NEW THIS WEEK (7/3) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
AMRUM--At first glance, Fatih Akin’s latest film seems like an outlier in one of contemporary cinema’atile, restlesss most vol oeuvres. The German-Turkish director who burst onto the scene in 2004 with the punk-fueled ferocity of "Head-On," broadened his canvas with "The Edge of Heaven" and delivered the grief-stricken political thriller "In the Fade" has rarely been associated with nostalgia or historical reflection. Yet "Amrum" proves a remarkably natural fit. Beneath its placid surface lies another tale of identity, inheritance and the burden of history, subjects that have long dominated his work. Set on the titular North Sea island during the final weeks of World War II, it follows twelve-year-old Nanning (impressive newcomer Jasper Billerbeck in a strikingly naturalistic performance) who struggles to help his family survive amid wartime deprivation. He fishes at night, gathers food where he can and labors in the fields alongside local farmers. The island’s windswept beaches and seemingly idyllic landscape suggest a refuge from the outside world. But the imminent collapse of Nazi Germany forces Nanning to confront some uncomfortable truths about his family's unstinting loyalty to the Nazi Party. Akin approaches the material with a modesty and restraint that's among its most salient virtues. Rather than constructing a conventional wartime narrative, he filters enormous historical upheavals through a child’s perspective. Intimate rather than epic, it's attentive to small gestures, fleeting encounters and moments of dawning consciousness. What lingers beyond the historical setting is a raw emotional authenticity that cuts to the bone. No extras on the Kino Lorber DVD. (A MINUS.)
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.)
EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC--Shifting his gaze from the police state and religious establishment to the entertainment industry itself, Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh completes the unofficial "Cairo Trilogy" he began with "The Nile Hilton Incident" and "Boy from Heaven." The result is a formidable work of moral inquiry: a gripping, darkly funny political thriller animated by Saleh's characteristic fascination with the compromises demanded by power. The film centers on George Fahmy (Fares Fares, Saleh’s longtime collaborator and creative alter ego), Egypt's most beloved movie star and a man whose public image masks a private life of vanity, loneliness and quiet desperation. When George falls out of favor with the authorities, he's offered a role he can't refuse: President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in a lavish, state-sponsored biopic. What begins as an exercise in career preservation swiftly becomes a descent into the innermost chambers of political authority where every favor carries a price and every compromise demands another. Along the way, George becomes entangled in a world of whispered threats, elegant surfaces and institutional rot. Fares brilliantly conveys both the absurd self-regard of a fading matinee idol and the mounting terror of a man gradually realizing that he's wandered into a labyrinth with no exit. Unfolding like a noir disguised as backstage melodrama, "Eagles of the Republic" exposes the uneasy alliance between celebrity, nationalism and propaganda. In bringing his trilogy to a close, Saleh has crafted a worthy capstone to one of contemporary cinema’s most incisive examinations of power. No bonus features on the Cohen Media Group/Kino Lorber Blu-Ray. (B PLUS.)
LOCKBOX--Director Daniel Stamm has spent much of his career exploring the same theme: ordinary people confronting extraordinary evil while desperately clinging to faith, reason or both. His 2010 breakout, "The Last Exorcism," turned possession movie clichés into something nervy and unsettling while later efforts (e.g., 2022's "Prey for the Devil") proved less successful. With this adaptation of Soren Narnia's same-named short story, Stamm once again returns to demonic territory and the results feel depressingly familiar. Carla Gugino plays Ellen, a grieving woman who retreats to a rural community after her mother's death and assumes responsibility for a military vet cousin (Lou Taylor Pucci's Winthrop) suffering from PTSD. Their uneasy domestic arrangement is disrupted when a volatile neighbor (Katharine Isabelle) insists that Winthrop is harboring something sinister. Strange manifestations begin appearing around the property, all seemingly connected to a mysterious supernatural force pursuing him. A tale of inherited trauma and unseen evil could provide fertile ground for psychological horror. Unfortunately, Stamm quickly settles into a procession of genre obligations: ominous whispers, distorted faces, sudden apparitions and an endless supply of dimly lit hallways. The cliches are staged with professional elan, but efficiency isn't the same as inspiration. By grounding Ellen's anguish in recognizable human emotion, Gugino gives the material more nuance than it deserves. Pucci brings a twitchy vulnerability to Winthrop, suggesting depths the screenplay never bothers exploring. Saddled with an underwritten role, Isabelle mostly functions as a delivery system for exposition. The film gestures toward themes of grief, family obligation and generational damage, but every intriguing idea is eventually smothered by generic supernatural spectacle. For a filmmaker who once found fresh angles within the exorcism genre, this feels less like a haunted object than a sealed container filled with recycled scares. (C MINUS.)
MAURICE--When James Ivory’s masterpiece premiered in 1987, it felt like a quiet act of rebellion. Long associated with the refined literary adaptations he made alongside producer Ismail Merchant and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Ivory had already established himself as a world-class auteur with films like "A Room with a View," "Heat and Dust" and "The Bostonians." Yet "Maurice" remains one of the most daring works in Ivory's distinguished oeuvre: a lush period drama that refuses the tragic inevitability traditionally imposed upon queer characters and instead imagines the possibility of fulfillment, emotional honesty and romantic liberation. Adapted from E.M. Forster’s posthumously published novel, it unfolds in an Edwardian England governed by rigid class hierarchies and equally inflexible assumptions about sexuality. Maurice Hall (James Wilby), a conventional middle-class youth, arrives at Cambridge where he develops a profound attachment to the intellectually gifted Clive Durham (Hugh Grant). Their relationship evolves into love, but Clive ultimately recoils from the implications of his desires. Choosing social respectability over emotional truth, he retreats into marriage and conformity, leaving Maurice adrift in a world that offers no language or legal protection for his identity. The second act follows Maurice’s painful search for self-discovery before an unexpected relationship develops with Alec (Rupert Graves), a gamekeeper on Clive’s estate. What begins as clandestine encounters develops into something far more radical: a relationship capable of transcending both social convention and internalized shame. What distinguishes "Maurice" from most earlier cinematic treatments of homosexuality is not simply its subject matter, but its moral architecture. Released at a moment when queer stories on screen were still largely framed through punishment, pathology or despair, it insisted upon the legitimacy of desire itself. Ivory approaches the material neither as social problem or sentimental fantasy. Instead he treats Maurice’s emotional awakening with the same seriousness and romantic grandeur traditionally reserved for heterosexual protagonists.The visual elegance (sunlit lawns, austere Cambridge interiors, rigorously composed country house tableaux) might initially appear emblematic of the trademark Merchant-Ivory style. Yet beneath its impeccable surface lies a work deeply concerned with the costs of repression. Ivory uses the conventions of English period films almost subversively, exposing the emotional suffocation hidden beneath social decorum. Wilby gives Maurice a touching mixture of uncertainty, longing and burgeoning self-possession. A pre-stardom Grant captures Clive’s intelligence and fragility while revealing the fear that ultimately defines (and defeats) him. Graves brings a striking physical immediacy to Alec, embodying a character whose emotional directness challenges the constraints governing Maurice’s world. Ben Kingsley contributes a memorable supporting turn as the hypnotist Maurice consults in a futile attempt to "change" himself, a figure who comically illuminates the absurdity of what would become known as conversion therapy. Nearly four decades later, "Maurice" retains its power not merely as a landmark of LGBTQ cinema but as a profoundly humane work of art. Its brilliance lies in its refusal to separate politics from humanity. Ivory understood that the most radical approach to Forster’s story was not outrage or polemic, but tenderness. The result is a movie of uncommon grace: intellectually rigorous, emotionally generous and quietly revolutionary, standing among the finest achievements of Ivory’s career. The two-disc Cohen Media Group/Kino Lorber Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary featuring critic Wade Major and UCLA English professor Joseph Bristow; a making-of featurette with Ivory and cinematographer Pierre Lhomme; deleted scenes and alternate takes with optional audio commentary by Ivory; a chat with Ivory and director Tom ("Spotlight") McCarthy; and both the original and 2017 re-release trailers. (A PLUS.)
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.)
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.)
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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.)
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.)
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.)
---Milan Paurich
