EVIL DEAD BURN--Horror franchises rarely improve with age. More often they calcify into brand management, dutifully recycling familiar shocks while mistaking mythology for imagination. This latest excursion into Sam Raimi's blood-spattered universe doesn't entirely escape that fate, but French director Sébastien Vaniček-- whose exhilarating spider nightmare "Infested" announced a gifted new genre stylist--brings enough savage energy and visual invention to keep the IP's black heart beating. The premise is laudably streamlined. A sprawling family gathers at an isolated country estate following the death of its matriarch, hoping grief might accomplish what years of simmering resentments could not. Instead, an ancient book (the inevitable Necronomicon) unleashes a demonic force that turns reconciliation into slaughter. Before long, every embrace carries the possibility of possession and every whispered apology the promise of another geyser of arterial spray. Vaniček stages the mayhem with muscular confidence. He has a keen eye for enclosed spaces that seem to shrink as terror expands, and he understands that the "Evil Dead" series works best when the violence is so extravagantly excessive it circles back into a kind of ghastly slapstick. Limbs break, bodies contort and blood flows with operatic abandon, yet the film seldom loses its wicked sense of humor. If "Burn" ultimately falls short of greatness, it's because it lacks the emotional sting and startling freshness that made Lee Cronin's "Evil Dead Rise" (2024) feel like more than another contractual obligation. Cronin found genuine tragedy amid the carnage while Vaniček mostly delivers an exceptionally nasty thrill ride. It's lean, brutal and satisfyingly deranged, if ultimately a little less haunting once the blood dries. (B.)   

https://youtu.be/a4RASgUlQPQ?si=7nwe5-M6JDPLDBoH

A

GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS--It's one of the more endearingly persistent myths of contemporary Hollywood that sex comedies might still thrive if revived with sufficient wit, self-awareness and the willingness to embarrass attractive people on camera. David ("Wet, Hot American Summer") Wain’s new movie doesn't so much revive the genre as tilt it slightly, letting it wobble back into view like a familiar face you're not entirely sure you recognize. Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch), an earnest young woman on the verge of marriage, is jolted out of romantic complacency when her fiancee (Michael Cassidy) confesses--rather too cheerfully--that he's already used his allotted “celebrity sex pass” on Jennifer Anison. Instead of retreating into wounded self-pity, Gail heads to Hollywood, determined to pursue her own celebrity sex pass (Jon Hamm, playing a gamely self-aware version of himself). Once in L.A., the film tilts fully into Wain’s preferred mode of controlled chaos. Also appearing as himself, John Slattery becomes an unexpectedly useful helpmate in Gail’s search for Hamm, reuniting the "Mad Men" costars in the service of romantic absurdity and industry self-mythology. The result is less a narrative than a comic Möbius strip: celebrity chasing celebrity, fiction folding into persona, persona collapsing back into gag. What keeps the tone buoyant is Wain’s refusal to treat any of this as mere gimmick. The screenplay is interested in the emotional logic beneath the absurdity: the way couples negotiate fantasy, permission and betrayal under the polite language of modern relationships. Deutch anchors the proceedings with a performance that balances exasperation and unsinkable curiosity while Hamm and Slattery lean into their public personas with knowing, generous precision. At a brisk 93 minutes, its greatest virtue may be restraint. In an era when even comedies sprawl toward self-importance, Wain delivers something closer to a throwback: a lean, intelligent sex farce with a sense of rhythm and the refreshing conviction that a joke lands best when it's allowed to end. (B.)

https://youtu.be/GEbaLieo_Kw?si=pLg_bGzMc7gVDerG

MOANA--Disney's live-action remake of their 2016 animated blockbuster finally settles one lingering question: apparently there is no intellectual property so beloved, so recent or so visually accomplished that it cannot be repackaged into another feature-length exercise in corporate déjà vu. Never mind that the original remains widely available or that much of this "live-action" production is itself an elaborate digital fabrication. Aside from flesh-and-blood performers occupying the foreground, the film often feels as computer-generated as its predecessor, only flatter and considerably less memorable. Directed by Thomas Kail (whose underwhelming résumé consists primarily of filmed stage productions like "Hamilton" and "Grease: Live! "rather than narrative features), the remake faithfully retraces the original's footsteps with almost devotional precision. One suspects Disney wanted a traffic controller rather than an interpreter, and Kail dutifully keeps the machinery humming without ever discovering a cinematic reason for its existence. The story remains unchanged. Young Moana (Catherine Laga'aia), the adventurous daughter of a Polynesian chief, defies her father's insistence that she remain safely on the island after an ecological blight threatens their people's future. Guided by the ocean itself, she embarks on a perilous voyage to restore the stolen heart of Te Fiti, enlisting the reluctant demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) in a quest populated by monsters, coconut pirates and towering lava demons.Laga'aia brings an unaffected warmth that keeps Moana sympathetic even when the screenplay is running on recycled fumes while Johnson slips comfortably back into a role he first voiced a decade ago. Yet neither can disguise the overwhelming sense that everyone involved is dutifully reenacting something that already worked better the first time. The real fatigue arrives not from the movie itself but the business strategy it represents. Disney has become trapped in an endless cycle of self-cannibalization, strip-mining its own library instead of taking risks on original stories. One remake might be harmless nostalgia, but a conveyor belt of them begins to resemble creative surrender. "Moana" isn't disastrous, it's merely another expensive reminder that Disney now seems far more interested in preserving its past than imagining its future. (C MINUS.)

https://youtu.be/EEz5xbzYPKI?si=0Pp_EFS78asqSEM8

OMAHA--Directed with an exceptionally delicate touch by Cole Webley, this spare, quietly devastating road movie unfolds with the patience of a long drive across empty country, the kind where the landscape gradually begins to mirror the people inside the car. A weary father, played with stunning restraint by John Magaro, wakes his two children at dawn and ushers them into the family car. Their house has been foreclosed, belongings hastily packed and the destination is left conspicuously vague. The siblings (preternaturally wise nine-year-old Ella and younger brother Charlie) accept the sudden trip with the mixture of excitement and unease that only children can muster. Ella, played with striking naturalism by Molly Belle Wright, gradually becomes aware that their father is carrying a burden he refuses to name. Wright gives Ella an alert intelligence, studying her father with a seriousness that suggests she already suspects more than she can articulate. As Charlie, Wyatt Solis offers a lively counterbalance:  impulsive, funny and innocently absorbed in the small pleasures of the trip. Together the young actors supply the film with its emotional heartbeat. Making his character's desperation palpable without spelling it out, Magaro builds his performance almost entirely from silence. He moves with a haunted inwardness, his love for his children visible in fleeting gestures: a roadside treat, a small joke, a protective glance in the rearview mirror. Webley favors wide Western landscapes and cramped interiors with the car becoming both refuge and trap. What begins as a family road trip slowly reveals itself as something far sadder and morally complex. At just over 80 minutes, "Omaha" is less interested in tidy explanations than the fragile, often heartbreaking bonds between parent and child. No extras on the Greenwich/Kino Lorber DVD. 

(A MINUS.) https://youtu.be/RAuZoy2LR-g?si=iDvR3ePz5Uf0VFlG

NOW AVAILABLE IN THEATERS, HOME VIDEO AND/OR STREAMING CHANNELS: 

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.)

DESPERATE LIVING--If there's a single film in John Waters’ career that can plausibly be described as both his most hostile and greatest work, it's 1977's "Desperate Living," a magnum opus so gleefully indifferent to audience comfort levels that even now it feels less like a cult movie than a dare. Made between the underground provocations of "Female Trouble" (1975) and the breakthrough appeal of "Polyester" (1981), it occupies a singular place in Waters’ body of work, the moment when his fascination with social outcasts, bad taste and institutional collapse achieved its purest, most uncompromising expression. The story follows neurotic suburban housewife Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) who murders her husband during a psychotic episode and flees with her morbidly obese Black maid/lover Grizelda (Jean Hill) to Mortville, a ramshackle shantytown populated by criminals, misfits, political revolutionaries and sexual reprobates. Mortville is ruled by the tyrannical Queen Carlotta, played by Edith Massey with a combination of bewilderment, conviction and comic majesty that no trained actor could ever hope to duplicate. Around them swirls a society in perpetual decay where authority is absurd, morality is meaningless and civilization itself appears to have been built from salvaged garbage. Waters had already spent years developing his cinema of bad taste, but "Desperate Living" pushes beyond mere outrage. Unlike "Pink Flamingos" or "Female Trouble" whose satirical targets remain discernible beneath the anarchy, "Desperate Living" often seems determined to sever every remaining tie to conventional entertainment. There's no reassuring protagonist, sentimental core or attempt to soften the grotesque edges. The visual ugliness isn't an accident of budget but an aesthetic choice. Waters creates a world in which degradation becomes a form of liberation, and the collapse of social order is treated not as tragedy but utopian possibility. What makes the film endure is the singular perfection of its performances. Waters’ Dreamlanders were never actors in any conventional sense: line readings wobble unpredictably, emotional registers shift without warning and any connection to "realism" is tenuous at best. Yet these qualities became expressive tools. Stole’s Peggy is the very incarnation of suburban hysteria; Hill gives Grizelda an unexpected sweetness beneath the character's nonstop vulgarity; and Massey achieves something close to immortality. As Queen Carlotta, she's simultaneously ridiculous, terrifying, pathetic and oddly regal--amateurism inseparable from genius. Within Waters’ oeuvre, it represents the culmination of his underground period before a gradual migration toward mainstream acceptance. Later films would become more polished, accessible and even humane. but none would ever achieve this level of feral artistic freedom. It's a vision untainted by compromise, a fairy tale assembled from refuse and deviance. A half century later, "Desperate Living" remains problematic, abrasive and frequently appalling. It's also quite possibly Waters’ undisputed masterpiece. The Criterion Collection's new box set includes both 4K and Blu-Ray copies of the film; an audio commentary with Waters and actor Liz Renay; "Back to Mortville," a featurette with Waters leading a tour of the movie's Baltimore locations; new interviews with actors Susan Lowe, Mary Vivian Pearce and Mink Stole; a conversation between Waters and film programmer Cristina Cacioppo; an interview with production designer Vincent Peranio; and "Mortville in Revolt," an essay by critic/author Grace Byron. (A 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.)  

MINIONS & MONSTERS--For a franchise built on the principle that more is always more, "Minions and Monsters" arrives with a deflating sense of exhaustion. Directed by Pierre Coffin, the latest installment in Illumination Animation's seemingly endless yellow empire once again mistakes frenetic activity for inspiration, piling gag upon gag in hopes that sheer velocity will compensate for the absence of novelty. The cobbled-together screenplay finds the Minions in 1920's Hollywood attempting to make their own creature feature. Naturally they unleash actual monsters in the process, triggering a globe-trotting chain of cataclysmic events that requires them to save the world from a disaster of their own creation. The starry vocal cast includes Jeff Bridges, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch and Allison Janney, though most are given little to do beyond supplying fleeting audio recognition amid the ensuing chaos. The monster designs are colorful, the Hollywood period backdrop is rendered with impressive detail and the animation moves with the fluid efficiency one expects from Illumination. Yet the craftsmanship only underscores the film's central problem: every joke feels engineered rather than discovered. The Minions remain industrious little engines of slapstick, but after more than a decade of sequels, prequels and spin-offs, their anarchic charm has ossified into formula. Coffin clearly understands the

mechanics of the series he helped create. What seems increasingly elusive, though, is a reason for its continued existence beyond brand maintenance. Neither terrible nor offensive, it's merely overfamiliar--another installment that treats volume as a substitute for imagination. Small children will laugh and their parents may occasionally smile. But everyone else may find themselves wondering if these industrious yellow creatures have finally run out of places to go. (C.)  

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.)  

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 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.) 

YOUNG WASHINGTON--Wrapped in solemn self-importance, John ("Jesus Revolution," "I Can Only Imagine") Erwin's movie is less a fully realized historical drama than an extended dramatization of a textbook sidebar. Intended as the opening chapter in the life of America’s most revered founding figure, it follows the young George Washington (waxen newcomer William Franklyn-Miller) during his formative experiences in the French and Indian War where military setbacks, frontier politics and personal ambition supposedly forge the character that would later shape a nation. Surrounding Franklyn-Miller are seasoned pros like Andy Serkis, Ben Kingsley, Mary-Louise Parker and Kelsey Grammer, but their fleeting appearances feel less like characters inhabiting a world than esteemed guests passing through a grade school pageant. The film has a curiously airless quality in which costumes appear freshly unpacked and bloodless battle scenes feel sparsely populated. Rather than evoking the chaos of a continent-spanning conflict, it mostly resembles an earnest reenactment staged at a government heritage center. What remains is an uninspired exercise in historical myth-making unwilling to complicate its hero or expand beyond the limitations of its modest scope. You're left wondering how a story as seemingly consequential as George Washington’s youth could feel so curiously banal. (D PLUS.)

 ---Milan Paurich