NEW THIS WEEK (4/24) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
DIE MY LOVE--Harrowing, compassionate and haunting, Lynn ("We Need to Talk About Kevin," "You Were Never Really Here") Ramsay's latest masterpiece channels the full force of its emotions via commanding performances and her typically uncompromising vision. Adapted from Ariana Harwicz’s acclaimed novel, it explores the dissolution of identity within a marriage, the suffocation of domestic life and the ungovernable urges that lurk beneath the surface of love. Ramsay’s direction is characteristically fearless; she plunges the viewer into a fevered psychological landscape where tenderness and terror coexist. As new mom Grace, Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence delivers her most accomplished and devastating performance to date. Ramsay gives Lawrence the freedom to unravel on screen without artifice or restraint, and the result is a portrait of despair and desire almost too intimate to bear. Robert Pattinson brings an understated ballast to the role of Grace's well-meaning, if ultimately ineffectual husband that slowly curdles into dread which helps ground the emotional chaos. Lakeith Stanfield’s enigmatic turn adds a vital tension, his quiet empathy contrasting with the surrounding volatility. Sissy Spacek and Nick Nolte lend weathered gravitas, their scenes infused with memory and regret, helping shape the story’s emotional architecture with quiet precision. Ramsay and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey craft images that sear themselves into memory: sunlight that feels bruised, domestic interiors trembling with unease and landscapes that radiate both freedom and entrapment. The sound design helps amplify Grace's fracturing psyche: every creak, whisper and silence reverberates with unspoken pain. Editing is sharp yet intuitive, collapsing time and memory into a fluid, almost dreamlike continuum that mirrors its protagonist’s disorientation. Yet this isn't simply a descent into madness. Ramsay locates moments of brutal poetry amidst the despair, illuminating fragile connections that keep people tethered to one another even when everything else is lost. The handsome new MUBI release includes both 4K Ultra HD and Blu-Ray copies of the film. (A.)
FUZE--Returning to the pressure-cooker atmosphere of 2016's Oscar-nominated "Hell or High Water" and last summer's "Relay," director David Mackenzie has crafted a lean, morally knotted thriller that unfolds with the inexorable logic of a slow-burning fuse. Best known for his ability to braid character study with genre propulsion, Mackenzie here pares his approach to something almost classical in its severity. Set in London over the course of a single, increasingly volatile day, the movie follows bomb disposal expert Tom Buckley (played with flinty restraint by Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who's tasked with defusing an explosive device discovered beneath a housing project. What begins as a technical exercise quickly mutates into something more psychologically fraught after learning the bomb is part of a coordinated plot, and that Buckley may have a personal connection to its architect. As tensions mount, a police liaison officer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and a bank robber (Theo James) complicate the already precarious chain of events, turning the act of defusal into a battle of competing narratives and buried motives. Mackenzie directs with a taut, unshowy precision favoring close ups and real-time escalation over spectacle. Each cut of a wire and withheld piece of information throbs with meaning. Mackenzie’s gift lies in making the procedural feel existential, and he's crafted a quietly unsettling meditation on moral responsibility in an age of diffuse, often invisible threats. (B PLUS.)
HOUSE CALLS--In the late '70s when Hollywood romantic comedies loosened up without quite surrendering their sense of decorum, "House Calls" arrived as a modest but insouciant charmer. Directed by Howard Zieff--a filmmaker whose gift for human-scaled comedies can also be felt in "Slither" (1973), "Hearts of the West" (1975) and "Private Benjamin" (1980)—the movie has aged with a kind of unassuming grace. Charley Nichols (Walter Matthau), a recently widowed, comfortably cynical physician, resumes his bachelorhood with gusto by juggling a series of casual romantic entanglements. Into his life comes Ann Atkinson, a guarded, fiercely intelligent divorcée played by two-time Oscar winner Glenda Jackson. Ann’s professional ambitions and emotional wariness stand in bemused contrast to Charley’s raffish ease. Their relationship unfolds as a series of encounters (witty, prickly, occasionally tender) that gradually reveal deeper undercurrents beneath the breezy surface. At its center is the electric chemistry between Matthau and Jackson. Matthau, with his rumpled geniality and gift for comic understatement, finds an ideal foil in Jackson’s precise, almost musical command of language. Their interplay is less about flirtation than negotiation: two adults circling each other with equal parts skepticism and curiosity. It's a meeting of sensibilities rather than types, and the film’s pleasures reside in watching them adjust, retreat and advance again. That appeal proved durable enough to inspire a television spin-off with Wayne Rogers and Lynn Redgrave stepping into the Matthau and Jackson roles. The series, which ran for three seasons on CBS, captured some of the original’s piquant flavor although it (perhaps inevitably) softened the sharper edges that made the original so special. Today "House Calls" plays like a low-key classic: urbane without being slick, romantic without illusion and anchored by two performers whose shared screen time feels both improbable and inevitable. It's a grown-up comedy that trusts its audience to appreciate not just the punchlines, but the pauses in between. Entertainment journalists Max Evry and Bryan Reesman provide the audio commentary for KL Studio Classics' new Blu-Ray. (A MINUS.)
HOUSE OF CARDS--This modest 1969 Universal programmer wears its intrigue lightly and seems content to drift along on the charm of its cosmopolitan setting. Directed by John Guillerman (whose later, more bombastic credits include "The Towering Inferno" and 1976's "King Kong"), the movie plays like a minor key prelude to his future spectacles. George Peppard stars as Reno Davis, an American boxer idling away in Paris whose career has slowed to a shrug and whose ambitions have calcified into routine. Enter wealthy widow Anne de Villemont (Inger Stevens) who hires him as a quasi guardian to her eight-year-old son. Their arrangement takes a dramatic turn when the boy is kidnapped, plunging Reno into a labyrinthine conspiracy that stretches beyond France and into the murkier corridors of international intrigue. Peppard, with his easy physicality and bemused screen presence, proves an appealing guide through the increasingly convoluted plot. He's less a hard-nosed professional than a man improvising his way through danger, giving the film an appealing looseness. Stevens brings an understated melancholy to Anne, her composure masking a deep well of anxiety and sorrow. As a shadowy figure whose motives remain teasingly opaque, Orson Welles descends upon the proceedings like stormy weather, reshaping its atmosphere through sheer presence alone. His scenes crackle with a different kind of energy, momentarily suggesting a darker, more complex movie lurking beneath the surface. Guillerman directs with efficiency rather than flourish, using the European locations as both scenic backdrop and texture. The pleasures are modest yet genuine: a sense of place, a handful of well-staged action setpieces and performances that elevate material that might otherwise seem overly formulaic. It may not linger in the memory, but "House of Cards" endures as a curio of its era--a throwaway that, like its title, is delicately constructed, occasionally precarious and ultimately held together by the charisma of its actors. Historian/screenwriter Gary Gerani provides the audio commentary track on KL Studio Classics' new Blu-Ray which also includes the original theatrical trailer. (B.)
HOUSE OF 7 CORPSES--Proudly disreputable and curiously endearing, Paul Harrison’s shoestring 1973 horror curio has gradually accrued the status of a midnight movie treasure. Shot with more enthusiasm than polish, it's a movie that seems to exist in a half-dream of Hollywood’s own haunted past where the boundaries between performance and possession grow perilously thin. The set-up is delightfully lurid. A temperamental director (played with gravelly conviction by John Ireland) brings his cast and crew to an abandoned mansion to shoot a low-budget horror flick. The house, naturally, comes with its own checkered history (a series of ritualistic murders tied to satanic rites occurred there). When the producers insist on using an authentic occult text as a prop, the staged séance begins to feel less like make believe and more like an invocation. One by on, the actors find themselves enmeshed in a mounting series of deaths that mirror the script. Harrison, whose career never quite escaped the gravitational pull of exploitation cinema, directs with a rough-hewn sincerity that gives the film its peculiar charm. He's less interested in shocks than atmosphere, allowing the house itself to emerge as the most commanding presence--dusty, echoing and suggestively alive. The pacing can be a tad slack, but the cumulative effect is oddly hypnotic as though it were slowly conjuring its own spell. John Carradine, a veteran of Hollywood’s Golden Age and no stranger to gothic material, appears as a sinister caretaker whose wrinkled brow and sepulchral voice seem imported from a more elegant era of screen horror. His presence lends an unexpected gravitas, a reminder of a lineage that stretches back to the genre’s classical roots. If Harrison never quite achieves the scares he's aiming for, he achieves a kind of ragged poetry in the creaky sets and earnest performances. It's his scrappy affection for horror that refuses to stay buried. KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes two audio commentary tracks with, respectively, author/historian David Del Valle and producer/director David DeCoteau, and associate producer Gary Kent; an archival interview with Carradine; Demon Dave & Joe's "Savage Tracks" Volume 5 featuring Randy Cognata; and the theatrical trailer. (B.)
JIMPA--Director Sophie Hyde returns to the intimate, semi-autobiographical turf that's defined much of her work (including "Animals" and "Good Luck to You, Leo Grande") with a gently probing drama about family, identity and the complicated legacies of queer life across generations. The film unfolds with a deceptively casual rhythm, its emotional stakes accruing in sidelong glances and carefully weighted conversations. The story centers on a nonbinary teenager (played with unaffected naturalism by Aud Mason-Hyde) who travels to Amsterdam to spend time with their estranged grandfather affectionately known as Jimpa (John Lithgow). Once a vibrant figure in Europe’s gay liberation movement, Jimpa now lives a quiet life, his past both a source of pride and a repository of unresolved tensions. The teen’s mother (Oscar winner Olivia Colman), herself navigating the lingering complexities of being raised by a defiantly unconventional parent, hovers at the edges of their reunion. Hyde structures the narrative as a kind of intergenerational dialogue contrasting Jimpa’s hard-won sense of identity formed in an era of overt struggle with his grandchild's more fluid, contemporary understanding of gender and selfhood. The LGBT themes emerge not as polemic but as lived experience textured by memory and affection. Hyde is less interested in conflict than the delicate process of mutual recognition: how people separated by time, geography and ideology can still find common ground. Lithgow gives a performance of tremendous warmth, shading Jimpa’s charm with hints of regret and stubbornness. Colman brings a quiet intelligence to a woman caught between admiration for her dad and hurt over past grievances. But it's Mason-Hyde who anchors the film, their performance marked by a watchful stillness that allows the character’s questions and uncertainties to resonate. If "Jimpa" occasionally feels slight, its modesty is also a virtue. Hyde resists easy catharsis, favoring a more open-ended emotional landscape. What remains is a thoughtful, humane movie that examines the evolving language of identity without losing sight of the personal histories that shape it. Kino Lorber's Blu-Ray includes cast/crew interviews and deleted scenes. (B PLUS.)
MICHAEL--Antoine ("Training Day," "The Equalizer") Fuqua's long-gestating Michael Jackson biopic proves less excavation than consecration. Written by John ("Gladiator") Logan, the film traces Jackson’s arc from his childhood years with the Jackson 5 through the vertiginous ascent of solo superstardom, staging familiar milestones (the Motown years, the making of "Thriller," the Pepsi commercial accident, etc.) with dutiful, museum-like fidelity. Jaafar Jackson, Michael’s nephew, assumes the titular role with uncanny physical precision, a feat of mimicry that occasionally deepens into something like real feeling. As tyrannical patriarch Joe Jackson, Colman Domingo brings a stern, coiled gravity that hints at generational trauma the movie is mostly reluctant to address. Fuqua directs with polish and scale--concert sequences pulse, the camera glides, iconography is reverently reproduced--but the drama feels curiously airless. This isn't a life so much as a brand narrative shaped more by the Jackson estate’s imprimatur than any artistic inquiry. While gesturing toward the hardships of an abusive parent and the pressures of fame, it consistently substitutes trauma for unearned uplift. Most glaringly, "Michael" sidesteps the controversies that have long shadowed the late superstar. Well-documented allegations of child abuse are conspicuously absent, reportedly excised from earlier versions at the demand of the Jackson family. And Michael's increasingly complex public identity (racial, sexual, psychological) is flattened into the vague rhetoric of transcendence. The result is less a biographical portrait than whitewashing that insists upon its mythologized subject's innocence without engaging the questions that make his legacy so fraught. What remains is a handsome, hollow spectacle that moves efficiently through the beats of a legend while carefully avoiding the man himself. (C.)
OMAHA--Directed with an exceptionally delicate touch by Cole Webley, this spare, quietly devastating road movie unfolds with the patience of a long drive across empty country, the kind where the landscape gradually begins to mirror the people inside the car. A weary father, played with stunning restraint by John Magaro, wakes his two children at dawn and ushers them into the family car. Their house has been foreclosed, belongings hastily packed and the destination is left conspicuously vague. The siblings (preternaturally wise nine-year-old Ella and younger brother Charlie) accept the sudden trip with the mixture of excitement and unease that only children can muster. Ella, played with striking naturalism by Molly Belle Wright, gradually becomes aware that their father is carrying a burden he refuses to name. Wright gives Ella an alert intelligence, studying her father with a seriousness that suggests she already suspects more than she can articulate. As Charlie, Wyatt Solis offers a lively counterbalance: impulsive, funny and innocently absorbed in the small pleasures of the trip. Together the young actors supply the film with its emotional heartbeat. Making his character's desperation palpable without spelling it out, Magaro builds his performance almost entirely from silence. He moves with a haunted inwardness, his love for his children visible in fleeting gestures: a roadside treat, a small joke, a protective glance in the rearview mirror. Webley favors wide Western landscapes and cramped interiors with the car becoming both refuge and trap. What begins as a family road trip slowly reveals itself as something far sadder and morally complex. At just over 80 minutes, "Omaha" is less interested in tidy explanations than the fragile, often heartbreaking bonds between parent and child. (A MINUS.)
OVER YOUR DEAD BODY--A genre-hopping chamber piece that takes a marriage gone terminally sour and twists it into increasingly baroque shapes. Jason Segel and Samara Weaving play a husband and wife who have arrived at the same solution to their grievances. They retreat to a remote cabin with plans to murder their spouse and pass it off as an accident. What follows, at least initially, is a brittle pas de deux of suspicion and feigned normalcy with both characters leaning into the rhythms of mutual deception. Segel brings a hangdog hesitancy that suggests second thoughts he can't fully articulate while Weaving’s brittle, sardonic presence suggests a woman already several moves ahead of her lesser half. Director Jorma Taccone stages their early interactions with a teasing deliberation, drawing out the comic potential in every loaded glance and aborted gesture. The central joke--that both parties are equally committed to the same unspeakable act--lands with a certain nasty precision. Yet Taccone is less interested in sustaining that equilibrium than disrupting it. When the script begins to introduce complications that nudge the story toward farce rather then something darker, the film reveals both its ambitions and limitations. The tonal shifts can feel more dutiful than inspired, as if checking off genres rather than fully inhabiting them. Yet there's an undercurrent of unease that lingers, rooted in the performers’ ability to suggest that beneath the byzantine plotting lies something more recognizably human: disappointment, resentment, a desire to be seen. If "Dead Body" never quite resolves its competing impulses, it remains a mildly diverting exercise in conjugal brinkmanship sharpened by two actors who understand the value of playing it straight. (C PLUS.)
RESURRECTION--Bi Gan’s 2025 Cannes competition entry confirms the Chinese auteur as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular architects of time, memory and dream space. Following the languorous hypnotism of "Kaili Blues" (2015) and the vertiginous 3-D reverie of "Long Day’s Journey Into Night" (2018), Bi advances his oeuvre with a movie at once more austere and metaphysically daring: a work less concerned with narrative resolution than the sensation of consciousness itself drifting across temporal planes. At its most
immediate level, "Resurrection" traces the journey of a taciturn drifter who returns to his remote hometown after years away, summoned by news of a death that may or may not have occurred. What begins as a loosely structured homecoming gradually dissolves into a fugue of overlapping identities and unstable timelines. Encounters with figures who seem to exist both in the present and as echoes of the past--a woman who may be a former lover, a child who resembles the protagonist as a boy, a reclusive caretaker guarding an abandoned cinema--suggest a world in which memory is not recollection but habitation. The “resurrection” of the title emerges less as a literal event than as an ontological condition: the persistence of people and places in altered, recursive forms. Bi’s films have always operated according to a poetics of drift, but here his signature long takes and sinuous camera movements achieve an almost sculptural purity. The extended setpieces (particularly a nocturnal passage through a half-submerged village) recall the bravura sequences of his earlier work, yet they're less ostentatious, more attuned to the rhythms of breathing and perception. Time stretches, contracts and folds in on itself not through overt formal trickery but through a precise orchestration of sound, shadow and spatial disorientation. The result is a work that feels both tactile and oneiric, grounded in physical environments yet perpetually slipping their bounds. Where "Long Day’s Journey" offered a melancholic romanticism, this movie pares emotion down to its barest essences: longing, déjà vu, the faint terror of recognizing one’s own past as something alien. Dialogue is sparse, often elliptical, and the performances are deliberately hollowed out as though the characters themselves are unsure of their own reality. In this sense, Bi edges closer to a kind of cinematic phenomenology, inviting the viewer not to interpret events so much as inhabit their unfolding. Yet for all its austerity, "Resurrection" isn't hermetic. Its images (flickering projectors, flooded streets, faces glimpsed in passing) carry a deep, almost aching beauty, as if the film were mourning the fragility of experience even while preserving it. Bi has always been haunted by the possibility that time cannot be held; here he suggests that it can, in fact, be re-entered if only in fragments. The result is a masterpiece of rare cohesion and ambition that both consolidates and extends Bi’s distinctive visual language. It doesn't simply revisit his familiar concerns but refines them into something approaching the sublime. The Criterion Premieres Blu-Ray includes an interview with Bi and notes by critic Siddhant Adlakha. (A.)
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THE DRAMA--Director Kristoffer Borgli has constructed 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.)
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.)
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 Cairo-based television journalist Daniel Harrow's young daughter Imogen. Eight years later Imogen (Natalie Grace) mysteriously resurfaces, altered in ways that deeply unsettle both Daniel (Jack Reynor) and his wife Elena (Laia Costa). 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 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--British filmmaker Ben Wheatley’s body of work 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.)
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.)
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
