NEW THIS WEEK (5/1) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
ANIMAL FARM--Andy Serkis' animated screen adaptation of George Orwell's bilious political fable has enough discomfiting contemporary parallels to justify its existence even if it never escapes the shadow of its literary source. Serkis, whose facility with performance capture has pretty much defined his career, channels that technical fluency into a digital menagerie that's expressive without tipping into the grotesque. The visual palette, all muted earth tones and creeping shadows, underscores the story’s drift from rustic idealism to authoritarian dread. The narrative remains mostly faithful: a group of farm animals overthrow their human owner only to find their utopian aspirations corrupted by the calculating pigs who assume power. There's an undeniable pleasure in hearing seasoned actors like Glenn Close, Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi and Woody Harrelson navigate Orwell’s blunt, allegorical prose even though the script hews so closely to the novel that surprise becomes a scarce commodity. The allegory is delivered with a laudable fidelity, but rarely takes the imaginative leap that would make it feel urgent rather than merely dutiful. (C PLUS.)
CASA GRANDE--A prodigal daughter (Madison Lawlor) returns to her family’s struggling farm where her gravely ill father (Lou Diamond Phillips) faces the twin pressures of his looming mortality and encroaching rivals. Old resentments simmer, debts mount and the land itself becomes both physical battleground and spiritual burden. Juan Pablo Arias Munoz directs with a reverence for rustic imagery--sunsets, dust, weathered faces--but it feels less atmospheric than dutiful. Lawlor, tasked with carrying the moral and emotional weight, gives a performance that suggests deeper undercurrents than the script allows. Phillips brings a worn dignity to the ailing patriarch despite the fact that his role seldom rises above cliche. A drama that confuses stillness for gravity, "Casa Grande" feels less like a lived-in world than an art-directed set where hardship is aestheticized and resolution comes too glibly to leave any discernible mark. (C MINUS.)
DEEP WATER--If at first you don’t succeed, try the same premise with fewer ideas. That appears to be the guiding philosophy behind Renny ("Die Hard 2," "Cliffhanger") Harlin’s return to aquatic mayhem after the deliriously self-aware "Deep Blue Sea." While that 1999 camp classic reveled in its pulp absurdity, Harlin's latest seems uncertain whether to play it straight or wink at the audience. The setup has a certain B-movie panache: a commercial flight, piloted by Aaron Eckhardt and Ben Kingsley, goes down in open water after a midair catastrophe. The crash itself, staged with Harlin’s old flair for mechanical chaos, briefly suggests we might be in capable hands. Metal screams, bodies lurch and the ocean rushes up with alarming speed. Then the survivors emerge, clinging to debris, scanning the horizon--and yes, the dorsal fins arrive right on cue at which point it
becomes a rote exercise in attrition. Harlin's direction lacks the brio that once made his excesses entertaining; the shark attacks are neither convincingly scary nor gleefully outrageous; and the digital effects have a weightless quality that drains them of menace. It's a creature feature that would rather tread water than take a bite. (D PLUS.) https://youtu.be/f0ptq0Lzdh8?si=u542-mBjHZF1dhSA
THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2--Two decades after "The Devil Wears Prada" turned the fashion world into a crucible of ambition, its belated sequel arrives with a knowing grin. Directed once again by David Frankel, the film reunites its principal triumvirate: Meryl Streep (glacially imperious Miranda Priestly); Anne Hathaway (former Priestley assistant Andy Sachs); and Emily Blunt (still-acerbic Emily Charlton). Time has rearranged their hierarchies but not their ambitions. The streamlined premise is cannily contemporary. Andy, now a seasoned journalist navigating a precarious media landscape, is lured back into Miranda’s orbit when Runway faces an existential crisis in the age of digital disruption. Emily, having parlayed her survival skills into a high-powered consultancy, finds herself triangulated between loyalty and opportunism. The plot moves briskly through couture showrooms, glass-walled offices and algorithm-driven anxieties where influence is measured as much in clicks as hemlines. Frankel directs with a lighter touch than previously, less interested in a Cinderella arc than in the aftershocks of success. The film’s pleasures are largely performative. Streep delivers Miranda’s barbed dialogue with surgical precision, her silences doing as much work as her speeches. Hathaway gives Andy a tempered intelligence, her earlier wide-eyed idealism replaced by something more pragmatic. Blunt, the franchise's stealth weapon, brandishes Emily’s wit as a kind of armor, each line landing with expert timing. If the screenplay ultimately settles for tidy resolutions, it compensates with an undercurrent of ruefulness about careers built on perpetual reinvention. The sequel doesn't recapture the original’s novelty, but it doesn’t need to. Instead it offers something rarer: a sense of lived-in continuity as if these characters have been evolving just out of sight, waiting for the right moment (and outfit) to return. (B PLUS.)
HOKUM--Adam ("Severance") Scott plays a novelist of waning ambition who arrives in Ireland with a peculiar assignment: to scatter his late parents' ashes on the grounds of the country inn where they once stayed. It’s an errand that seems faintly absurd even before the proprietors (David Wilmot and Florence Ordesh, suitably cryptic) hint at the hostelry's fraught history with a long-dead witch. The latest horror flick from director Damian ("Oddity," "Caveat") McCarthy is another slow-burn chamber piece that leans more into suggestion than shock. McCarthy draws tension from the geometry of narrow hallways, the groan of floorboards and the unsettling stillness of everyday objects. Scott, so often deployed for his genial unease, proves an ideal anchor. His blocked litterateur is skeptical but fraying, a man whose rationalism erodes not in dramatic bursts but in accumulating doubts. If the second half circles ideas more than advancing them, it remains a stylish entry in contemporary horror. McCarthy seems less interested in delivering jump scares than conjuring a lingering unease: the sense that grief, like superstition, has a way of reshaping the spaces we inhabit. (B.)
HOLD THAT GHOST--Briskly directed by Arthur Lubin, this 1941 Abbott and Costello classic expertly melds burlesque rhythms with genre hijinks. Arriving in the wake of their breakout success with "Buck Privates" the previous year, it helped consolidate the duo’s screen personas--Bud Abbott’s fast-talking, lightly exasperated straight man and Lou Costello’s elastic man-child--while placing them in a setting that amplifies and gently mocks the conventions of haunted house thrillers. The premise is blissfully elemental. Unexpectedly named heirs in a gangster’s will, two hapless service station attendants arrive to claim their inheritance only to find themselves stranded in a dilapidated, possibly haunted roadhouse. What follows is less a narrative of suspense than an ingenious orchestration of comic setpieces: sliding panels, vanishing corpses and Costello’s exquisitely timed terror. Rather than overwhelming his stars with atmospheric excess, Lubin maintains a lucid spatial logic that allows the gags to land with precision. The supporting cast adds ballast to the architecture. An inspired foil, Joan Davis' brassy timing matches Costello beat for beat while The Andrews Sisters lend the proceedings a musical buoyancy characteristic of Universal’s house style. Their presence helps situate the film at a fertile intersection of comedy, horror and revue entertainment. Within the broader Abbott and Costello oeuvre, it refines the anarchic energy of their earlier vehicles while anticipating the more overt genre parodies to come. If "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" is justly lauded as their definitive horror-comedy synthesis, "Hold That Ghost" is its most elegant precursor. The emphasis on rhythm over spectacle and seamless integration of character and gags argue for its elevation within their canon. It remains a model of studio-era craftsmanship: swift, playful and improbably cohesive, a haunted house not merely of creaks and shadows but of comic possibility. The KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes the original theatrical trailer as well as two separate audio commentary tracks with, respectively, film historians Alan K. Rode and Samm Deighan (A.)
TWO PIANOS--The films of Arnaud Desplechin have always had a bracingly literary texture, their tangles of memory, intellect and feeling recall the emotional sprawl of great 19th-century novels. From the nervy self-examination of "My Sex Life…or How I Got Into an Argument" to the dazzling tonal high-wire act of "Kings and Queen" and the rueful, polyphonic family fresco of "A Christmas Tale," his best work has reveled in contradiction. By contrast, his latest movie feels disarmingly direct: a lush, unabashed melodrama that trades some of his customary intellectual rigor for a more immediate emotional pull. After years of living abroad, French pianist Mathias Vogler (Francois Civil) returns home at the behest of his former mentor (Charlotte Rampling) to perform a series of concerts. Mathias' accidental encounter with Claude (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), an ex- lover entangled in her own emotional limbo, reopens old wounds that never fully healed. Desplechin complicates this otherwise conventional romantic scenario with familiar motifs (doubles, sudden fainting spells, the uncanny pull of memory), but resists the centrifugal narrative sprawl that defined his earlier triumphs. The result is a “soapier” Desplechin where passions run high, coincidences abound and emotional crescendos arrive with a frequency that would have been tempered in his more intricately structured films. Yet Desplechin’s sincerity disarms skepticism; he leans into the heightened register rather than apologizing for it. Civil gives Mathias a volatile, inwardly fractured intensity while Tereszkiewicz lends Claude a tremulous, wounded dignity. But it's Rampling who quietly steals the movie. In a role that melds authority with fragility and calculation with regret, she delivers her most commanding screen performance since Andrew Haigh's "45 Years," a reminder of how much drama can be conveyed in the smallest recalibration of voice or gaze. If "Two Pianos" lacks the dizzying structural ambition of Desplechin’s masterpieces, it compensates with a kind of late-style clarity. This is a movie about return--geographical, emotional, artistic--and the frightening possibility that one’s past might not merely haunt the present but actively reshape it. In stripping away some of his usual narrative bric-a-brac, Desplechin has made one of his most accessible and moving films. (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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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.)
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
