CAROLINA, CAROLINE--Adam Carter Rehmeier trades the anarchic punk energy of his 2020 cult favorite “Dinner in America” for something moodier, dustier and more romantically doomed. Starring Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner, this outlaw romance unfolds like a sunburnt B-movie discovered in the glove compartment of a stolen car: ragged around the edges, intermittently exhilarating and ultimately more affecting than its shaggy dog structure initially suggests. Weaving plays Caroline Daniels, a restless young woman desperate to escape the gravitational pull of a dead-end Texas town. She hooks up with Oliver (Gallner), a drifter and small-time con artist whose charm barely conceals panic and self-loathing. Together they drift through the American Southwest on a spree of robberies, hustles and impulsive reinventions with a vague hope that the next town might finally offer absolution. The film’s greatest asset is the combustible chemistry between Weaving and Gallner. Weaving understands that Caroline’s recklessness is inseparable from performance; she plays the character like a woman auditioning for her own mythology. Gallner turns Oliver into a jittery romantic who seems perpetually aware that he's the weaker half of the duo. Rehmeier clearly wants to evoke the reckless lyricism of “Badlands,” “True Romance,” "Bonnie and Clyde," "Natural Born Killers" and other lovers-on-the-lam classics, though his movie lacks the formal rigor or emotional accretion of those movies. Its pacing sags at midpoint, and the screenplay occasionally mistakes eccentricity for depth. Still, there's genuine feeling beneath the scruffy surface, along with an affectionate understanding of American lost souls who mistake motion for freedom. (B.)    

https://youtu.be/fNdC6SJ-TxY?si=4luG101B6x8MAiKd

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.)

https://youtu.be/rJSmz-zhDxE?si=rgWFeaz2IvoUba_D

THE SACRIFICE--Made in exile and completed just months before his death, this1986 masterpiece stands as Andrei Tarkovsky’s valedictory statement: a film that gathers together the director’s lifelong preoccupations with faith, memory, spiritual crisis and the possibility of redemption. If "Andrei Rublev" explored the artist’s vocation, "Solaris" the persistence of memory and "Stalker" the yearning for transcendence in an unfeeling world, "The Sacrifice" distills those concerns into a work of remarkable austerity and emotional clarity. It's also Tarkovsky’s most Bergman-esque movie, not merely because it was shot in Sweden with many of Ingmar Bergman’s regular collaborators, but because it engages directly with the Scandinavian master’s fascination with silence, doubt and divine absence. The film unfolds over the course of a single day. Alexander (Erland Josephson), a retired actor, critic and intellectual, celebrates his birthday with family and friends at his isolated seaside home. As international tensions suddenly escalate into what appears to be an impending nuclear catastrophe, Alexander is plunged into spiritual despair. Convinced that civilization stands on the brink of annihilation, he makes a desperate vow to God: if the world can be restored, he will renounce everything he loves. What follows is less a conventional narrative than a metaphysical journey through fear, sacrifice and faith. Josephson, one of the most indispensable members of Bergman’s repertory company, gives a career-best performance. His Alexander is simultaneously cerebral and vulnerable, a man whose intellectual sophistication proves inadequate when confronted by an imminent apocalypse. Josephson’s gaunt features and searching gaze become instruments through which Tarkovsky explores the collapse of rational certainty. Susan Fleetwood brings a raw volatility to Alexander’s wife, and Allan Edwall provides a gentle earthiness as the family’s postman and self-styled mystic. Together they help create an atmosphere of emotional instability mirroring the cosmic anxieties. Yet it's ultimately defined less by performances than by Tarkovsky’s singular command of time and space. Working with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Bergman’s longtime collaborator, he fashions images of extraordinary serenity and menace. The sparse interiors, windswept landscapes and lingering camera movements evoke a world suspended between material reality and spiritual revelation. The justly lauded concluding sequence, executed in an astonishingly complex long take, remains one of the most breathtaking acts of cinematic devotion ever committed to celluloid. What distinguishes "The Sacrifice" within Tarkovsky’s oeuvre is its unexpected directness. Some of his earlier films often shrouded their metaphysical concerns in dreams, science fiction or historical allegory. Here the central questions are laid bare. Can faith survive catastrophe? Is redemption possible through self-denial? Does sacrifice possess genuine transformative power? Tarkovsky offers no definitive answers, but the closing moments suggest that spiritual renewal may emerge precisely where reason reaches its limits. As a final opus, it possesses that rare feeling of an artist summing up their entire worldview. It's grave, demanding and profoundly moving--a cinematic elegy that transforms personal mortality into a meditation on the fate of humanity itself. Kino Classics' gorgeous new Blu Ray includes an audio commentary with Tarkovsky colleague  Layla Alexander-Garrett; "Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky," Michel Leszczylowski's 1988 documentary on the making of "The Sacrifice;" and an interview with Leszczylowski. (A.) 

https://youtu.be/ODJb2-PLu7Y?si=8HCFRUqgWJhdtXBF

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.)

https://youtu.be/A-8pAlDgINI?si=5R_seyGyN8U5cX8k

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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 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.)  

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.)

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.)

PRESSURE--Anthony Maras’s tony docudrama is less a combat movie than a chamber piece about men attempting to think clearly while history bears down on them like inclement weather. The premise may sound forbiddingly austere--a film about meteorological forecasts and military hesitation in the days before D-Day--yet Maras, whose "Hotel Mumbai" (2018) demonstrated an equally formidable skill at orchestrating tension within enclosed spaces, understands that bureaucratic maneuvering can be suspenseful when enough lives depend upon a decision. Set during the 72 hours preceding the Normandy invasion, the film follows Group Captain James Stagg (played with grave intelligence by Andrew Scott,) the British meteorologist charged with advising Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower on whether the weather will permit the largest amphibious assault in modern history. Opposing him is the swaggering American forecaster Irving P. Krick, (Chris Messina oozing unearned confidence), whose sunnier predictions threaten to push the operation toward catastrophe. At the center of the drama is Brendan Fraser's Eisenhower:  exhausted, burdened and quietly terrified beneath his ceremonial calm. Fraser wisely avoids heroic grandstanding. His Ike is a decent administrator suddenly confronted with the unbearable arithmetic of war; thousands may die either because he acts or if he hesitates. Maras stages the mounting uncertainty with admirable precision. Conference rooms become battlegrounds; weather charts acquire the menace of enemy maps. The clipped editing and muted color palette evoke the procedural paranoia of Cold War thrillers more than conventional World War II epics. Yet the movie occasionally mistakes solemnity for depth. Characters sometimes deliver exposition in polished monologues that feel imported from prestige television, and the script’s determination to underline the moral weight of command can grow repetitive. In supporting roles, Kerry Condon brings warmth as Eisenhower’s trusted aide Kay Summersby while Damian Lewis essays a tartly amusing Bernard Montgomery whose pomposity briefly punctures the sometimes arid seriousness. "Pressure” never entirely transcends its theatrical origins, but it remains an intelligent, unusually adult war drama more interested in doubt, intellect and exhausted conscience than battlefield spectacle. In a season crowded with noisy heroics, that restraint feels almost radical. (B.)

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