THE DEATH OF ROBIN HOOD--The Robin Hood legend has survived for centuries because it can accommodate almost any interpretation: folk hero, political rebel, romantic adventurer, nationalist symbol. Writer-director Michael Sarnoski attempts something more somber:  a reckoning with age, mortality and the burdens of myth. It's an honorable ambition more successfully realized fifty years ago in Richard Lester's magnificent "Robin and Marian," the gold standard of revisionist Robin Hood cinema. Hugh Jackman stars as an aging Robin, no longer the dashing outlaw of popular imagination but a weary man haunted by violence and disappointment. After suffering a grave injury, he's taken in by Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), whose care becomes the catalyst for his reflections on a life spent chasing ideals that may have never existed. As Robin drifts between memory and reality, old wounds—both physical and spiritual—reopen. Sarnoski, whose "Pig" (2021) displayed a gift for finding unexpected emotional depth in unlikely material, clearly wants to strip the legend down to the marrow. Beautifully mounted with damp forests, overcast skies and weathered faces creating an atmosphere of permanent autumn, the cinematography achieves an almost painterly grandeur. Yet the film never fully escapes its own ponderousness. Where Lester found aching humanity in the collision between myth and reality, Sarnoski too often settles for repetitive meditations on guilt and legacy. The screenplay circles the same themes without deepening them, and long stretches feel less reflective than inert. Yet Jackman's performance remains compelling throughout. He invests Robin's final days with dignity, vulnerability and flashes of the charisma that once made him legendary. But for all its artistry and noble intentions, "The Death of Robin Hood" never discovers the emotional precision necessary to transform its contemplation on mortality into something truly memorable. Like its exhausted hero, the movie ultimately reaches its destination. By confusing solemnity with insight, it simply takes too long to get there. (B MINUS.)   

https://youtu.be/ii1gTLxWukk?si=I8aLOCQQPYz-I946     

THE LAST ONE FOR THE ROAD--The title sounds like a promise muttered at closing time: one final glass, one more story, one last chance to postpone adulthood for another night. In this loose-limbed, unexpectedly moving film from Francesco Sossai, that familiar phrase becomes both a joke and a quiet existential condition. What begins as a shaggy dog road movie gradually reveals itself as something richer and sadder--a portrait of men who have drifted so far into middle age that aimlessness itself has become a vocation. Set amid the provincial towns of Veneto, it follows two hard-drinking, semi-bewildered companions (played with comic melancholy by Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla) who take a shy architecture student (Filippo Scotti) under their wing during a meandering nocturnal odyssey through bars, back roads and dead-end conversations. Little happens in the conventional sense. Cars break down, drinks accumulate, old grievances resurface and mornings arrive with a kind of cosmic disappointment. Yet Sossai understands that drifting can itself become a kind of narrative momentum. progressing not toward revelation but companionship. He has the rare ability to make slackness feel deliberate rather than inert. Scenes unfold with the relaxed unpredictability of real life overheard at neighboring tables. The humor arrives sideways: in awkward silences, drunken philosophizing, the pathetic grandeur of men insisting they still have time to reinvent themselves. Romano gives a performance of tremendous delicacy, his face perpetually caught between mischief and defeat. Lensed with a tactile softness that makes even industrial outskirts seem faintly romantic, it evokes an Italy far removed from tourist brochures: sleepy, overcast, littered with half-finished ambitions. Yet there's affection in every frame. Sossai never mocks his characters for their inertia; he recognizes something universal and painfully human instead. A hangout movie that sneaks up on you before landing with unexpected weight, its recent sweep at Italy’s David di Donatello Awards was well deserved. Few recent films have captured the comedy, loneliness and fragile grace of ordinary lives with such aching tenderness. (A.) BUY OR RENT ON MOST STREAMING PLATFORMS. 

https://youtu.be/5kYHufR72P0?si=2N3zlkZQUUcA8j56

THE LOST MAN--By 1969, Sidney Poitier occupied an uncertain position in American movies. He was both the most respected Black star in Hollywood and increasingly criticized for the very dignity that made him "acceptable" to white audiences. Into that fraught environment came this tense, melancholy urban thriller steeped in the anxieties of late-'60s America. Poitier plays Jason Higgs, a Black militant who participates in a payroll robbery intended to help financially support imprisoned revolutionaries. After a police officer is killed during the heist, Jason becomes a wanted man:  hunted by the authorities and betrayed by the very movement he served. Helping him evade capture is a sympathetic social worker (Joanna Shimkus) whose growing physical attraction to Jason gives the movie a mournful romantic undercurrent. (Poitier and Shimkus would later marry in real life.) What remains most striking about "The Lost Man" is less the genre mechanics than its uneasy emotional temperature. Director Robert Alan Aurthur stages the narrative as both chase thriller and political lament, folding the rhetoric of Black militancy into the grammar of film noir. Quincy Jones’s jazz-inflected score brings a pulse of cool sophistication while hinting at the blaxploitation era waiting around the corner. Arriving a year after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, it was controversial because it asked mainstream audiences to identify with an armed Black revolutionary. In a Hollywood where Black protagonists were portrayed as either saintly or suffering, Jason Higgs was a man hardened by ideology, compromised by violence and yet still deeply human. The performance ranks among Poitier's most wounded and soulful. The Oscar winning actor's famous composure remains intact, but here it's curdled into fatigue and disillusionment. At times the movie reveals the limitations of studio liberalism. Aurthur softens the politics into existential tragedy, and the truncated interracial romance feels like an attempt to reassure audiences nervous about the material. Yet those compromises are precisely what makes the film so fascinating as a cultural artifact. It captures a Hollywood in transition, edging away from the tidy racial conciliations of the early ’60s and toward the angrier, more fractured cinema that would define the next decade. While not possessing the incendiary force of the era’s most radical work ("Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" it ain't), its impact lingers. "The Lost Man" seems caught between worlds, uncertain whether America is even capable of the societal transformation it demands. The KL Studio Classics' Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with historian Julie Kirgo and filmmaker Peter Hankoff as well as the original theatrical trailer. (B PLUS.)

https://youtu.be/aN0JYU-eJsY?si=4f1G_bx3Gdlgn8hU

PETER ASHER:  EVERYWHERE MAN--This deeply affectionate music bio-doc unfolds less like a career retrospective than a warm, rambling catch-up with an old friend who just happens to have lived several lifetimes in pop history. Co-directed by Dan Geller ad Dayne Goldfine, it follows Peter Asher from his early days as half of Peter & Gordon through his quietly monumental second act as a producer and industry consigliere. What makes the film so memorable is its sense of proximity, not just to Asher who remains a gently self-effacing guide but to the constellation of talent that orbits him. The parade of talking heads feels like guests dropping by a particularly storied living room. Paul McCartney turns up, of course, a reminder of Asher’s front-row seat to the The Beatles phenomenon. But the emotional core lies in its revisiting of Asher’s work with artists like Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor and Carole King, each relationship sketched with a mixture of admiration, humor and lived-in familiarity. The movie wisely resists deifying its subject. Asher emerges not as an attention hog but a facilitator of other people’s brilliance, someone whose instincts and taste helped shape the sound of an era without ever demanding center stage. That modesty becomes Geller and Goldfine's central thesis, positing that Asher's true legacy isn’t just his catalog of hits but a web of creative partnerships that remain very much alive. By the end, you don’t feel like you’ve watched a documentary so much as spent an afternoon in some very good company. And that’s the highest compliment a movie like this could hope for. (A MINUS.)

https://youtu.be/nIpHwQ94WvY?si=FgBIcvJwsLtZIImd

TOY STORY 5--There's a moment in the latest "Toy Story" sequel when Woody and Buzz Lightyear find themselves contemplating a world in which children no longer need them. That question lands with unexpected force not merely because it concerns the fate of beloved toys, but because it hovers over the entire series. After five movies spread across more than three decades, one starts to wonder if Disney and Pixar have returned to this toy box once too often. Directed by Andrew Stanton who helped launch the franchise in 1995 and later helmed such Pixar landmarks as "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E," the newest chapter serves up a clever contemporary premise. Bonnie, now older and increasingly absorbed by a frog-shaped tablet named Lilypad, abandons her old toys and leaves them struggling for relevance. Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the gang are forced to confront a challenge they've never faced before: technology itself. The vocal cast remains one of the IP’s greatest strengths. Tom Hanks brings his familiar warmth to Woody; Tim Allen supplies Buzz with a mixture of overconfidence and vulnerability; and Joan Cusack gives Jessie much of its emotional weight. Pixar animators continue to find new textures, lighting effects and visual gags within a universe that ought to feel creatively exhausted by now, and the screenplay contains flashes of the melancholy wisdom that made previous entries so resonant. Yet "Toy Story 5" never fully escapes the gravitational pull of its predecessors. While its themes remain heartfelt (the toys once again face obsolescence and reaffirm the value of loyalty, friendship and imagination), repetition has somewhat diminished their impact. The lingering query is not whether Woody and Buzz have another adventure left, but whether Pixar does. (B.)  

https://youtu.be/QftAW9TTmuQ?si=AKSc_HAWx653uvVE

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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.)

DISCLOSURE DAY--Steven Spielberg returns to the cinematic terrain that's haunted and inspired him for half a century: the very real possibility that man is not alone. If "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" was a film of yearning and "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" one of wonder, "Disclosure Day" is a sober, intellectually curious meditation on what incontrovertible proof of alien life might actually do to civilization. Kansas City meteorologist  Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) experiences a profoundly unsettling event during a live television broadcast. As strange phenomena proliferate across the globe, she joins Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a cybersecurity specialist and whistleblower convinced that powerful interests have concealed evidence of extraterrestrial contact for decades. Their search for answers places them in conflict with Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a corporate executive whose motives remain teasingly ambiguous. Meanwhile, a former insider turned advocate (Colman Domingo) pushes for full disclosure regardless of the consequences. What distinguishes the movie is Spielberg's refusal to reduce it to mere spectacle: the extraterrestrial mystery functions as both narrative engine and philosophical provocation. Spielberg isn't asking whether alien life exists, but whether humanity is emotionally prepared for the truth. Institutions, faith, media, commerce and private relationships all tumble under the weight of an imminent reckoning. Though often described as Hollywood's supreme populist, Spielberg's finest work has always contained a deep undercurrent of ambivalence. The suburban optimism of "E.T." coexisted with loneliness; the awe of "Close Encounters" carried the price of obsession; the historical conscience of "Lincoln" and "Bridge of Spies" emerged from moral uncertainty. "Disclosure Day" belongs squarely within that tradition. It's a film fascinated by knowledge and frightened by its implications. Blunt gives one of the most nuanced performances in a Spielberg movie to date, grounding the cosmic material in a recognizable human anxiety. O'Connor supplies restless intelligence while Firth and Domingo lend the proceedings a welcome ideological complexity. The visual craftsmanship, shaped by longtime Spielberg cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, balances grandeur with unease, and John Williams contributes a score of remarkable emotional force. At an age when many directors settle into repetition (December will mark his 80th birthday), Spielberg appears newly invigorated. The result is one of his most thoughtful and resonant films in years, a sci-fi epic that gazes toward the stars while keeping its attention squarely focused on the fragile psychology of life on Earth. (A.)     

THE FURIOUS--This Hong Kong action spectacular arrives with the force of a battering ram and the velocity of a freight train. Directed by veteran stunt maestro Kenji Tanigaki whose fight choreography on films from “Rurouni Kenshin” to “SPL 2” has long made him one of the leading architects of modern action cinema, the movie treats narrative as little more than connective tissue between eruptions of exquisitely designed mayhem. Wang Wei, played with soulful ferocity by Xie Miao, is an ordinary working-class father whose daughter is abducted by a sprawling crime syndicate. Facing indifference from corrupt authorities, he descends into an urban underworld of traffickers, hired killers and corrupt politicians, aided by a haunted journalist (Joe Taslim). The deeper they plunge into the conspiracy, the more the film resembles a descent through successive circles of hell, each level populated by deadlier opponents than the last. Comparisons to "The Raid" and "John Wick" movies are inevitable, though “The Furious” distinguishes itself with a rougher, more tactile sensibility. Where Chad Stahelski’s movies pursue sleek geometric elegance, Tanigaki favors chaos barely held in check. Bodies crash through cramped apartments, stairwells become kill boxes and every improvised object (ladders, hammers, chains, shattered furniture) acquires terrifying momentum. The supporting cast reads like a hall-of-fame roster of contemporary martial arts superstars: Yayan Ruhian, JeeJa Yanin and Brian Le each receive showcase moments that border on the ecstatic. Tanigaki shoots the conflagrations with old-school clarity increasingly absent from 21st century Hollywood action flicks. You see the performers’ full bodies, the punishing physicality of impacts, the exhausting duration of combat. The violence hurts. What finally elevates “The Furious” above mere genre exercise is its sincerity. Beneath the pulverizing choreography lies an unabashedly emotional story about grief, parental devotion and moral exhaustion. Tanigaki understands that action is most thrilling when driven by desperation rather than swagger. By the time its final showdown arrives--a sustained symphony of shattered bones and impossible endurance--“The Furious” has earned not just exhilaration, but genuine catharsis. It's lean, bruised and pulsing with genuine feeling. (A MINUS.)

MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE--This cheerfully overstuffed take on the '80s toy phenom has an almost touching sincerity. Director Travis Knight seems to understand that this kind of pop material only works if approached with utter conviction and a hint of lunacy. It opens with Eternia in ruins after the cadaverously grinning Skeletor (played by Oscar winner Jared Leto with flamboyant, cape-swirling relish) has finally conquered Castle Grayskull after decades of cosmic bickering. Prince Adam, long exiled on Earth and living under the pseudonym Adam Glenn, is summoned back by the rediscovery of the Power Sword and reunites with fierce Teela (Camila Mendes), battle-hardened Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba) and assorted warriors, sorcerers, mutants and chrome-plated oddballs in a last gasp attempt to save the universe from total collapse. Objectively speaking, this is rococo nonsense: glowing portals, skull-faced villains, interplanetary prophecy, enchanted falcons, laser cannons and enough arcane lore to fill several filing cabinets at Mattel headquarters. Yet Knight--whose gift for blending melancholy with unbridled exuberance was already evident in “Bumblebee” and “Kubo and the Two Strings”--keeps the tone buoyant and surprisingly affectionate. The film leaves the impression of a child furiously emptying a toy chest onto the living room floor and insisting that every figure be included in the adventure. Nicholas Galitzine makes for an agreeably earnest He-Man, simultaneously square-jawed and slightly bewildered by the absurdity surrounding him. And Alison Brie turns Evil-Lyn into a deliciously venal antagonist, slinking through the movie in gowns that appear to have been designed by a particularly theatrical cobra. It's too long, too loud and frequently ridiculous, but also unexpectedly charming. Rather than transcending its origins as corporate fantasy product, “Masters of the Universe” embraces them with such goofy enthusiasm that resistance ultimately seems futile. (B.)

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.)

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.)  

SCARY MOVIE--26 years after the original "Scary Movie" gleefully turned horror clichés into ribald comedy, the sixth installment arrives with a distinct sense of deja vu. Directed by Michael Tiddes, it reunites Anna Faris and Regina Hall whose inspired commitment once gave the franchise whatever comic legitimacy it possessed. Their return generates a flicker of goodwill that the movie itself quickly extinguishes. To say there's a plot would be overly generous. Faris and Hall reprise their perpetually frazzled heroines, drifting through a barrage of topical spoofs that touch on recent horror hits, superhero spectacles, prestige dramas and even a few streaming-era phenomena that were already old news before production wrapped. That formula once had a kind of anarchic energy, but here feels dutifully rote as if the filmmakers were merely checking titles off a blackboard. Because the series has long since expanded beyond horror by lampooning everything in sight, the movie often seems to be mocking the same entertainment ecosystem that's already a parody of itself. Faris remains a gifted farceur, capable of turning a blank stare into a punch line. With her impeccable comic timing and air of mounting exasperation, Hall remains the franchise’s secret weapon. But both are stranded in material that mistakes box-checking for wit. The result is less a comeback than a reminder that, stretched across decades, some jokes lose whatever shock (and silliness) they once had. (C MINUS.)

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.) 

 ---Milan Paurich