NEW THIS WEEK (4/3) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
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.)
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.)
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.)
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FORBIDDEN FRUITS--Director Meredith Alloway locates the uncanny not in shadowy forests but under fluorescent retail lighting where adolescent longing curdles into something both communal and faintly menacing. Set largely within the liminal sprawl of a dying suburban mall, it follows a cluster of disaffected young women who, drawn together by boredom and a shared sense of invisibility, form a loosely organized, increasingly fervent witchy collective. At its center is Lili Reinhardt, whose wary, searching performance anchors the movie's emotional drift. Opposite her, Alexandra Shipp brings a sharper, more charismatic edge, suggesting a hunger for control that quietly shapes the group’s rituals. What begins as ironic play--tarot readings between shifts, whispered incantations near shuttered storefronts--gradually assumes a more serious, even dangerous charge as belief and performance blur. Alloway favors a cool, observational approach punctuated by sudden, disorienting eruptions of the surreal. The mall itself becomes a character: a mausoleum of consumer desire, its empty corridors echoing with the girls’ need for meaning. If the narrative occasionally feels diffuse, it's by design; the film is less interested in conventional escalation than in the porous boundary between empowerment and delusion. Resisting tidy allegory, Alloway lingers in ambiguity, suggesting that real magic, if it exists at all, lies in the intoxicating pull of belonging and the quiet peril of surrendering to it. (B.)
GOAT--Arriving with the confident sheen of an all-ages-friendly franchise wannabe, this brisk, brightly colored 'toon never finds the creative spark that could elevate it beyond the status of a mild diversion. The story centers on a stubborn young goat, voiced with earnest pep by Caleb ("Stranger Things") McLaughlin, who dreams of escaping his pastoral confines for the glare of a high-stakes urban sports league. When a fluke opportunity presents itself, he leaves his farm and moves to the city where athletic glory is both commodified and cruelly fleeting. Along the way, he encounters a fast-talking mentor (Nick Kroll), a steely but sympathetic rival (Gabrielle Union) and a parade of comic sidekicks whose primary function is to keep the pace lively and the jokes family-friendly. Director Tyree Dillihay, whose television background shows in the punchy rhythms, keeps the narrative moving efficiently if predictably. The animation favors clean lines and saturated colors over tactile detail, lending the movie a slightly airless look. The screenplay dutifully checks off lessons about perseverance, teamwork and self-reliance that won't surprise anyone over the age of 10. Less a passion project than a corporate product engineered to be as inoffensive as possible, the glossy images drift away like chalk dust after the final whistle. (C.)
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.)
READY OR NOT 2: HERE I COME--Seven years after the hide-and-seek bloodbath of "Ready or Not," this wickedly entertaining sequel reprises the original's blend of splattery mayhem and "eat the rich" satire. Once again co-directed by the filmmaking duo of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (collectively known as "Radio Silence"), the movie picks up immediately after the infernal events that left the Le Domas family estate in smoking ruins. Grace (Samara Weaving), the sole survivor, is drawn back into another cabal of Satanists whose wealth is matched only by their appetite for murder. Soon enough, she's navigating candlelit corridors, hidden passages and a new assortment of entitled heirs who treat killing as sport. What distinguishes this iteration isn't narrative novelty as much as tonal confidence. Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett lean harder into the absurdity of aristocratic rituals, staging the violence with a wink and nod as the body count rises. The gruesome setpieces (booby-trapped drawing rooms, chaotic chases through sprawling manor grounds, etc.) unfold with brisk, almost metronome-like precision. At the center remains Weaving whose skill at oscillating between disbelief, fury and darkly comic resilience gives this pulp its pulse. If the script occasionally strains to expand a premise that worked best as a contained nightmare, her performance helps anchor the movie in a recognizable emotional reality. While “Here I Come” may not recapture the delicious shock of its predecessor, it proves that Grace’s survival story still has a few nasty tricks up its sleeve. (B.)
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.)
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.)
THEY WILL KILL YOU--It's a real kick seeing a filmmaker refine a sensibility that already felt fully formed. With Russian director Kirill ("Why Don't You Just Die?," "No Looking Back") Sokolov’s gleefully vicious English-language debut, that modus operandi--equal parts slapstick brutality and deadpan nihilism--finds a slicker, more accessible canvas without losing its bite. Set almost entirely within the Virgil, a forbidding Manhattan high-rise, it follows ex-con Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz) who takes a housekeeping job to rescue her estranged kid sister ("Industry" breakout Myha'la) from a cabal of Satanists. Sokolov stages the building as a labyrinth of traps, ambushes and grotesque punchlines, turning each hallway into a potential killing field. The film’s engine is escalation: every encounter tops the last in audacity, often tipping into cartoonish excess before snapping back into something genuinely menacing. Beetz anchors the mayhem with a performance that's both reactive and slyly controlled; she gets the joke without ever letting her character become one. If the film occasionally feels like it’s running on a treadmill with each setpiece demanding another, bigger one, that's the point. Sokolov thrives on excess, and “They Will Kill You” delivers it with a grin and an admirable sense of rhythm. (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.)
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.)
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
