NEW THIS WEEK (5/15) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
BEND OF THE RIVER--Few directors have mapped the spiritual topography of the American frontier with the rigor and restless intelligence of Anthony Mann, and this 1952 masterpiece stands as one of his most indelible achievements. Nestled between the harsher psychological terrains of "Winchester ’73" (1950) and "The Naked Spur" (1953), the film refines Mann’s signature themes--guilt, redemption and the tenuous bonds of community--into a work of remarkable narrative clarity and emotional force. Reuniting with indispensable collaborator James Stewart, Mann crafts a western hero who's neither mythic nor uncomplicated. Stewart's Glyn McLyntock is a former outlaw attempting to outrun his past, guiding a wagon train of settlers toward fertile land in Oregon. The journey, however, becomes less a straightforward migration than a crucible of competing loyalties. When winter traps the settlers and a cache of much-needed supplies falls into the wrong hands, the fragile social contract binding the pioneers begins to fray. At its center is the uneasy partnership between McLyntock and Emerson Cole, played with insinuating ambiguity by Arthur Kennedy. Their shared history as men marked by violence gives the alliance a palpable tension. Mann allows their relationship to evolve not through exposition but through action, gesture and ultimately betrayal. The director’s visual style, marked by expressive use of landscape and a keen sense of spatial dynamics, renders the Oregon wilderness as both promise and threat, a place where moral certainties dissolve as quickly as the mountain fog. The supporting cast enriches Mann's ethical drama without diluting its focus. Cementing the emotional stakes, Julia Adams brings warmth and resolve to the role of Laura Baile while a young Rock Hudson lends an appealing earnestness to the more straightforwardly heroic Trey Wilson. Yet even these seemingly stable figures are drawn into Mann’s web of ambiguity where survival often demands compromise. What distinguishes "Bend of the River" within Mann’s oeuvre is its delicate balance between darkness and affirmation. While not shying away from violence or treachery, it ultimately gestures toward the possibility of renewal--not as a given, but as something hard-won through moral reckoning. In this sense, the westward movement becomes less a narrative of conquest than self-definition. Mann’s cinema repeatedly interrogates the cost of civilization, and here he found a particularly resonant expression of that theme. While it may lack the feverish intensity of some of his later collaborations with Stewart, the measured pacing and classical narrative construction reveal a filmmaker at the height of his powers, confident enough to let character and landscape speak in equal measure. It remains a cornerstone of the Mann-Stewart cycle and a quietly profound meditation on the American myth. KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes two audio commentary tracks with, respectively, writers Julie Kirgo and C. Courtney Joyner and historian Toby Roan as well as the theatrical trailer. (A.)
IN THE GREY--Guy Ritchie returns to the criminality and clockwork intrigue that launched his career, albeit on a globe-trotting scale that both indulges and refines his instincts. The premise is disarmingly simple: a covert task force is assembled to reclaim a billion-dollar fortune siphoned away by a sadistic autocrat. Jake Gyllenhaal anchors the operation as a quick-witted strategist whose cool veneer masks a gambler’s appetite for risk. Former Superman Henry Cavill leans into his hulking physicality as the team’s blunt instrument, bringing a dry, self-aware humor that undercuts his imposing presence. Quietly steering the testosterone-fueled chaos, Eiza González rounds out the trio with a seductive, sharply intelligent turn. Ritchie’s familiar stylistic tics--fractured timelines, whip-smart narration, needle-drop exuberance--are deployed with a restraint that suggests evolution rather than repetition. If films like "Snatch" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" reveled in anarchic sprawl, the setpieces here are engineered with near-mathematical precision. The result is a slick caper flick that moves with the assurance of professionals who know exactly how the game is played. (B.)
IS GOD IS--The fierce, darkly lyrical directorial debut by Alesha Harris feels both theatrical and ferociously cinematic. Adapted from her own stage play, Harris leans into myth, memory and vengeance with a confidence that rarely wavers, even when the film’s tonal ambitions threaten to outpace its narrative footing. The story follows twin sisters Ana and Racine (played with striking contrast by Mallori Johnson and Kara Young) who are summoned by their long-estranged mother, a burn-scarred figure known only as “God" (played with imperious stillness by Vivica A. Fox). From her bed, she dispatches them on a revenge mission to hunt down the father who abandoned and brutalized them years earlier. What unfolds is less a straightforward journey than a surreal odyssey through a heightened American landscape populated by grotesques and wounded souls. Harris stages the sisters' pilgrimage with an eye for stark composition and ritualistic rhythm, borrowing from the grammar of westerns and revenge thrillers while filtering everything through a distinctly Black feminist lens. The dialogue--at times incantatory, at times mordantly funny--retains its theatrical origins, but Harris opens the movie up with bold visual choices. Less interested in tidy catharsis than the jagged process of reclaiming agency, it's unruly, uncompromising and frequently electrifying. (B PLUS.)
MAGIC HOUR--In her new movie, director/star Kate Aselton leans heavily into the intimate, handmade aesthetic that's defined the creative milieu she shares with her husband, Mark Duplass. But this Mumblecore-adjacent indie reaches for something more metaphysical: a grief story filtered through the hazy logic of the supernatural. Recent widow Erin (Aselton) retreats to the stark quiet of Joshua Tree, hoping the desert’s vastness might dull the sharp edges of loss. Instead she begins to see--and chat with--her late husband Charlie (Diggs) who appears as though he'd never left. Whether ghost, projection or some gentler narrative contrivance, Charlie lingers not to haunt but guide, nudging Erin toward an emotional reckoning she's been unwilling to face. Aselton favors a loose, observational style, letting scenes breathe in long, sun-bleached takes. The desert is rendered less as a mystical space than a psychological one, its openness mirroring Erin’s disorientation. There are moments of piercing honesty, especially in the quiet rhythms of shared memory and unfinished conversations. Diggs brings warmth and an easy-going charm to Charlie, making his presence feel both comforting and faintly unnerving. He avoids the trap of saintly idealization, suggesting a man who, even in death, retains his human imperfections. Aselton, meanwhile, gives a performance of muted ache; her restraint is often effective, though it occasionally borders on emotional opacity. Yet the central conceit (grief as an extended dialogue with the dead) never quite coalesces into a fully persuasive dramatic engine. Scenes drift and Aselton's reluctance to explore her own premise leaves it feeling dramatically malnourished at times. Suspended between earthbound realism and something more ineffable, it's a film of sincere feeling and intermittent insight that glows faintly even while threatening to dissipate. (B MINUS.)
OBSESSION--At the heart of Curry Barker’s sly, unnerving foray into supernatural romance is a deliciously queasy irony: the more tightly one tries to hold onto love, the more grotesquely it mutates. What begins as a tale of unrequited longing curdles, scene by scene, into something far stranger and morally acidic. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a soft-spoken loner whose fixation on Nikki (embodied with a beguiling mix of warmth and wariness by Indee Navarrette) pushes him toward an ill-advised experiment in sorcery. The spell meant to secure Nikki’s love “forever” works all too well. But Barker, who has a sharp eye for emotional imbalance, is less interested in the mechanics of magic than its psychological toll. Nikki’s devotion becomes absolute, suffocating and increasingly unhinged. Bear soon finds himself recoiling from the very intimacy he engineered. Rather than leaning on shock tactics, Barker allows dread to seep in gradually: a glance that lingers too long, a smile that arrives half a beat too late. The modest scale works to its advantage, trapping the characters in a tightening emotional vise. Johnston gives a finely calibrated performance charting Bear’s shift from yearning to panic with subtle, almost imperceptible changes. If the premise suggests a cautionary fable, the movie avoids heavy-handed moralizing. Instead, it lingers in the gray areas where desire shades into entitlement and affection into possession. The result is a horror flick that feels disarmingly intimate even while edging into the otherworldly. By the time Barker reaches his subtly devastating climax, he's achieved something increasingly rare: a genre exercise that unsettles not through spectacle but recognition. Love, it suggests, is most dangerous not when it fails, but when it refuses to end. (B PLUS.)
RIDER ON THE RAIN--In the coolly perverse universe of this 1970 cult classic, René ("Forbidden Games") Clément proved himself a sly manipulator of tone, expectation and audience sympathy. What begins as a seaside reverie--sunlit, languorous--turns with a sudden act of violence into something far more lethal. The film’s enduring pleasures lie in how effortlessly it glides between the two, always keeping the audience off balance. Marlène Jobert plays Mellie, a young woman living in a coastal town whose life is violently disrupted when she's assaulted by an intruder during a storm. She kills her attacker in self-defense and disposes of the body, setting in motion a chain of events that grows increasingly labyrinthine. Enter Charles Bronson as enigmatic stranger Dobbs whose dogged pursuit of Mellie suggests motives at once inscrutable and unnervingly intimate. Clément directs with an old pro’s assurance, but also with a diabolical wit. He delights in withholding information, forcing the audience to share Mellie’s confusion as Dobbs circles ever closer. The plot unfolds less as a conventional thriller than a psychological duel in which power shifts from scene to scene. The structure is deceptively loose, almost casual, yet it tightens inexorably as hidden connections ultimately coalesce. Jobert gives a performance of remarkable dexterity, balancing vulnerability with a growing, almost feral resilience. She finesses Mellie's shifting moods with wide-eyed unease, gradually giving way to a wary intelligence. Cast against type. Bronson is teasingly ambiguous. His impassive facade conceals layers of ambiguity; he's by turns menacing, compassionate and faintly absurd, a character who seems to belong to another, darker narrative altogether. What lingers most is the atmosphere: a Riviera not of postcard charm but moral ambiguity where sunlight conceals as much as it reveals. Clement toys with genre conventions, allotting suspense not through mechanical plotting but a steady accumulation of unease. By the time its secrets are ultimately revealed, you realize that Clement is less interested in solving a mystery than exploring the strange, often unsettling intimacies that bind strangers. It's a thriller of uncommon elegance: teasing, elusive and supremely disquieting. KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes both the 114-minute American cut and 120-minute French-language version with separate audio commentaries for both featuring historians Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, Nathaniel Thompson, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson. (A.)
10 TO MIDNIGHT--There’s something bracingly disreputable about J. Lee Thompson’s tawdry, deadpan 1983 contribution to the serial killer genre. Reuniting with his frequent leading man Charles Bronson, Thompson crafted a movie that's less procedural than blunt instrument, equal parts tabloid nightmare and vigilante fantasia. Bronson plays Leo Kessler, a veteran L.A. cop whose instincts are as uncanny as his methods are constitutionally dubious. On the trail of a psychotic young murderer (Gene Davis' Warren Stacy), Kessler finds himself hamstrung by due process just as the body count rises. Stacy, a necrophiliac voyeur who stalks women before murdering them, is less a character than a walking affront--an embodiment of the decade's anxieties about random, motiveless violence. When legal technicalities threaten to free him, Kessler’s simmering contempt for the system boils over into something downright primal. If veteran screenwriter William ("The Magnificent Seven") Roberts' script traces a familiar arc, the movie's queasy fascination lies in its tonal contradictions. Thompson shoots Los Angeles as a drab labyrinth of apartments and parking garages, violence erupting with lurid, almost confrontational explicitness. The scenes of Stacy pursuing his victims in the nude are staged with a kind of perverse neutrality that leaves the audience stranded between revulsion and queasy tittilation. The supporting cast sharpens its uneasy edges. Lisa Eilbacher brings a welcome vulnerability to Kessler’s daughter whose proximity to danger raises the emotional stakes without softening the hard shell. As a by-the-book junior detective, Andrew Stevens provides a nice foil to Bronson’s bulldozer ethics. What lingers isn't plot mechanics but an almost nihilistic worldview. Institutions falter, psychology offers no solace and justice when/if it comes arrives stripped of legitimacy. Yet within this morally dubious framework, Thompson locates a grimly compelling rhythm and Bronson, impassive as ever, turns moral outrage into a kind of existential shrug. It’s exploitation cinema that still feels uncomfortably alive four decades later. The KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes two audio commentaries (with, alternately, Paul Talbot, author of the "Bronson's Loose!" books, and producer Pancho Kohner, casting director John Crowther and historian David Del Valle); standalone interviews with producer Lance Hool and actors Stevens, Robert F. Lyons and Jeana Tomasina; radio spots and the theatrical trailer.
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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.)
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.)
MORTAL KOMBAT II--Director Simon McQuoid's sequel to his 2021 hit understands that subtlety is rarely the point when fists, fireballs and spinal injuries are on the menu. As sequels go, it's louder, busier and more self-aware than its predecessor, embracing its own gleeful excesses with a wink that feels earned rather than desperate. The threat this time is existential: warlord Shao Kahn (embodied with hulking relish by Martyn Ford) arrives to claim Earthrealm outright, forcing its ragtag defenders into a tournament that looks less like a martial arts contest than a demolition derby with mystical overtones. At the center is Johnny Cage, played by Karl Urban with a roguish smirk that suggests he knows he’s wandered into the wrong movie and plans to enjoy it anyway. Flanking him are familiar faces: Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee, the franchise's moral spine); Kano (Josh Lawson) whose vulgar comic relief remains weirdly indispensable; and Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), bearing the narrative weight of prophecy with a stoic intensity. Newcomer Kitano (Adeline Rudolph) adds a welcome streak of unpredictability with her loyalties shifting as fluidly as the omnipresent CGI landscapes. McQuoid stages the chockablock mayhem with an eye for clarity over chaos--a small miracle given the barrage of visual effects--and the action setpieces possess a certain rhythmic precision. Not every joke lands and the plot is more scaffolding than structure, but "Kombat II" plays the game with just enough confidence to keep fans entertained. (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.)
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 SHEEP DETECTIVES--The irresistible premise of Kyle Balda's pastoral whodunit in which sheep become sleuths yields a disarmingly elegant entertainment that wears its whimsy lightly while honoring the classical pleasures of detective fiction. Shepherd George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) spends his evenings reading crime novels aloud to his flock, blissfully unaware that they comprehend every twist and turn. When George is found dead under mysterious circumstances, the sheep--steeped in the logic of literary murder mysteries--resolve to solve the crime, venturing beyond their meadow into a human world far messier than the tidy narratives in George's books. Balda toggles between rustic charm and procedural intrigue buoyed by a live-action ensemble that includes Emma Thompson, Nicholas Braun and Hong Chau, each contributing a note of human befuddlement in contrast to the sheep’s burgeoning deductive skills. But it's the vocal performances that give the proceedings its most distinctive sparkle. Julia Louis-Dreyfus lends brisk authority to the flock’s de facto leader while Bryan Cranston, Chris O'Dowd, Regina Hall and Patrick Stewart (among others) supply a veritable chorus of live-wire personalities. What emerges is a droll, gently knowing comedy about how narrative shapes perception even for those on society’s margins. (B PLUS.)
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.)
---Milan Paurich
