NEW THIS WEEK (7/31) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
{To commemorate its seventh anniversary, here's my retrospective essay about one of the greatest films of the first quarter of this century.}
ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD---There's something wonderfully unreasonable about Quentin Tarantino’s "Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood." It's a movie about a Hollywood that is already disappearing, made by a filmmaker who knows that the Hollywood he loves may never have actually existed. The joke--and the poignancy--is that cinema has always been partly a memory of itself. Movies preserve things that were never quite real: the perfect sunset, the heroic entrance, the fearless leading man, the city where every stranger might become a star. Tarantino understands that Hollywood was always a dream factory, but he also understands something more complicated: dreams, even artificial ones, can be emotionally true.
The year is 1969, and the old mythology is beginning to collapse. The studios are losing their grip. Television has changed the relationship between audiences and performers. The New Hollywood is arriving with its restless young turks and its distrust of the old formulas. The western hero, once the embodiment of American confidence, is becoming a museum piece.
Into this moment walks Rick Dalton, an actor who once played the lead in a popular television western and now finds himself uncertain whether he's a leading man, a supporting player or yesterday’s news. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick as a magnificent contradiction: a man whose ego is enormous because his fear is enormous. He's vain, insecure, funny, pathetic and strangely lovable. When Rick worries that he's becoming known only as the villain of the week, he isn’t simply worried about employment. He's confronting the terrifying possibility that the audience has stopped seeing him.
The miracle of DiCaprio’s performance is that he allows us to laugh at Rick without laughing him off. There's a scene in which Rick, alone in his trailer, berates himself after forgetting his lines on set. It's both hilarious and heartbreaking because we recognize the nightmare beneath the comedy. Every actor, every artist, every person who has ever wondered whether they still matter understands that moment.
Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth exists on the other side of that anxiety. Cliff has no ambition left to betray him. He's the film's great fantasy figure: the man who moves through the world effortlessly because he has nothing to prove. Pitt plays him with a kind of anti-performance. The muscles, the smile, the confidence; all of it seems nearly accidental. Cliff is the guy who would have been a movie star if he'd wanted to be, which is precisely why he probably never could have been.
Tarantino has always been fascinated by people trapped inside movie genres, and "Once Upon a Time" might be his most complicated example. Rick is a western hero who cannot remain heroic. Cliff is a stuntman who looks more like the star than the star himself. The entire film is built around the gap between image and reality.
The Sharon Tate sections are where Tarantino’s gamble becomes most daring. Margot Robbie doesn't play Tate as a tragic symbol waiting for history to arrive. She plays her as a young actress enjoying the simple pleasure of being alive: going to the movies, dancing, laughing, watching herself onscreen. The scene in which Tate sits in a theater and watches herself in "The Wrecking Crew" is not just nostalgia, it's a director asking us to look at a person before we look at what happened to her.
Tarantino’s revision of the Manson murders has understandably been debated, but the emotional impulse behind it is surprisingly tender. He isn't merely changing history, he's arguing with the cruelty of history and asking whether movies--which have spent more than a century creating fantasies of rescue--can finally offer one.
This is where the film becomes something larger than a Hollywood fairy tale. It becomes a movie about our desire to return to moments before we knew something terrible was coming. Everyone has a version of 1969 that exists in memory as a paradise before the fall. Tarantino’s fantasy isn't that the past can be restored, it's that cinema can briefly allow us to revisit it.
The danger of nostalgia is that it can turn the past into a postcard. But Tarantino’s Hollywood is too strange and messy for that. He fills it with aging actors, cheap television pilots, forgotten performers, declining careers and people who exist on the margins of fame. His affection isn't really for the golden age, it's for the people who survived after the gold started fading.
That may be why the movie’s strangest and most touching image isn't a glamorous one: Rick Dalton standing outside his own era, wondering if there's still a place for him. Hollywood has always promised immortality, but actors age, studios disappear, audiences move on. What remains is the strange miracle that for two hours in a dark room someone’s manufactured dream can become your own memory.
Tarantino has spent his career rescuing discarded genres, forgotten actors and damaged reputations. In "Once Upon a Time" he attempts something even more impossible: rescuing a feeling. Not the feeling that everything was once better, but the feeling that movies mattered because they could make the impossible feel briefly, emotionally real. The old Hollywood ending was always a lie. But sometimes a beautifully told lie becomes its own kind of truth.
SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY--Destin Daniel Cretton’s "Brand New Day" arrives with the soft thud of a franchise refusing to acknowledge how tired it's become, and how tired we've become of it. Cretton, who brought a welcome tensile restraint to "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" (2021) again demonstrates a sure hand for staging action that actually registers as space rather than noise. But even his calm efficiency can’t fully counteract the sense that this is a series running on contractual obligation rather than narrative necessity.
Tom Holland returns as Peter Parker, and the performance--once spry, boyish, even genuinely affecting--now feels locked into a kind of unctuous autopilot: dutiful, perennially earnest and increasingly difficult to take seriously as anything more than Marvel’s most carefully managed mascot. The film leans hard on his supposed relatability, though it increasingly resembles a corporate talking point rather than a character trait. The story finds Peter attempting, once again, to reconstruct a life in fragments after the fallout of multiverse chaos and trying to reconnect with MJ (Zendaya) in a relationship strained into narrative convenience. Jacob Batalon returns as Ned, though the role has been reduced to a kind of narrative pressure valve to release jokes whenever the emotional circuitry starts to flicker. Cretton’s direction briefly steadies the machine. A sequence set in an abandoned transit hub has a clarity and spatial logic that suggests what these movies might look like if they trusted less in spectacle overload. But the script, assembled with the usual committee impersonality, keeps collapsing back into obligation: setup, quip, escalation, multiverse tease, repeat. What remains is a sequel that's competently made but emotionally airless, another entry in a saga that mistakes continuity for momentum. By the end, “Brand New Day” feels less like a promise than a corporate scheduling memo. (C.)
YOUNG MOTHERS--Belgian auteurs Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne return to the moral terrain they've mapped with unsentimental care for nearly three decades: the lives of people caught between social systems and private reckonings. While recognizably "Dardenne" with handheld camerawork alert to small gestures that carry ethical weight, it also feels sui generis. Set in and around Liège, the story follows several young women navigating early motherhood with scant support and limited options. The narrative braids their days together rather than insisting on a single protagonist. One strand centers on a teenager determined to keep her baby despite pressure from social workers and family; another tracks a new mom struggling to reconcile her own arrested adolescence with the sudden authority conferred by parenthood. Performances, led by newcomers Lucie Laruelle and Babette Verbeek, have the Dardennes’ customary raw-boned honesty and the spurning of knee-jerk psychoanalyzing helps deepen our understanding of the characters' interior lives. The directors’ neorealist instincts have always been less about reportage than proximity. There are flashes of tenderness (an improvised lullaby, a shared cigarette, a moment of stubborn joy) that open the film to something like hope without diluting its formal rigor. What distinguishes this movie in the Dardennes’ oeuvre is its sense of female community. Where their earlier works often isolated protagonists in moral solitude, this time they find meaning in provisional bonds: advice exchanged in hallways, childcare bartered in favors, solidarity formed on the fly. Rather than romanticizing these connections, the Dardennes honor their necessity and resist tidy resolutions. Choices are made, consequences accepted and life goes on--haltingly, imperfectly. That refusal of consolation is also a sign of respect. The Dardenne' have long believed that cinema’s highest calling is to look closely and judge sparingly. "Young Mothers" does just that, offering a compassionate, bracing portrait of responsibility taking shape under pressure one ordinary day at a time. The Music Box DVD includes a Q&A with Jean-Pierre and Luc Drenne; an image gallery; and the theatrical trailer. (A.)
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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.)
THE ELEPHANT MAN--David Lynch's 1980 masterpiece has long occupied an unusual place in his storied oeuvre. On paper, it seems almost anomalous: a period biography commissioned by a major studio, adapted from existing source material and based on the documented life of Victorian-era celebrity Joseph/"John" Merrick. There are no red curtains, no cryptic FBI agents, no uncanny doubles or dream logic to announce themselves in obvious fashion. Yet with each passing year, "The Elephant Man" has come to seem less like an outlier in Lynch's career than one of its purest expressions. That paradox began with one of Hollywood's most inspired leaps of faith. Mel Brooks--hardly a filmmaker associated with Victorian tragedy--recognized something extraordinary after seeing Lynch's micro-budget 1977 freak out "Eraserhead." Rather than dismissing it as the work of an eccentric provocateur, Brooks perceived an artist capable of rendering interior experience with startling emotional force. His decision to entrust Lynch with the material remains one of the great producer's gambles in American cinema, a reminder that genuine artistic patronage occasionally flourished within Hollywood's sausage factories. Brooks was wise enough to keep his own name largely out of the marketing, fearing audiences would expect a comedy. What emerged instead was a work of overwhelming compassion. Merrick's story had already passed into modern myth before Lynch arrived. Born with severe physical deformities and exploited as a carnival attraction before finding refuge under the care of surgeon Frederick Treves, Merrick became a symbol of both Victorian cruelty and human dignity. Lynch approaches that familiar narrative without sentimentality. His Merrick, embodied with astonishing delicacy by John Hurt beneath Christopher Tucker's extraordinary prosthetic makeup, is never reduced to an object of pity. Instead, he becomes the emotional and moral fulcrum of a world whose supposedly "normal" inhabitants are frequently revealed as the true grotesques. It's here that "The Elephant Man" unmistakably reveals itself as a Lynch film. His lifelong fascination with outsiders, hidden suffering, industrial landscapes and the fragile boundary separating civilization from barbarism was already fully formed. Freddie Francis's luminous black-and-white cinematography transforms smokestacks, steam and Victorian machinery into landscapes every bit as uncanny as the factories of "Eraserhead." Sound design--always one of Lynch's secret weapons--creates an oppressive, dreamlike atmosphere where mechanical noise becomes psychological music. Even moments of conventional narrative unfold with the strange dream logic that would later define "Blue Velvet," "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive." More than four decades later, it's lost none of its capacity to move audiences. The humanism never curdles into sanctimony nor does the visual beauty overwhelm the pain at its center. If anything the movie has only grown richer with time, revealing that Lynch's greatest subject was never mystery for its own sake but empathy. That may explain why this seeming curio now feels indispensable. It's not merely one of the finest biographical dramas ever made, but one of the essential works in the Lynch canon: a masterpiece whose tenderness proves every bit as radical as his nightmares. The Criterion Collection 4K Blu-Ray includes archival interviews with Lynch, Hurt, Brooks, Francis, Tucker, co-producer Jonathan Sanger and stills photographer Frank Connor; a 1981 audio recording of an interview/audience Q&A with Lynch at the American Film Institute; "The Terrible Elephant Man Revealed," a 2001 documentary about the film; a 2005 featurette, "Joseph Merrick: The Real Elephant Man," with archivist Jonathan Evans; Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna reading excerpts from their 2018 book, "Room to Dream;" excerpts from an interview with Lynch from the 2005 edition of Chris Roley's book, "Lynch on Lynch;" and an 1886 letter to the editor of the London Times concerning Merrick by the chairman of the London Hospital. (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.)
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.)
MOTOR CITY--Some movies like Tony Scott's 1993 cult classic "True Romance" embrace pulp with enough conviction to become positively exhilarating. Then there's this spectacularly hollow exercise in delusional self-regard from director Potsy ("Old Henry") Ponciroli that mistakes relentless volume for style and slow-motion strutting for storytelling. What could have been a lean, nasty revenge thriller instead resembles an overproduced, feature-length 1985 Loverboy video minus the hooks, irony or decency to end after four minutes. Alan Ritchson plays John Miller, a former convict who returns to Detroit after years behind bars determined to settle scores with the crime syndicate that framed him and destroyed his life. Along the way he crosses paths with a gallery of allies, enemies and femme fatales played by Shailene Woodley, Pablo Schreiber and Ben Foster, each of whom seems to have wandered in expecting an actual screenplay. Instead they're handed attitude in place of dialogue. The "performances" amount to little more than grimacing, glaring and pantomiming beneath an endless barrage of thundering rock music with every emotional beat drowned out by a guitar solo. Characters enter in clouds of smoke, pose beneath neon lights, exchange a sentence or two and disappear before they've become recognizable human beings. Ponciroli directs as if every frame were destined to become a promotional still. Cars gleam; sparks fly; leather jackets billow fetishistically. But no amount of production design can disguise the emptiness underneath. The film mistakes surface for substance so consistently that its visual swagger actually becomes unintentionally comic. "Motor City" aspires to be mythic, muscular and cool, but it's merely loud, brainless and exhausting: a not-so-grand folly that confuses cinematic style with the world's longest music video. (D.)
THE ODYSSEY--Christopher Nolan has never mistaken moderation for a virtue, and the Oscar-winning director scales Homer's foundational text with the grit and determination of a filmmaker convinced that every myth should be experienced at maximum volume (and length). The result is frequently spectacular, intermittently exhilarating and, at nearly every turn, exhausting: a monument to cinematic ambition that's easier to admire than love. Matt Damon brings a weathered
intelligence to Odysseus, the battle-scarred king of Ithaca whose decade-long voyage home after the Trojan War becomes a gauntlet of monsters, shipwrecks, seductive goddesses and divine interference. Back in Ithaca, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) fends off increasingly aggressive suitors while her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), searches for news of the father he scarcely remembers. Around them swirl gods, kings and mortals played by a cast so lavishly stocked with marquee names (Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theon, et al) that one eventually stops trying to keep score. Indeed, Nolan's parade of celebrity cameos becomes its own unintended spectacle. Every few minutes another recognizable face materializes for a scene or two before vanishing again, producing the same distracting effect as John Wayne turning up as a Roman centurion at the Crucifixion in George Stevens' "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Instead of enriching Homer's world, the procession of stars repeatedly nudges viewers out of it. No one stages large-format spectacle with Nolan's technical assurance, though. The sea battles roar, the cyclopean landscapes dwarf humanity and the practical effects possess a tactile grandeur that computer-generated fantasy often lacks. Yet the movie remains oddly resistant to emotional intimacy. Nolan is forever explaining destiny, honor and memory while rarely allowing his characters to inhabit them as flesh-and-blood people rather than ideas in armor. It's difficult not to be reminded of 2024's "The Return" in which Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche distilled the same source material into a lean, deeply human drama that proved more moving at a fraction of this film's budget (and nearly three-hour run time). For Nolan acolytes, "The Odyssey" will doubtless confirm his status as modern cinema's reigning architect of gigantism. For everyone else, it may feel like another reminder that bigger canvases don't automatically produce deeper emotions. Homer survives the treatment but just barely, emerging from beneath layers of IMAX grandeur and directorial self-regard nearly as formidable as the trials faced by Odysseus himself. (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
