COUTURE--Although draped in the fabrics of Paris Fashion Week, Alice Winocour’s workplace drama is really about the seams people try to hide. Like previous Winocour movies--from the astronaut drama "Proxima" to the trauma-haunted "Revoir, Paris"--it explores lives suspended between public performance and private reckoning. American filmmaker Maxine Walker (Angelina Jolie) arrives in Paris to shoot a fashion-related project just as a devastating cancer diagnosis forces her to confront her future. Orbiting around Maxine are two young women whose personal and professional struggles echo and contrast her own: Angèle (Ella Rumpf), a makeup artist with artistic ambitions of her own, and Ada (Anyier Anei), a Sudanese model navigating an industry eager to profit from her image while ignoring her humanity. Their stories intersect amid the backstage chaos of couture houses, runway spectacles and endless preparations for beauty that feels increasingly fragile. Winocour was granted remarkable access to the mechanics of high fashion, and the strongest moments occur in cluttered rooms and backstage corridors where anonymous artisans labor over garments destined for a few fleeting minutes of glory. She's less interested in glamour than the women whose labor sustains it. Eschewing movie-star grandstanding, Jolie plays Maxine as a woman whose intelligence and composure are gradually eroded by fear. The performance has a lived-in gravity that anchors the story's disparate threads. Unfortunately, Winocour sometimes mistakes thematic richness for dramatic momentum. Characters drift in and out, subplots fray and the narrative can feel less stitched together than temporarily pinned in place. Yet even when it falters, the film remains visually arresting and emotionally resonant. Like one of the gowns it admires, "Couture" is exquisitely crafted, occasionally over-designed and ultimately moving less for its glitter than for the human vulnerabilities hidden beneath the surface. (B.) 

https://youtu.be/YkgFi8_X0m0?si=56s_jgZmW9Ma1TH_     

JACKASS:  BEST AND LAST--The most charitable thing to be said about "Best and Last" is that it finally dispenses with the pretense of being a movie. For more than 25 years, the self-abusing brotherhood led by Johnny Knoxville has transformed concussions, public nudity and catastrophic lapses in judgment into a remarkably durable franchise. Now comes what's being advertised as a farewell tour: a feature-length assemblage of greatest hits, near-misses and previously unreleased outtakes harvested from the series' cable TV and theatrical incarnations. If you've seen the earlier films, you've already seen much of what's here. The lackadaisical structure resembles a family photo album compiled by relatives who insist on showing you every single snapshot. Joined by the familiar gang--Steve-O, Chris Pontius, Wee Man, Dave England, Danger Ehren and Preston Lacy--Knoxville presides over the festivities with his customary grin of reckless enthusiasm. (The late Ryan Dunn also appears in archival footage.) What emerges is less a new work than a museum exhibit dedicated to the art of getting hit in the groin. Some of the material retains its anarchic power. A few stunts still provoke involuntary laughter, largely because the performers' commitment to humiliation remains so complete. Yet repetition takes its toll. Watching middle-aged men revisit old injuries and resurrect discarded gags can feel less like comedy than a reunion tour performing one encore too many after the crowd has started heading for the parking lot. The "Jackass" phenomenon deserves its place in pop culture history. It democratized stupidity, elevated prank culture and somehow convinced multiple generations that shopping carts were legitimate transportation devices. But "Best and Last" arrives with the unmistakable air of an IP cleaning out its attic. The title contains a promise. One hopes, for everyone's sake--especially their orthopedic surgeons'--that it keeps it. (C MINUS.) 

https://youtu.be/sNwzFhGwA94?si=l6SKTR8koZnN3PvF 

SUPERGIRL--The most surprising thing about Craig Gillespie’s franchise hopeful is that it exists at all. After decades of false starts, abandoned reboots and the lingering stench of 1984's ill-fated  "Supergirl"--the one that stranded Helen Slater, Faye Dunaway and Peter O’Toole in a film that seemed assembled from discarded comic-book scraps--DC finally gives Superman’s cousin a vehicle worthy of her powers. Adapted from Tom King’s celebrated “Woman of Tomorrow” storyline, it finds Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) far removed from Metropolis. Scarred by memories of Krypton’s destruction and less emotionally settled than her famous cousin, Kara embarks on an interstellar odyssey after meeting Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a determined young girl seeking vengeance against the marauder (Matthias Schoenaerts' Krem) who slaughtered her family. What follows is part space western, part revenge saga and part coming-of-age tale with Kara slowly discovering that justice and vengeance are rarely the same thing. The cosmic bounty hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa), all swagger and anarchic energy, crashes in and out of the movie like a drunken meteor while David Corenswet’s Superman appears just enough to remind us that this story belongs to someone else entirely. Gillespie, whose "I, Tonya" and "Cruella" displayed a knack for turning familiar material sideways, brings a welcome raggedness to the proceedings. The visuals are often striking, particularly in the gallery of strange planets and alien outposts, and it wisely avoids the digital blandness that's plagued so many recent superhero adventures. Rather than play Kara as a female variation on Superman, Alcock gives her a bruised, sardonic edge. Her performance suggests a heroine who's seen too much and trusts too little. Ridley provides an effective emotional counterweight while Momoa seems liberated by the opportunity to play a gleeful intergalactic menace instead of a brooding demigod. Ana Nogueira's screenplay loses some momentum in its middle stretches, and the climactic battles are more obligatory than truly exhilarating. Yet "Supergirl "possesses something increasingly rare in corporate filmmaking: a distinct personality. It isn't great, but it is funny, heartfelt and occasionally moving. By modern superhero standards, that counts as a Pyrrhic victory. (B.)  

https://youtu.be/PI9e89dyLt4?si=tRoqoX69HicA-Mra

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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.)

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.)   

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.)     

LEVITICUS--In the past decade, horror movies have become increasingly skilled at translating private anguish into literal monstrosity, but few have made that alchemy feel as raw or emotionally bruising as Adrian Chiarella's unnervingly assured feature debut. Set in a remote Australian Christian community where religious certainty hangs in the air like mildew, the film begins as a furtive teenage romance and gradually mutates into something far more harrowing: a supernatural reckoning with shame itself. The story centers on Naim and Ryan, played with throbbing vulnerability by Joe Bird and Stacy Clausen. Their attraction unfolds in whispers and glances,  stolen moments freighted with the terror of exposure. When members of their church subject the boys to a grotesque conversion ritual intended to purge their desires, something else is unleashed instead--a violent, shape-shifting entity that stalks them in the form of the person they most long for: each other. That premise could have easily collapsed into heavy-handed allegory. Instead, Chiarella approaches the material with remarkable formal confidence, constructing sequences that are genuinely frightening without losing sight of the emotional damage beneath the scares. The terror here isn't simply the creature itself, but an insidious culture that teaches young people to fear their own tenderness. With its empty roads, damp church halls and half-lit bedrooms suspended in permanent spiritual twilight, the movie has the clammy, nocturnal beauty that's become a hallmark of recent Australian horror flicks ("Talk to Me," "Bring Her Back," etc.). Bird conveys Naim’s panic and yearning with heartbreaking restraint while Mia Wasikowska brings a welcome complexity to the role of his mother, a woman whose love and cruelty become nearly indistinguishable. What lingers most isn't the gore--though there's plenty of it--but the tragedy of watching intimacy itself become weaponized. Yes, "Leviticus" is a film about possession, but even more devastatingly it's about what happens when people are taught to regard their own hearts as something demonic. (B PLUS.)

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.)

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.)  

 ---Milan Paurich