, it's less a traditional documentary than an act of cinematic archaeology. The camera lingers on Presley in motion--hips swiveling, face slick with sweat, eyes alternately tender and feral--and the effect is to remind us how physical his genius was. Luhrmann cuts with a DJ’s ear for rhythm, finding new momentum inside familiar songs and allowing the performances to build into something close to rapture. This is spectacle in the service of presence. What distinguishes "EPiC" from countless legacy concert docs is Luhrmann’s intuitive grasp of Elvis as both performer and vessel. The film doesn’t flatten Presley into a greatest-hits jukebox; it emphasizes the volatility of a man singing as if his body might combust under the strain. In this sense, it functions as a corrective to nostalgia, insisting that Elvis was not a museum piece but a live wire. There's also a quiet self-reflexivity at play. Having previously filtered Presley through stylization and dramatization, Luhrmann now seems content to let the archive breathe. His interventions heighten rather than obscure, framing "The King" as a singular American force whose magnetism survives any amount of remixing. Exhilarating, unapologetic and oddly moving, it argues with every cut and crescendo that Elvis in concert remains one of the greatest spectacles modern cinema can offer. (A MINUS.)
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.)
HOPPERS--Pixar, the studio that magically transformed talking toys and trash-compacting robots into vessels of metaphysical longing, returns with a sprightly, slightly overextended fable about empathy, environmentalism and the limits of modern technology. Directed by Daniel Chong in his feature debut, the film is energetic and amiable without achieving the sort of emotional alchemy that once made every Pixar release seem like a cultural event. The premise is clever in a familiar, committee-approved way. Set in the near-future where scientists have created a method of “hopping” human consciousness into robotic animals, the story follows 19-year-old skater chick Mabel (Piper Curda) who volunteers to inhabit the mechanical body of a beaver to help thwart a shady development project threatening earth's delicate ecosystem. What begins as a caper about corporate greed and conservation slowly morphs into a lesson about (quite literally) seeing the world from another species’ point of view. The voice cast is stacked, sometimes distractingly so. As an imperious insect queen, Meryl Streep delivers line readings of wry understatement while the rest of the ensemble (including Jon Hamm, Bobby Moynihan and Dave Franco) gamely toggles between comic exaggeration and earnest uplift. Fur textures and water effects are rendered at a level of digital perfection that now feels less miraculous than predictable. The jokes land, the message is unobjectionable and the third-act reconciliation arrives right on schedule. What’s missing is that old Pixar magic, the sense of emotional risk and reaching beyond allegory to something unexpectedly profound. Which raises an uncomfortable question: are Pixar’s glory days behind it? "Hoppers" suggests a studio still capable of smart, likable, all-ages-friendly entertainment, but also one increasingly content to coast on their laurels. That may be enough for families at a Saturday matinee, but it’s no longer enough to make it feel essential. (B MINUS.)
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.)
PROTECTOR--Despite the formidable presence of Milla Jovovich as Nikki, a combat vet hell-bent on rescuing her kidnapped daughter, director Adrian ("Rambo: Last Blood," "Get the Gringo") Grünberg's generic throwaway collapses under the weight of overfamiliarity. The 92 minute runtime feels less like disciplined economy than a concession to narrative thinness: a skeletal framework that exposes rather than energizes its mechanical action setpieces. The hackneyed premise has generated countless thrillers (not all of them starring Liam Neeson), but here it's rendered with the predictability of a formula checklist. Nikki’s descent into the criminal underworld carries few surprises and less emotional depth; the script struggles to endow her odyssey with anything beyond choreographed brutality. Jovovich remains a dependable physical presence, but the role offers her a series of combat moves rather than character development. In supporting roles, Matthew Modine and D.B. Sweeney are mere sketch figures handicapped by expository dialogue and perfunctory motivation. Grünberg favors blunt impact over spatial or emotional clarity, resulting in numbingly repetitious sequences that loop back on themselves without accruing any discernible tension. The relentlessly grim surfaces and lack of dramatic invention leaves it adrift in a morass of tedium. (D.)
SCREAM 7--The long-running, once bracing slasher series returns with a self-consciousness that now registers as weary ritual. This latest iteration is written and directed by Kevin Williamson, architect of the 1996 original, which gives it a pleasing circularity. Unfortunately, Williamson's involvement also underscores how much the franchise’s self-awareness has ossified into formula. Streamlined to the point of schematic, the plot once again deposits Ghostface in Woodsboro where a new cycle of murders seems designed to interrogate the very idea of legacy horror. A fresh group of young characters, lightly sketched and mostly interchangeable, find themselves stalked while attempting to decode which rules of the genre still apply. Hovering over it all is the much-ballyhooed return of Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott whose reappearance is treated with reverence, but also a modicum of uncertainty as if Williamson wasn’t quite sure what to do with his most enduring symbol of survival. She’s joined by familiar faces (Courteney Cox, David Arquette, Matthew Lillard, et al) and a smattering of survivors from the recent sequels, all circling one another in a narrative that nods incessantly to the entire "Scream" universe. These callbacks, previously sly and invigorating, now feel like box checking in a contractual agreement with its own past. The kills are efficient rather than inventive, the humor lands softly and the screenplay’s meta observations arrive pre-digested, lacking the mischievous bite that used to make the franchise seem transgressive. Even the central mystery unfolds with a mechanical inevitability, its revelations less shocking than politely acknowledged. As a result, it's less a revitalization than a reminder that even the sharpest blades can dull with ceaseless repetition.
(C MINUS.)
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.)
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
