BACKROOMS--Writer-director Kane Parsons accomplishes something unusually rare in modern horror cinema by transforming an ephemeral piece of internet folklore into a fully realized work of atmosphere and metaphysical unease. The online “Backrooms” mythos--an endless maze of yellowed office corridors, buzzing fluorescent lights and maddeningly repetitive interiors--has circulated for years as a kind of collective digital nightmare. Parsons, expanding upon the viral shorts that first made him an online sensation as a teenager, understands that the concept’s potency lies in its terrifying simplicity. The terror emerges not from monsters but from space itself. The movie follows a troubled furniture-store owner, played with weary intelligence by Chiwetel Ejiofor, who stumbles upon the impossible labyrinth hidden behind the mundane surfaces of everyday life. What begins as an accidental discovery gradually evolves into obsession as he ventures deeper into a seemingly infinite architectural void that refuses all coherent logic. Renate Reinsve provides an emotional counterweight as a psychiatrist attempting to ground both the man and the increasingly incomprehensible reality surrounding him.  Parsons demonstrates remarkable formal confidence for a first-time feature director. Rather than succumbing to exhaustive explanation, he embraces ambiguity as a governing principle. Hallways loop back impossibly onto themselves; rooms appear altered moments after being traversed; distant sounds reverberate with unnerving spatial inconsistency. The geometry itself seems animate, governed by motives beyond human comprehension. Parsons repeatedly finds terror in ordinary textures: industrial carpeting, water stains, cheap wallpaper, flickering office lights. The banal becomes infernal. What most distinguishes “Backrooms” is its sense of philosophical dread. Beneath the genre tropes lies a deeper anxiety about the fragility of consensus reality:  the suspicion that familiar environments may conceal incomprehensible dimensions just beneath their surfaces. Parsons taps into a distinctly contemporary fear that modern life, with its anonymous commercial spaces and depersonalized architecture, has already become a kind of maze from which escape may be impossible. The result is a horror movie of uncommon rigor and atmosphere, unsettling not simply because of what it depicts but because of the vast unknowability it leaves intact. (B PLUS.)

https://youtu.be/2z6a6NUFlsU?si=e8OJ__butDdTyfjg

THE BREADWINNER--The kind of high-concept family comedy that Hollywood once doled out with assembly-line frequency--one can easily imagine it playing multiplexes circa 1984 starring Michael Keaton or Steve Martin--"The Breadwinner" revives the hackneyed “dad as overwhelmed homemaker” premise with mild, albeit secondhand charm. Directed with brisk impersonality by Eric Appel, the movie functions as a contemporary gloss on Keaton's "Mr. Mom:" dad stays home, mom ascends the corporate ladder and their household promptly descends into slapstick chaos. Nate Bargatze plays Nate, a suburban husband/father whose grasp of domestic life appears limited to locating the cereal cabinet and avoiding catastrophe with the washing machine. When his wife Katie (played with effortless warmth and grounding sincerity by Mandy Moore) transforms a modest household invention into a lucrative entrepreneurial enterprise, she becomes the family’s de facto breadwinner leaving Nate to navigate carpools, school lunches and three increasingly skeptical daughters. The rhythms are yawningly predictable: meals are incinerated, routines collapse and hard-earned life lessons arrive precisely on cue. Yet the film benefits immeasurably from Bargatze’s understated comic persona. Unlike so many stand-up comics thrust into leading roles, he understands the virtue of restraint; his befuddlement feels lived-in rather than performative. No one will ever mistake this for groundbreaking comedy, but as an all-ages-friendly throwaway it mostly gets the job done. (C.)  

https://youtu.be/m76VzoDfQWQ?si=ap4-cEfZle_M4wVj

THE SNOWMAN--Largely dismissed at the time of its release, director Tomas ("Tinker Tinker Soldier Spy") Alfredson's 2017 film merits reappraisal as one of the more formally daring literary adaptations of the past decade. Adapting Jo Nesbø’s labyrinthine procedural, Alfredson trades conventional thriller mechanics for something more cerebral: a fractured, wintry mood piece about obsession, memory and the slow erosion of moral certainty. Pared to its essentials, the story follows Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender), an Oslo police detective tracking a serial killer who leaves behind snowmen as his cryptic signature. Hole partners with sharp, enigmatic Katrine Bratt (Rebecca Ferguson), uncovering connections that stretch backward through decades of buried crimes. The deliberately elliptical plot unfolds less as a tidy chain of revelations than a mosaic of impressions--glimpses of violence, institutional decay and psychic unraveling. Instead of clarity and resolution, Alfredson offers ambiguity and a lingering unease. This isn't ineptitude (as some critics suggested at the time), but a calculated aesthetic gamble. Working again in a wintry register after "Let the Right One In," Alfredson uses Norway’s frozen expanses as both literal terrain and metaphoric void, a landscape where traces vanish as quickly as they appear. The rhythms--abrupt transitions, temporal dislocations--mirror Hole’s own fractured consciousness, turning the investigation inward. Fassbender gives a performance of remarkable restraint, his Hole is less a hardboiled archetype than a hollowed-out vessel of regret. Ferguson provides a crucial counterpoint, her composure masking an undercurrent of calculation. J. K. Simmons, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Val Kilmer and Chloë Sevigny drift in and out like half-remembered figures, deepening the sense of a world populated by damaged, opaque lives. If the film occasionally stumbles, it does so in ways inseparable from its ambitions. Rather than flaws, the narrative gaps and tonal dissonances become part of its strange allure. Alfredson has fashioned a crime movie that feels less like a puzzle to be solved than a landscape to be wandered:  bleak, elusive and, in its own austere way, mesmerizing. The KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes two separate audio commentaries with, respectively, filmmaker Steve Mitchell and screenwriter Michael Charles Hill, and historians Marc Edward Heuck and Howard S. Berger; five standalone featurettes; and the original theatrical trailer. (A MINUS.)

https://youtu.be/BF2Ksrxu_QY?si=v4qdJkI4mv5Ywe2n

TUNER--Oscar-winning documentarian Daniel ("Navalny") Roher makes the kind of assured transition to narrative filmmaking that hardly seems possible anymore. Arriving less like a debut than a recovered artifact from the high watermark of early-'70s American cinema, it would fit neatly between repertory screenings of "Five Easy Pieces" and "The Friends of Eddie Coyle." You can practically feel the ghost of a young Bob Rafelson hovering over its unhurried rhythms and melancholy textures. What distinguishes Roher's movie is the elegance with which he repurposes familiar New Hollywood talismans into something freshly intimate and emotionally alert. Leo Woodall gives a performance of remarkable acuity as Owen, a gifted piano tuner scraping by while caring for his aging mentor Bernard (played by Dustin Hoffman with extraordinary fragility and restraint). Owen possesses an almost unnervingly acute sense of hearing: the film repeatedly draws us into his heightened sonic awareness whether it's the faint rattle of loose radiator pipes, the microscopic wavering of a piano string drifting out of tune or the muffled scrape of footsteps behind a closed door. Roher turns sound itself into a dramatic instrument. The world arrives to Owen less through sight than vibration and texture, and the tension emerges from his inability to shut any of it out. That sensitivity becomes both gift and curse after Owen arrives at an affluent client’s home and inadvertently interrupts a burglary in progress. Faced with Bernard's mounting hospital bills and dwindling options, he reluctantly agrees to aid the thieves--led by a tightly wound Lior Raz whose simmering menace never tips into caricature. What follows is nominally a crime story though Roher is more interested in the moral exhaustion that accompanies financial desperation than the mechanics of suspense. The emotional counterweight comes via Havana Rose Liu who brings warmth and sensual intelligence to the music student Owen becomes romantically involved with, and Tovah Feldshuh (superbly dry and unsentimental as Bernard’s wife). Like the finest American movies of the seventies, “Tuner” treats criminality as an extension of loneliness, economic anxiety and bruised dignity. Roher’s debut is a work of uncommon poise: soulful, tactile and deeply attentive to the fragile sounds people make while trying to hold their lives together. (A.)

https://youtu.be/AKfGU0kUHQc?si=nGRvH2T4MM3WiPbR

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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.)

I LOVE BOOSTERS--Boots Riley's follow-up to "Sorry to Bother You" (2017) is a riotous, shape-shifting caper comedy that doubles as a critique of consumer capitalism stitched together with equal parts mischief and fury. Set in a heightened, faintly sci-fi Bay Area, the film follows Corvette--played with magnetic wit by Keke Palmer-- the leader of a loose collective of shoplifters who target a rapacious fashion empire. Alongside comrades Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), Corvette navigates a world in which exploitation is both systemic and absurdly normalized. Their mogul adversary (Demi Moore) becomes less a villain than a grotesque symbol of excess run amok. Riley’s gleefully overstuffed script is bursting with visual gags, speculative detours and political asides that feel beamed in from another, more radical cinematic tradition. Yet what might register as chaos in lesser hands acquires a strange coherence thanks to Palmer who brings emotional clarity to Riley’s maximalist tendencies, embodying both the allure and moral queasiness of participating in the very system she hopes to upend. The ensemble cast (LaKeith Stanfield, Eiza González, Will Poulter, Don Cheadle, et al) moves with a comic rhythm that feels at once anarchic and precise, as if everyone tuned themselves into Riley’s peculiar frequency. What lingers isn't any single setpiece but the sensation of a filmmaker intoxicated by the possibilities of the medium. Riley’s satire isn't tidy; it sprawls, contradicts itself and occasionally threatens to collapse. Few contemporary American films feel this alive to the absurdities of modern life. Or this willing to laugh, loudly, defiantly and fequently, in its face. (A.)   

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.)

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.)

PASSENGER--Norwegian director André Øvredal again proves that he understands a fundamental truth about the horror genre: fear works best when it intrudes upon ordinary spaces. A roadside diner, a deserted campground and the cramped interior of a camper van all become sites of mounting metaphysical dread in a film that's frequently unnerving without being entirely satisfying. Øvredal, whose previous credits includes “Trollhunter,”“The Autopsy of Jane Doe” and “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark,” has always possessed a sharp eye for atmosphere. While this hardly ranks among his best work, it contains enough sustained dread to justify the trip. Brooklynites Tyler and Maddie (Jacob Scipio and Lou Llobell) impulsively chuck their apartment for a cross-country mobile home odyssey. What begins as an exercise in lifestyle reinvention curdles after the couple witnesses a grotesque highway accident. They soon realize that something invisible has attached itself to them. The malevolent entity haunting their RV doesn't merely stalk them:  it appears to feed upon their growing paranoia, resentment and exhaustion. The strongest passages rely less on shocks than on a slow accumulation of unease. Øvredal stages nighttime rest stops and empty highways with real menace, but the screenplay over explains its central evil, draining potency from what initially feels terrifyingly abstract. Scipio gives Tyler an appealing cockiness that gradually fractures under pressure while Llobell brings nuance to Maddie’s escalating terror. Oscar winner Melissa Leo turns up in a thankless supporting role that barely gives her room to leave an impression beyond conveying a sense of weary foreboding. (C PLUS.)    

RESURRECTION--Bi Gan’s 2025 Cannes competition entry confirms the Chinese auteur as one of contemporary cinema’s most singular architects of time, memory and dream space. Following the languorous hypnotism of "Kaili Blues" (2015) and the vertiginous 3-D reverie of "Long Day’s Journey Into Night" (2018), Bi advances his oeuvre with a movie at once more austere and metaphysically daring:  a work less concerned with narrative resolution than the sensation of consciousness itself drifting across temporal planes. At its most

immediate level, "Resurrection" traces the journey of a taciturn drifter who returns to his remote hometown after years away, summoned by news of a death that may or may not have occurred. What begins as a loosely structured homecoming gradually dissolves into a fugue of overlapping identities and unstable timelines. Encounters with figures who seem to exist both in the present and as echoes of the past--a woman who may be a former lover, a child who resembles the protagonist as a boy, a reclusive caretaker guarding an abandoned cinema--suggest a world in which memory is not recollection but habitation. The “resurrection” of the title emerges less as a literal event than as an ontological condition: the persistence of people and places in altered, recursive forms. Bi’s films have always operated according to a poetics of drift, but here his signature long takes and sinuous camera movements achieve an almost sculptural purity. The extended setpieces (particularly a nocturnal passage through a half-submerged village) recall the bravura sequences of his earlier work, yet they're less ostentatious, more attuned to the rhythms of breathing and perception. Time stretches, contracts and folds in on itself not through overt formal trickery but through a precise orchestration of sound, shadow and spatial disorientation. The result is a work that feels both tactile and oneiric, grounded in physical environments yet perpetually slipping their bounds. Where "Long Day’s Journey" offered a melancholic romanticism, this movie pares emotion down to its barest essences: longing, déjà vu, the faint terror of recognizing one’s own past as something alien. Dialogue is sparse, often elliptical, and the performances are deliberately hollowed out as though the characters themselves are unsure of their own reality. In this sense, Bi edges closer to a kind of cinematic phenomenology, inviting the viewer not to interpret events so much as inhabit their unfolding. Yet for all its austerity, "Resurrection" isn't hermetic. Its images (flickering projectors, flooded streets, faces glimpsed in passing) carry a deep, almost aching beauty, as if the film were mourning the fragility of experience even while preserving it. Bi has always been haunted by the possibility that time cannot be held; here he suggests that it can, in fact, be re-entered if only in fragments. The result is a masterpiece of rare cohesion and ambition that both consolidates and extends Bi’s distinctive visual language. It doesn't simply revisit his familiar concerns but refines them into something approaching the sublime. The Criterion Premieres Blu-Ray includes an interview with Bi and notes by critic Siddhant Adlakha. (A.)  

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.) 

STAR WARS:  THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU--There's a point at which brand management ceases to be storytelling and becomes a form of corporate babysitting. Director Jon Favreau's new "Star Wars" derivative is a lavish, dispiriting example of that transformation: a feature-length ad for the enduring marketability of a big-eyed puppet. The film extends the adventures of bounty hunter Din Djarin (voiced and intermittently embodied by Pedro Pascal) and his ward Grogu, a creature engineered to trigger the same reflexive protectiveness as a designer puppy. With the Empire fallen and scattered warlords threatening the fragile New Republic, Din and Grogu embark on a mission involving a kidnapped Rotta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allen White) with a rigid New Republic officer (Sigourney Weaver) calling the shots. Favreau, who brought a breezy ingenuity to the "Iron Man" franchise, directs with the dutiful air of someone rearranging action figures in a climate-controlled vault. The state of the art visual effects are, of course, immaculate. Every helmet gleams, every creature twitches on cue and every explosion lands with algorithmic precision. Yet nothing feels at stake. Favreau lurches from one familiar planet, cameo and combat sequence to the next, confusing recognition with delight. Pascal lends Din a weary paternal tenderness and, with her trademark authority, Weaver briefly suggests an adult movie trapped inside a toy commercial. But the gravitational pull of Grogu’s coos and sight gags reduces everyone to straight men. As spectacle, it's competent; as cinema, it's infantilizing. The galaxy may be vast, but this film’s imagination is depressingly small. (C MINUS.)   

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