NEW THIS WEEK (9/18) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
RESIDENT EVIL—The good news about Zach Cregger’s reboot of the long-running franchise is that it’s actually (and finally!) a watchable “Resident Evil” movie. The slightly less auspicious news is that Cregger, after the deliriously inventive “Barbarian” and spectacularly nasty “Weapons,” has elected to spend his newfound collateral adapting somebody else’s material. One can’t help imagining what fresh nightmare he might have cooked up on his own. Still, if Hollywood insists on feeding its up-and-coming auteurs existing I.P.s, this is the way to do it. Cregger takes the basic machinery of the series—Raccoon City, a viral outbreak, infected monsters, sundry corporate nightmares—and gives it something the previous films lacked: an actual personality. Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier making a delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital when the outbreak occurs, turning an ordinary workday into a prolonged exercise in not getting eaten, infected or otherwise horribly dismembered. Bryan isn’t some prepackaged action hero: he’s an ordinary guy thrown into an extraordinary mess which makes his increasingly desperate survival attempts more involving than the usual videogame avatar machismo. Cregger is particularly adept at keeping his audience off balance. A scene that begins as straightforward horror can suddenly veer into grotesquerie, black comedy or something genuinely disturbing. The monsters are suitably repulsive, but the real pleasure lies in Cregger's delight in toying with our expectations. Zach Cherry and Paul Walter Hauser contribute neatly calibrated comic relief without making the whole thing feel like a spoof. All the previous “Resident Evil" movies treated their source material as either fanboy obligation or an excuse for digital mayhem. Cregger doesn't erase the game's DNA, he simply makes it cinematic. It isn't as personal, audacious or flat-out weird as his previous films, but maybe that's the price of renting rather than owning the house. (B.)
https://youtu.be/mNd1gb19A-c?si=t2iHUv1YOoEPvAqK
SHAUN THE SHEEP: THE BEAST OF MOSSY BOTTOM—Shaun and his sheep pals may be mute, but they’ve never had trouble communicating. “The Beast of Mossy Bottom” proves once again that a good sight gag can travel farther than reams of dialogue. The third feature starring the resourceful little troublemaker after “Shaun the Sheep Movie” (2015) and “Farmageddon” (2019) is a modestly scaled delight: sweet, silly and just spooky enough to make Halloween seem like a suitable occasion for livestock mischief. When the Farmer accidentally destroys the flock’s pumpkin patch, Shaun decides he can fix everything by adopting the guise of a mad scientist to manufacture replacements. Soon a mysterious beast begins prowling the woods around Mossingham, turning a gourd problem into a mini monster movie. Directors Steve Cox and Matthew Walker keep the animation impressively tactile with every woolly body, muddy field and handmade contraption possessing the slight imperfections that make stop-motion feel so alive. It can’t, however, escape the long shadow of its predecessors. The first two films had a freshness and comic momentum that made Shaun’s leap from television to the big screen feel almost miraculous while “Mossy Bottom” is smaller and more familiar. The jokes occasionally seem recycled, and the story is content to hit the expected beats. But familiarity isn’t fatal when the execution is this amiable. This might not be the best big-screen “Shaun,” but it’s an agreeable little Halloween treat with enough wit, craftsmanship and charm to leave you smiling. (B.)
SHOAH--There are documentaries that record history, some that interpret it and Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” which seems to demand that history surrender its corpse. Released in 1985 after more than a decade of research, shooting and editing, this nine-and-a-half-hour magnum opus about the Nazi extermination of European Jewry isn’t merely a documentary about the Holocaust. It’s one of the rare films that fundamentally alters our understanding of what cinema can do, and what it may be morally required to do. Lanzmann’s radical conceit was also a rebuke to conventional historical filmmaking. There would be no newsreel footage of liberated camps, no photographs of corpses, no omniscient narrator explaining what we already know. Instead, it returns to the sites of extermination as they exist in the present and asks the living to summon the dead. Survivors—former Nazis, Polish bystanders, railway workers, resistance figures and historians—reconstruct piece by piece the machinery that murdered six million Jews. The effect is almost perversely cinematic. A train moves through the Polish countryside. Grass ripples where a killing center once stood. A barber named Abraham Bomba describes cutting the hair of women who were moments away from entering the gas chamber. A former railwayman recalls transporting Jews toward their deaths. Simon Srebnik, one of the few survivors of Chełmno, returns to the landscape where he’d been forced as a boy to dispose of Jewish corpses. Nothing announces itself as spectacle; everything becomes spectacle because Lanzmann refuses to manufacture it. This is where “Shoah” becomes something more than oral history. Lanzmann understands that memory isn’t a transparent window onto the past, it’s a landscape of wounds, hesitations, repetitions and silences. He allows people to struggle for words, sometimes pressing them. He’ll let an anecdote circle back upon itself until an apparently ordinary detail becomes unbearable. The work's extraordinary duration isn’t self-indulgence; time itself becomes an ethical instrument. We're not allowed the comforting compression by which mass murder becomes a chapter in a textbook. Nor does Lanzmann permit the Holocaust to remain an abstraction called "history." His subject is the physical process of extermination: the trains, the selections, the gas chambers, the Sonderkommando, the cremation of bodies, the destruction of evidence. The Nazis sought not only to murder their victims but erase all traces of their crimes. Lanzmann answers that campaign of erasure with an almost ferocious act of cinematic remembrance. His most extraordinary achievement may be the way he makes absence visible. There aren’t any bodies because there were no bodies to film. Instead there are landscapes, forests, railway lines, fields, villages, rivers. The banality of those images is precisely what makes them so terrifying. The killings happened here. People lived here. People still live here. The world didn’t become visibly different after the crimes. And Lanzmann's camera never allows us the easy consolation of distance. His compositions are often austere, even beautiful, but beauty is never permitted to become prettification. The present day images and the voices from the past exist in an unnerving collision. What we see is ordinary; what we hear is almost impossible to comprehend. That collision is the movie’s great formal invention. Lanzmann doesn’t illustrate testimony, he creates a tension between image and voice in which neither can fully contain the other. A face speaks; a landscape listens; a train passes; a memory returns. Cinema becomes an encounter rather than an explanation. The result is exhausting, hypnotic and ultimately overwhelming not because Lanzmann assaults the viewer with images of atrocity, but because he withholds them. He understands that imagination, confronted with precise testimony and empty space, can be more devastating than any archival footage. Nearly a century after the Holocaust, “Shoah” has lost none of its terrible immediacy. If anything, its refusal to turn atrocity into safely concluded history has become even more important. By transforming testimony into presence and absence into evidence, it’s an investigation of the past that refuses to ever become the past. Calling it "great" makes the word sound absurdly inadequate. Yes, it’s monumental, but monuments can become objects one simply admires from a distance. Lanzmann made something more demanding: a monument that speaks, remembers, accuses and insists that we listen. He doesn’t ask us to imagine what happened, he makes forgetting impossible. The Criterion Collection box set includes three supplementary Lanzmann films (“A Visitor from the Living,” “Sobibor, October 14, 1943” and “The Karski Report”); a 2003 interview with Lanzmann; a conversation between Lanzmann and critic Serge Toubiana; an interview with director Arnaud (“A Christmas Tale,” “Kings and Queen”) Desplechin and Caroline Champetier who worked as an assistant camera person on “Shoah;” Guillaume Ribot’s 2025 film “All I Had Was Nothingness” about “Shoah”’s production; and an essay by critic/filmmaker Kent Jones. (A PLUS.)
SUNNY DANCER—George Jaques’s film is the kind of coming-of-age chronicle that understands adolescence as a particularly unruly form of survival. Set at a summer camp for young people with cancer, it could easily have collapsed into inspirational bathos. Instead, Jaques and his appealing young cast keep finding the messy, funny, horny and occasionally heartbreaking life underneath the illness. Bella (“The Last of Us”) Ramsey plays Ivy Pritchard, a 17-year-old leukemia survivor who arrives at camp in remission but emotionally stuck between gratitude and resentment. Ramsey, so good at conveying intelligence edged with defensiveness, gives Ivy an appealing prickliness: she isn’t interested in being anybody’s inspirational “Cancer Kid.” At camp she gradually falls in with fellow senior campers Jake (Daniel Quinn-Toye), Ella (Ruby Stokes) and Archie (Earl Cave), discovering friendship, rebellion and romance in roughly that order. Jaques wisely keeps the medical circumstances from becoming the movie’s entire raison d’etre. He’s more interested in what happens when teenagers are temporarily liberated from the expectations of ordinary life. They flirt, bicker, sneak around, have sex and get into trouble. The adult cast (including Jessica Gunning, James Norton and Neil Patrick Harris) supplies welcome grace notes without stealing the spotlight from its gifted young performers. Harris, in particular, brings unexpected tenderness to camp leader Patrick whose initially overbearing manner conceals a deeply personal grief. The final turn is suitably devastating, though perhaps a bit too schematic. Still, Ramsey handles Ivy’s subsequent grief with a restraint that keeps the ending from feeling manipulative. “Sunny Dancer” doesn’t reinvent the cancer drama; it does something more modest and, ultimately, more valuable. It gives its characters permission to be teenagers before asking us to mourn them.
TWO PROSECUTORS--Sergei (“Donbass,” “The Kiev Trial”) Loznitsa’s severe, hypnotic and chillingly alive historical drama makes the past feel like a nightmare someone has neglected to wake you from. Set at the height of Stalin’s Great Terror in 1937, it turns bureaucracy into an instrument of suspense and moral courage into an almost unimaginable act of rebellion. A young Soviet prosecutor, Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), receives a letter written in blood by Stepniak (Alexander Filippenko), an old Bolshevik who claims he’s been tortured and unjustly imprisoned. Kornyev, still idealistic enough to believe that the Soviet legal system might actually be capable of correcting an injustice, decides to investigate. What follows is a journey through an increasingly impenetrable maze of officials, corridors, waiting rooms and evasions, eventually leading Kornyev to Moscow and the formidable General Vyshynsky (Anatoliy Beliy). Loznitsa, whose films have repeatedly examined the machinery of political violence, understands how much more frightening oppression can be when nobody raises their voice. “Two Prosecutors” is constructed from long, meticulously choreographed takes in which doors close, telephones ring, officials confer and seemingly innocuous conversations acquire the menace of death sentences. The system doesn’t merely punish dissent, it makes truth itself administratively impossible. Kuznetsov gives a beautifully restrained performance, playing Kornyev not as a conventional heroic dissident but as something more complicated and tragic: a decent man whose faith in the principles of the system haven’t caught up with the reality of the system itself. And Filippenko gives Stepniak an almost spectral authority, a man already half-destroyed by the machinery he once served. Their encounters have the eerie quality of two men speaking across the widening abyss between ideology and experience. The austere compositions, Oleg Mutu’s boxy Academy-ratio cinematography and Danielius Kokanauskis’s razor sharp editing help create a world in which physical space seems to contract around Kornyev. The result is at once political thriller and Kafkaesque black humor—the comedy of a nation in which absurdity has become indistinguishable from terror. Criterion Premieres’ Blu-Ray includes an interview with Loznitsa, notes by critic Beatrice Loayza and the theatrical trailer. (A.)
THE WEIGHT—Set 1933 Oregon, director Padraic McKinley’s film initially seems like it’s going to be another grim Depression-era drama about good men being ground down by an unforgiving system. Part prison picture, survival adventure and morality tale, it’s instead a gripping, beautifully acted cross between “The Shawshank Redemption” and “Deliverance.” McKinley has made precisely the type of movie Hollywood used to make, adding to its bittersweet quality. Ethan Hawke plays Samuel Murphy, a father torn from his young daughter and sentenced to a brutal work camp on trumped-up charges. The warden (Russell Crowe) offers Murphy a tantalizing proposition: smuggle gold through 100 miles of dangerous wilderness and earn an early release. Murphy chooses three fellow prisoners to accompany him—Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen)—and the expedition becomes an increasingly precarious alliance. An Indigenous woman, Anna (Julia Jones) joins them along the way, further complicating the already fragile group dynamics. The wilderness isn't merely picturesque scenery but an antagonist in its own right, and the work camp has the institutional brutality of a classic prison flick. Once the men enter the wild, hunger, fear and greed begin eroding whatever bonds of fellowship they once possessed. Murphy's determination to get back to his daughter increasingly collides with the moral compromises demanded by his mission. Hawke is terrific, bringing his customary wounded decency and simmering stubbornness to the role. Crowe is equally solid in a nicely restrained turn as a warden whose authority has become inseparable from his capacity for cruelty. “The Weight” has the unfashionable virtue of believing that a serious adult film can simply tell a good story and let its cast do the rest. Thirty-odd years ago, this would have been a major-studio release and a potential awards contender. Now it's merely “content” that’s being given a brief multiplex detour before (hopefully) finding its true audience on VOD and streaming. It deserves better, and so does the type of moviemaking it represents. (B PLUS.)
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BUDDY—Take a relentlessly cheerful, Barney-ish ’90s children’s television host, make him a giant orange unicorn, then watch him go spectacularly homicidal. The central premise is kind of obvious, but director Casper Kelly—making his feature debut after the wonderfully deranged Adult Swim short "Too Many Cooks”—manages to keep it intermittently amusing. The film begins inside "It's Buddy!,” a garish, aggressively wholesome kids’ show in which pre-pubescents sing, dance and absorb Buddy’s life lessons about happiness and good behavior. But when one cast member refuses to play along, the program’s sunny façade starts developing some very dark cracks. Soon the kiddies are prisoners of Buddy’s bizarre universe, scrambling to escape while their supposedly benevolent host turns into an axe-wielding monster. Back in the real world, Emmy winner Cristin (HBO's "The Penguin") Milioti plays a mom investigating the disappearance of her daughter who becomes increasingly convinced that something terrifying has happened to her family. Kelly has a terrific eye for the peculiar artificiality of children’s TV: the candy-colored sets, the canned cheerfulness, the maddeningly perky songs. He also knows that the sight of a cuddly unicorn committing bloody mayhem is inherently funny. Keegan-Michael Key, hidden inside Buddy’s absurd costume, supplies exactly the right combination of menace and idiotic enthusiasm. The conceit is clever enough for an extended short, but at feature length the cracks begin to show. Still, it's sufficiently weird and cheerfully nasty enough to earn its place in the Midnight Movie canon. It's not a killer unicorn masterpiece, but at least it dares to be different. (B MINUS.)
COYOTE VS. ACME--There's something deliciously apt about a movie in which an abused little guy takes on a vast corporation nearly being a corporate casualty itself. Three years after Warner Brothers shelved "Coyote Vs. Acme" for a tax write-off, Wile E. Coyote and director Dave Green get the last laugh. Green's film takes its inspiration from Ian Frazier’s wonderfully deadpan 1990 New Yorker story that imagined a lawsuit against the Acme Corporation. After another futile attempt to catch the Road Runner ends with the usual plethora of explosions, anvil droppings and bodily deformation, Wile E. hires down on his luck attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to sue Acme for defective merchandise. Forte's Kevin is an amiably schlubby sad sack whose professional humiliations parallel Wile E.’s endless physical humiliations, and the two make an unexpectedly touching odd couple. Lana Condor (Kevin’s idealistic niece) and John Cena (a slickster Acme lawyer) provide able human support, while Eric Bauza’s multiple Looney Tunes voices remind us that these characters still possess comic DNA that no corporate rebranding can ever vanquish. Green also understands an essential rule: don't over-explain Wile E. who remains silent throughout, communicating entirely through gestures and facial expressions. The slapstick shenanigans occasionally achieve the glorious lunacy of the Chuck Jones originals, and the integration of animation and live action is remarkably seamless. In fact, it may be the wittiest and arguably best live-action/animation hybrid since "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." It's not as revolutionary as that 1988 landmark, but it has something increasingly rare in family entertainment: jokes written for grown-ups that don't ignore children. (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.)
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.)
HOPE—South Korean cult director Na Hong-jin’s latest is the kind of berserk genre-bender that makes you wonder whether anyone has ever told Na he doesn’t have to cram everything into a single movie. Of course, restraint has never been Na’s problem. The man behind “The Chaser,” “The Yellow Sea” and “The Wailing” returns after a decade-long sabbatical with a 156-minute sci-fi action thriller that begins as a small town murder investigation before mutating into extraterrestrial mayhem. After wildfires divert emergency forces and communications go down, police chief Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and rookie officer Sung-ae (Hoyeon) are left to protect elderly residents of the isolated village of Hope. Meanwhile, Beom-seok’s cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) leads a search party into the mountains to find what (or who) has been mutilating animals and people. The hunters soon discover three very strange visitors: Ma’veyyo (Michael Fassbender), J’aur (Alicia Vikander), Ai’dovor (Taylor Russell) and Va’migere (Cameron Britton). The less said about what happens next the better. Na
is at his best when withholding information, turning empty roads, wrecked buildings and patches of dark forest into zones of almost unbearable uncertainty. His action sequences have a wonderfully tactile, old-fashioned ferocity: people run, cars crash, guns fire and bodies hit the ground with gratifyingly little digital polish. The deliberately wonky FX, however, can make the creature effects look less otherworldly than merely unpolished. Yet it’s never dull which counts for plenty in an era when “epic” too often means just long and expensive.
Na’s Achilles heel is that he can’t resist adding another complication, another character, another escalation. The extraordinary opening hour gives way to something messier and ultimately fatiguing. But exhaustion is part of the experience, too. It may not be another “Wailing”-caliber masterpiece, but “Hope” confirms Na as one of contemporary cinema’s nonpareil choreographers of panic.
(B PLUS.)
INSIDIOUS: OUT OF THE FURTHER--At some point, the "Insidious" movies stopped being a franchise and became a municipal service. Written and directed by Jacob Chase, the sixth installment concerns Gemma (Amelia Eve) who has the unfortunate ability to interact with spirits and bring them back into the mortal world. Soon enough, malevolent forces take advantage of the supernatural revolving door, and Gemma finds herself caught between the living and the dead. A woman who can inadvertently smuggle ghosts across the border
separating life from death is a reasonably good horror hook--particularly if you're willing to accept that the border in question has the security of a Motel 6. But Chase, who helmed 2021's "Come Play," treats the premise less as an opportunity for invention than as a mechanism for getting the by-now rickety "Insidious" tropes back into position. Creaking floors, portentous silences, things standing behind people who inexplicably don't notice them and eventually things that spring toward the camera because the supernatural has apparently embraced jump-scare technology. It's less interested in frightening you than reminding you that it knows where the scare button is. Eve brings a welcome seriousness to her role and Brandon Perea is enormously appealing as Gemma's cop boyfriend, but the most engaging presence is Lin Shaye whose Elise
has always possessed something increasingly rare in contemporary horror flicks: an actual personality. Shaye can suggest a history behind a glance and a private relationship with the supernatural that doesn't need to be diagrammed on a whiteboard. When she appears, "Out of the Further" briefly remembers that ghosts might actually be interesting. (C MINUS.)
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.)
PRACTICAL MAGIC 2--There are bad ideas for movie sequels, and then there’s “Practical Magic 2.” The 1998 original was hardly some beloved classic awaiting rediscovery. It was actually pretty terrible: a tonally confused supernatural romantic comedy that failed to make much of a dent at the box office. Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman reprise their roles as sisters Sally and Gillian Owens, and the always
welcome Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing return as their witchy aunts. The story picks up with the Owens women confronting another chapter in their family's centuries-old curse after Sally's daughter Kylie (Joey King) discovers secrets about the origins of their magic and begins evincing dangerous abilities of her own. The resulting quest takes the family from Massachusetts to Great Britain where apparently the solution to generations of supernatural dysfunction has been waiting all along. Susanne (“Brothers,” “After the Wedding”) Bier, a director capable of considerably more emotional acuity, seems hamstrung by a screenplay that substitutes mythology for character and CGI for atmosphere. New additions to the cast (King, Lee Pace and Maisie Williams) don’t leave much of an impression while Bullock and Kidman are left to manufacture chemistry on demand. The first movie at least had the advantage of being weirdly sincere about its sisterhood themes even if it was a schizophrenic mess. The follow-up seems less like a continuation than a corporate séance: summon two recognizable stars, exhume a quarter-century-old I.P. and hope that nostalgia will perform the magic the filmmakers didn't. Considering the dubious artistic quality and modest commercial legacy of the original, the most mysterious thing about this sequel is how it was ever conjured in the first place. (C MINUS.)
RUNNER--Hank Malone (Alan Ritchson), a former soldier turned delivery driver, is handed the task of transporting a life-saving liver to a sick little girl. Along the way, he’s obliged to escort Ben Bishop (Owen Wilson), the twitchy, mysterious fellow who brought him the precious cargo while a gang of mercenaries tries to make off with the organ. The liver, naturally, becomes the most valuable piece of luggage in the Western Hemisphere. Directed by former stuntman Scott Waugh who’s made a career out of turning kinetic mayhem into marketable concepts (“Act of Valor,” “Need for Speed,” “Hidden Strike”), “Runner” is professionally assembled but depressingly generic. The chases are loud, the bullets plentiful and the geography of the action semi-incomprehensible, but the movie never discovers the manic comic energy it promises. Instead it has the mechanical efficiency of a theme-park ride whose operator keeps checking his watch. Worse, the script treats its absurd premise with such solemnity
that you begin hoping someone will accidentally trip over the liver. As Hank’s reluctant partner, Wilson supplies some of his trademark deadpan eccentricity but seems stranded in a film that doesn't know what do with him. Ritchson remains an enormously appealing screen presence: handsome, physically imposing and blessed with the kind of easygoing affability that even survives bad dialogue and worse explosions. He’s been knocking around for years, and this only reinforces the suspicion that Ritchson is still waiting for that one big screen role capable of turning him into a genuine movie star. (D PLUS.)
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.)
THE UPRISING--From “Bloody Sunday” and “United 93” to "Captain Phillips,” Paul Greengrass has developed a distinctive knack for turning large-scale political or historical events into visceral experiences of confusion, panic and momentum. His latest film, a muscular account of England’s 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, isn’t quite in the same league as his finest work, but it’s sturdy, intelligent entertainment. Andrew Garfield stars as the cryptically named Ploughman, a humble farmer who finds himself becoming the face of a popular rebellion against King Richard II. (Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Jonny Lee Miller and Katherine Waterston round out the top-notch cast.) The setup is almost irresistibly Greengrass-ian: a plague-ravaged society, crushing taxation, an increasingly furious lower class and a government that’s convinced itself that its authority is sacrosanct. The revolt is staged less like a pageant than an eruption with crowds surging through muddy medieval streets and the camera plunging into the middle of the violence. Greengrass’ handheld style, sometimes criticized as an arty mannerism, makes considerable sense here. The movie feels less like an illustrated history lesson than a portrait of an entire society losing its balance. What’s particularly interesting is that it never romanticizes rebellion. The peasants may have legitimate grievances, but righteous anger has a nasty habit of becoming something considerably less righteous once restraints disappear. That tension gives “The Uprising” more political bite than its fairly conventional good-guys-versus-the-Crown mechanics might suggest. Garfield, however, is the film’s weak link. He can be an appealing actor and is perfectly capable of conveying Ploughman's decency, but there’s something oddly callow about his performance, a quality that becomes more conspicuous as the character is elevated into a legendary populist leader. Garfield never quite convinces us he could become a mythical figure. The marketing briefly tried to sell “The Uprising” as “The Rise of Robin Hood” despite the fact that Greengrass made a historical drama about the Peasants' Revolt rather than a conventional Robin Hood origin story. In the wake of June's poorly received “The Death of Robin Hood” starring Hugh Jackman, perhaps everyone involved decided that a little less brand name recognition was a smart move. The irony is that Greengrass is less interested in the merry bandit than in the historical conditions that made an outlaw like him necessary. The result is bloody, energetic and politically savvy, if somewhat overextended at 128 minutes. Greengrass, however, remains one of the few mainstream filmmakers who can make history feel dangerous rather than merely decorous. (B PLUS.)
---Milan Paurich
