NEW THIS WEEK (4/17) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
ISLANDS--Sun-drenched and unsettling, German director Jan-Ole Gerster's initial foray into English-language cinema is an unsettling, sun-drenched thriller that unfolds like a mirage, an atmospheric tale of suspicion, desire and displacement. Sam Riley, best known for playing Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis in 2007's "Control," gives one of his best performances to date as Tom, a former professional tennis player whose career has slipped into obscurity. Now working as a pro at a Canary Islands resort, Tom fills his days with lessons for sunburned tourists and his nights in a blur of parties and brief liaisons--an endless summer that feels less like paradise and more like purgatory. Enter Anne, played by Stacy ("Nymphomaniac, Volume 1") Martin with a cool, enigmatic elegance who arrives with her husband Dave (Jack Farthing) and their young son Anton (Dylan Torrell). Inexplicably drawn to Anne, Tom agrees to give Anton private lessons, but the lines between professional courtesy and personal intrigue quickly blur. When Dave mysteriously vanishes after an evening out, the casual rhythms of island life give way to suspicion and Tom finds himself at the center of a police investigation that seems to hinge as much on his own emotional turmoil as the facts of the case. Gerster resists easy payoffs, allowing tension to accrue in the leisurely beats of a story that is at once a character study and a whodunit. The setting (sun-bleached beaches, late-night bars and the endless horizon of the Atlantic) becomes a silent participant reflecting Tom’s internal drift. Riley’s portrait of a man undone by regret and yearning finds a perfect foil in Martin’s inscrutable Anne whose motives remain tantalizingly opaque. It's a quietly powerful film that lingers like a horizon you can almost touch, but never quite reach. No extras on the Greenwich/Kino Lorber DVD. (B PLUS.)
LEE CRONIN'S THE MUMMY-- Boris Karloff's 1932 creature feature has been reimagined less as straightforward resurrection than a grief story wrapped in desiccated bandages. Lee Cronin, whose "Evil Dead Rise" reveled in tactile dread, pares the premise down to its stark emotional core. The film opens with the disappearance of globe-hopping journalist Daniel Harrow's young daughter Imogen in a remote desert. Eight years later Imogen (Natalie Grace) returns--seemingly unchanged physically, but altered in ways that deeply unsettle Daniel (Jack Reynor) and his partner Elena (Laia Costa) who've been trying to rebuild their lives in her absence. What follows is a slow unspooling of the unnatural: Imogen’s body resists time, her presence warps the domestic space and something ancient seems to have followed her home. Cronin’s direction is most effective in the first half where terror accrues in quiet gestures and the uncanny is allowed to seep in rather than explode in jump scares. Reynor brings a credible, hollowed-out anguish to his role while Costa lends a grounding intelligence, registering both maternal instinct and rational skepticism. Grace, who embodies both innocence and something vaguely sinister, is effectively creepy. Yet as the narrative leans more heavily into its mythological underpinnings--curses, relics and a vaguely sketched ancient order--the movie loses some of its earlier momentum. The explanatory backstory feels conventional, even rushed as though Cronin was less interested in the lore than the emotional wreckage it leaves behind. What remains is a film at war with itself: a mournful chamber piece intermittently overtaken by genre cliches. At its best, it suggests a more intimate kind of screen horror where the dead don’t stay buried but return unchanged, demanding to be loved anyway. (B MINUS.)
NORMAL--There's always been something unclassifiable about British filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s oeuvre, a body of work that slips between genres with the confidence of a magician and the restlessness of a born skeptic. From the pastoral unease of "A Field in England" to the mechanized frenzy of "Free Fire," his movies have resisted easy categorization. This time Wheatley turns his attention to the American heartland only to uncover something stranger and more disquieting beneath its placid surfaces. Bob Odenkirk--drawing on the world-weary moral fatigue he honed in "Better Call Saul" and the coiled volatility of his "Nobody" Everyman--plays Sheriff Dan Heller, a man tasked with restoring order after a bank robbery in a small Midwestern town goes violently wrong. What begins as a routine police investigation gradually reveals a web of buried grievances and half-forgotten crimes that implicate nearly everyone, including Heller himself. Wheatley's gift lies in his ability to let tone curdle almost imperceptibly. Scenes that begin with procedural clarity drift into something more uncanny, aided by cool, watchful cinematography and a sound design that seems to hum with unspoken dread. The town feels less like a setting than a pressure chamber. If the film occasionally threatens to collapse under the weight of its own metaphors, it's redeemed by Wheatley’s bracing refusal to offer comfort. What exactly have we agreed to call “normal,” and at what cost? (B.)
RUNAWAY TRAIN--Director Andrei ("Tango and Cash," "Maria's Lovers") Konchalovsky's 1985 film stands as one of the most ferocious, philosophically resonant action flicks of the '80s. What distinguishes the movie isn't simply its visceral propulsion, but the severity of its moral landscape rendered with an almost Dostoevskian intensity beneath the clangor of steel and snow. The premise is deceptively simple. Two convicts--Manny, played with volcanic fury by Jon Voight, and Eric Roberts' jittery Buck--escape from a brutal Alaskan prison overseen by a sadistic warden (John P. Ryan). Seeking refuge they stow away on what they think is a stationary freight train, only to discover that it's a driverless juggernaut hurtling through the frozen wilderness. Joining them is railroad worker Sara (Rebecca De Mornay) whose presence introduces both a fragile humanity and a counterpoint to the men’s increasingly desperate psychological states. Yet to describe the movie as a mere chase picture is to miss its essential achievement. Konchalovsky, working from an unproduced screenplay by Akira Kurosawa, transforms it into a stark parable about freedom, fate and self-definition. Manny is no conventional hero; he's a man shaped, and arguably deformed, by institutional brutality, clinging to a code of personal sovereignty that borders on the mythic. Voight plays him not as a figure of redemption, but a tragic absolutist determined to assert meaning in a world that offers none. The action sequences are undeniably thrilling, executed with a tactile realism that resists the gloss of most of its studio-bound contemporaries. The train itself becomes an elemental force, less vehicle than metaphor, an iron embodiment of unstoppable momentum indifferent to human will. Konchalovsky emphasizes physicality (the biting cold, the grinding machinery, the precariousness of every foothold). This is action cinema stripped of fantasy where danger feels imminent and the consequences are irreversible. Buck's nervous optimism and moral pliability contrasts sharply with Manny’s rigid, implacable ethos. Sara, meanwhile, is not merely a bystander but a moral witness caught between fear and reluctant admiration. The trio forms a volatile triangle of competing instincts: survival, dominance and conscience. What ultimately secures its place among the great action films of the era is its refusal to console, hurtling towards a kind of existential reckoning. In an era defined by invincible heroes and clean resolutions, Konchalovsky delivered something harsher, stranger and more enduring, a movie that dares to ask what freedom costs and whether it can ever be truly attained. Special features on KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray include an audio commentary with Roberts and historians David Del Valle and C. Courtney Joynrer; two standalone interviews with Roberts (from 2013 and 2025 respectively); Voight and costar Kyle T. Heffner's reminiscences about the film's production; and the original theatrical trailer. (A.)
UFORIA--There's something tenderly stubborn about director John Binder’s 1985 curiosity that arrived in theaters with little fanfare and left just as quietly, only to gather a modest but devoted following in the ensuing decades. Set in a vaguely near-future American landscape both sun-bleached and spiritually overcast, it follows drifter-turned-reluctant visionary Jack Harlan (played with gruff warmth by Fred Ward) who stumbles into a desert commune promising a reset from the noise of modern life. Presiding over this fragile experiment is Claire (Cindy Williams) whose soft-spoken veneer masks an ironclad belief in their mission. Lurking at the edges is the enigmatic Gideon (character actor extraordinaire Harry Dean Stanton) who may understand the community’s contradictions better than anyone. Binder’s movie is less narrative-driven than a series of observations (small gestures, uneasy conversations, the slow erosion of certainty). Jack, initially skeptical, begins to absorb the rhythms of the place even as fractures gradually appear: questions of authority, the tension between individual desire and the collective good, an ever-present suspicion that "utopia" is impractical. At the time of its release, "Uforia" struggled to find an audience. Its refusal to provide easy catharsis or conventional dramatic stakes likely confounded viewers expecting either a sharper satire or a more overtly inspirational tale. Yet that very ambiguity feels like a quiet strength. Binder was less interested in mocking idealism than examining its vulnerabilities and the ways in which hope can both sustain and destabilize. Ward anchors the film with a performance that resists grandstanding while Williams lends Claire a grounded sincerity that never tips into naiveté. Stanton, meanwhile, hovers like a ghost of disillusionment and provides the most haunting notes. Its modesty has become an enduring charm, a reminder that some movies don't fail so much as wait patiently to be discovered. Viewed today, "Utopia" plays like a dispatch from a future that never quite arrived. KL Studio Classics' new Blu-Ray includes both 4K and DVD copies as well as an audio commentary track with Binder, associate producer Jeanne Field and historian Daniel Kremer. (A MINUS.)
NOW AVAILABLE IN THEATERS, HOME VIDEO AND/OR STREAMING CHANNELS:
THE DRAMA--There's something almost sadistic in the way director Kristoffer Borgli constructs a premise that sounds like a generic indie rom-com only to subvert it from within. In his third feature following the queasy-inducing "Sick of Myself" and meta, concept-driven "Dream Scenario," Borgli once again turns his attention to the fragile fictions people construct about themselves, this time through the rituals of coupledom. The film centers on soft-spoken Emma (Zendaya) and her fiancé Charlie (Robert Pattinson) whose British reserve masks an anxious interior life. As their wedding week unfolds, what begins as a series of minor tensions--awkward encounters with friends, strained family dynamics--gradually spirals when a revelation destabilizes the relationship’s carefully curated mythology. Borgli parcels out these disruptions with a magician’s sense of timing, allowing discomfort to accumulate in glances, pauses and social misfires rather than in florid melodramatic gestures. What distinguishes the movie isn't merely the narrative architecture but its tonal audacity. Borgli has always excelled at locating cringe within aspiration and this time he applies that sensibility to romantic intimacy itself. The result is by turns laugh-out-loud funny and faintly nauseating, a combination that recalls the social horror of his earlier work while pushing into more emotionally exposed terrain. If "Myself" dissected narcissism and "Scenario" toyed with the absurdity of public image, "The Drama" interrogates the quieter delusions that sustain love. Zendaya gives a performance of remarkable subtlety, revealing Emma’s inner fractures without ever surrendering her opacity while Pattinson continues his post-franchise run of adventurous choices with a portrayal that balances charm and unraveling panic. A smartly chosen supporting cast (including Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim) adds texture to a social world that feels both recognizable and faintly surreal. Borgli's vision may not be comforting, but it is bracingly clear-eyed. Love here isn't undone by a single secret so much as the dawning recognition that we never quite knew the other person to begin with. (A MINUS.)
FACES OF DEATH--Director Daniel ("How to Blow Up a Pipeline") Goldhaber revisits a title once synonymous with grindhouse provocation and refashions it into something more introspective and provocative. Rather than trading in shock value for its own sake, Goldhaber probes the uneasy chasm between spectatorship and complicity. Mara ("Euphoria" alumnus Barbie Ferreira) is a disaffected video editor who lands a job curating disturbing online content for a shadowy media startup. When she crosses paths with Lucas (Dacre Montgomery), a charismatic but increasingly unhinged archivist obsessed with cataloging actual death footage, she's drawn into a digital underworld where authenticity becomes both currency and curse. As their collaboration deepens, so does the film’s interest in the psychological toll of witnessing (and packaging) human suffering. Goldhaber, whose earlier work displayed a knack for marrying genre thrills with political undercurrents, brings a similar sensibility here. It's at its best when lingering on Mara’s moral erosion, conveyed with a wounded alertness by Ferreira who gives her role a grounded center. Montgomery leans heavily into Lucas’s seductive menace even though the character’s journey occasionally veers toward the schematic. Alternating between the antiseptic glow of editing suites and the murky textures of illicit footage, it's a visually striking package. The thematic ambitions sometimes outpace its narrative cohesion, though; the critique of digital voyeurism feels both urgent and underdeveloped, lightly sketched in rather than fully realized. Although Goldhaber doesn't entirely escape the shadow of his own premise, he still manages to transform a once-notorious brand into a vehicle for uneasy, lingering questions very much worth exploring. (B MINUS.)
A GREAT AWAKENING--The premise of director Joshua Enck's wannabe inspirational--the unlikely friendship between Benjamin Franklin (played with dutiful stiffness by John Paul Sneed) and evangelical firebrand George Whitefield (Jonathan Blair who also co-wrote the script)--isn't without promise. As the colonies inch toward revolution, Whitefield’s sermons ignite the so-called "Great Awakening" while future Founding Father Franklin (printer, skeptic, brand manager avant la lettre) becomes his unlikely champion. Yet what unfolds over two-plus sluggish hours is less a film than a pious pageant staged with the solemnity of a museum diorama and roughly the same degree of animation. Enck’s direction favors reverence over rhythm; scenes begin, linger and expire without ever justifying their existence. Sneed’s Franklin is all furrowed brow and homespun aphorism, drained of the wit that made him so memorable. Blair, meanwhile, approaches Whitefield as if volume were a substitute for charisma, delivering sermon after sermon with diminishing returns. Their supposed friendship (intellectual, spiritual, even transactional) never coheres into anything remotely convincing. The script leans heavily on a kind of uplift-by-declaration: liberty must be awakened, hearts must be stirred, history must be made. These ideas are announced so frequently they begin to sound less like convictions than talking points. Buried somewhere beneath the starch and sermonizing is a potentially gripping story about media, faith and the manufacturing of public influence in the pre-digital age. But Enck, who confuses piety with dramatic urgency, never finds it. (D.)
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.)
PROJECT HAIL MARY—Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller ("Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs," "The LEGO Movie") transform "The Martian" author Andy Weir’s wonky sci-fi novel into a buoyant, unexpectedly moving slice of pop entertainment. The film carries the familiar pleasures of problem-solving spectacle while revealing a gentler curiosity about companionship, intelligence and the stubborn human instinct to keep experimenting even when the universe is self-destructing. Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a mild-mannered middle-school science teacher who awakens alone aboard a distant spacecraft with no memory of who he is or even why he’s there. Through fragments of returning memory--and a series of increasingly desperate calculations--Grace realizes he's been sent on a last-chance mission to investigate a mysterious cosmic phenomenon draining energy from the sun. Back on earth, a multinational emergency effort overseen by a steely European official ("Anatomy of a Fall" Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller) has pinned its collective hopes on the unlikely astronaut. Lord and Miller handle the material with their usual tonal agility and prodigious wit, oscillating between suspense, comedy and earnest scientific inquiry without losing narrative momentum. Much of the drama arises from watching Grace think: equations scribbled in midair displays, improvised experiments conducted in zero gravity, hypotheses collapsing and reforming in real time. Gosling, leaning into a kind of befuddled sincerity, makes the character’s intellectual trial-and-error both funny and oddly heroic. What ultimately distinguishes this from more bombastic space epics (think Christopher Nolan's fatally muddled "Interstellar") is its innate warmth. The movie's central relationship--one that develops far from Earth and outside the boundaries of human experience--isn't treated as a gimmick but a genuine emotional bond. The filmmakers resist easy cynicism, allowing curiosity and cooperation to become the real engines of suspense. Visually sleek yet surprisingly intimate, "Hail Mary" is less a story about saving the planet than fragile, improbable alliances that make salvation possible. It’s a crowd-pleaser that still finds room for wonder. (A MINUS.)
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.)
THE SUPER MARIO BROTHERS GALAXY MOVIE--The brand management behind this inevitable sequel to the 2023 blockbuster finds its next level in a follow-up that's bigger, louder but not appreciably better. Helmed with breathless efficiency by returning director Aaron Horvath, it swaps the Mushroom Kingdom’s earthy platforms for a kaleidoscopic tour of the cosmos where gravity bends and narrative coherence soon follows. The vocal cast remains the franchise’s strongest asset. Chris Pratt again plays Mario as a plucky, slightly bewildered everyman while Charlie Day gives Luigi a tremulous, endearing anxiety that proves useful when the brothers are separated across distant galaxies. Anya Taylor-Joy’s Princess Peach is afforded more agency this time, leading a mission to recover a scattered set of Power Stars before they fall into the claws of Bowser (voiced with gravelly gusto by Jack Black). Mario, Peach and a band of familiar allies hop between vividly rendered planetoids, each with its own physics and perils, in a race to thwart Bowser’s plot to reshape the universe into his own volcanic image. The animation team conjures a playful sense of scale--from tiny spherical worlds to vast nebulae--that captures the tactile wonder of its source material. Yet for all its sensory pleasures the film struggles to balance momentum with meaning. Jokes land in bursts and the emotional beats, particularly the brothers’ separation, feel more dutiful than earned. What remains is a fitfully diverting kidflick that understands the appeal of its universe without quite discovering a new one. (C.)
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.)
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.)
YOU, ME AND TUSCANY--Director Kat (2022's "Marry Me") Coiro returns to the rom-com genre with an easygoing confidence, delivering a sunlit diversion that leans more on charm than surprise. Anna (Halle Bailey), an aspiring New York chef on the run from a stalled career and failed relationship, finds herself at a lavish Tuscan villa where she impulsively poses as the fiancée of its distracted owner, Matteo (Marco Calvani). What begins as a harmless white lie grows increasingly complicated when she meets Michael (Regé-Jean Page), Matteo's British-born adopted brother, whose easy confidence and disarming sincerity make him both an ideal confidant and inconvenient romantic prospect. Coiro handles the farcical elements with a light touch, allowing the deception to unfold less as a high-stakes charade than gentle emotional awakening. Bailey gives Anna a likable mix of restlessness and vulnerability while "Bridgerton" heartthrob Page proves an effortlessly appealing foil, equal parts teasing and attentive. The supporting cast performs with understated grace. As Matteo, Calvani avoids caricature by imbuing his faux fiancé with a distracted melancholy; Isabella Ferrari, the estate’s elegant matriarch, lends the proceedings a note of Old World sophistication; and Aziza Scott (Anna’s sharp-tongued best friend) injects a welcome jolt of sassiness. If the movie drifts where it should sprint and resolves exactly as predicted, its soft-focus romanticism and tactile sense of place offer modest but undeniable rewards. (C PLUS.)
---Milan Paurich
