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Terrestrial Verses
Reviews Terrestrial Verses “Terrestrial Verses,” one of the most brilliant and provocative…
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Reverse the Curse
Reviews Reverse the Curse When it premiered at Tribeca last year, David…
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Hit Man
Reviews Hit Man People like to speak about a golden era of…
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The Becomers
Reviews The Becomers Immigrant stories put a fresh frame around lives that native-born…
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Drama
Decoded
Reviews Decoded The Chinese WW2 spy thriller “Decoded” stands out for a number of reasons, mostly in spite of its conventional and hackneyed depiction of a troubled mathematician who deciphers encrypted messages for the mainland army. For starters, “Decoded” provides a dramatic change of pace for two marquee-worthy names: soft-spoken heart-throb Liu Haoran, who takes an unusual leading man role as the gifted, but painfully shy codebreaker Rong Jinzhen; and director Chen Sicheng, who’s best known for his goofy mega-blockbuster “Detective Chinatown” comedies. With “Decoded,” a plodding adaptation of Mai Jia’s popular source novel, Chen and Liu abandon cheap-seats humor—Liu…
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Drama
The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-eAT
Reviews The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-eAT Not gonna lie, this had me in the first half. In its first hour, Tina Mabry’s “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat” is a bubbly, melodramatic story about the multi-decade friendship shared by three Black women. Based on Edward Kelsey Moore’s same-titled novel, the comedy zigs—despite its name, it’s not actually about the musical group—and zags through these characters’ personal ups and downs. In some ways, its tonal shifts, light and airy, mirrors the tone seen in Black 1990s films like “Soul Food” and “The Best Man,” where the overriding love shared by the characters…
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Comedy
The Becomers
Reviews The Becomers Immigrant stories put a fresh frame around lives that native-born citizens don’t think too deeply about. Science fiction movies can do the same, but in a more exaggerated fashion, revealing the surreal eeriness of the “normal.” You see this dynamic at work in “The Becomers,” writer-director Zach Clark’s movie about extraterrestrials coming to earth and assuming the bodies of humans. It’s probably more engrossing to just throw the movie on and let it unfold than to go into it after reading a review or summary. Any impact the movie has comes from the alternately comical and unnerving way Clark and the cast…
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Thriller
The Killer (2024)
Reviews The Killer (2024) John Woo’s “The Killer” was a true gamechanger, at least for this critic. The one-two punch of Woo’s 1989 action masterpiece with his equally magnificent “Hard Boiled” changed the way I looked at the genre in my teens, and truly inspired hundreds of imitators. For anyone in my age range who can remember watching “The Killer” (likely on VHS) decades ago, the thought of remaking a flawless film feels cinematically heretical. And yet Hollywood has been circling such a project for decades with Richard Gere and Nicolas Cage once attached in the ‘90s. After years of…
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Thriller
Strange Darling
Reviews Strange Darling “Strange Darling,” J.T. Mollner’s self-consciously edgy gotcha of a serial-killer thriller, is so high on its own cleverness that it never stops to think about what it’s actually saying. A pithy way to summarize this movie’s whole vibe would be “If Quentin Tarantino tried to make a ‘#MeToo movie.’” But that’s not fair to Tarantino, who, for all his flaws, is at least somewhat self-aware. To give Mollner the benefit of the doubt, he may have been so impressed with himself when he came up with this movie’s twist that he didn’t realize that he had written…
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Horror
Blink Twice
Reviews Blink Twice Early in Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut, we are introduced to Slater King (Channing Tatum), a tech billionaire, via a television interview where he apologizes for an undisclosed offense. However, the unsaid transgression is no mystery. The setting—an influential, rich white guy in a confessional interview lamenting his behavior and promising to do better—is a familiar enough scenario that we can assume he weaponized his power in some egregious manner. Slater hosts a gala where catering waitresses and best friends, Frida (Naomi Ackie) and Jess (Alia Shawkat), are working. Halfway through, they ditch their white button downs for…
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Horror
Hell Hole
Reviews Hell Hole The Adams Family—a group of filmmakers led by father John Adams, mother Toby Poser, and daughter Lulu Adams—are some of the most fascinating horror filmmakers on the scene. Get thee to a streaming service and watch “The Deeper You Dig” as soon as possible—it’s one of the best horror films of the decade so far—and then chase that with their clever, twisted “Hellbender.” These are deeply personal genre films, movies that hum with atmosphere and dread. Their latest is kind of a departure for John and Toby—Lulu gets writing credit but doesn’t appear this time—in that it’s…
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Comedy
Between the Temples
Reviews Between the Temples Nathan Silver’s “Between the Temples” opens with a loud, keening blast from the shofar. If you haven’t heard it before, imagine the sound of someone slumped forward in the driver’s seat, face pressed against the steering wheel, and you’ll be in the ballpark. It’s a perfectly bracing note to open this year’s most anxious comedy, about a cantor in a crisis of faith who has recently lost his wife, his voice, and his will to live. Antic, endearing, and often achingly funny, the film stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben Gottlieb, who hasn’t felt at home in…
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Comedy
Incoming
Reviews Incoming Movies won’t stop pursuing the next great one crazy night adolescent comedy anytime soon. You know, that “Superbad” formula obliquely indebted to much darker single-night films about hapless grown-ups, like “After Hours.” And in a way, cinema aimed towards young eyeballs is all the richer for it. Without that perpetual effort, we would have never gotten the uproarious and refreshingly sex-positive “Blockers,” the genially fun “Booksmart,” the high-adrenaline “Bodies Bodies Bodies” or the best of them all, “Emergency,” a thrilling college comedy that also had something substantial to say on race, gender and class in America. “Incoming,” from…
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Horror
The Crow
Reviews The Crow Good movies always have integrity, but not-good movies can have integrity, too. “The Crow,” about a man who is murdered along with the love of his life and comes back from the dead to avenge her, is an vivid example of this principle. It has a lot of elements that don’t work (including a symbolism-laden recurring flashback to a childhood trauma that landed the hero, Eric Draven, in a mental institution) and you sort of just have to accept that the central love story is powerful because the film needs it to be, and because the actors are…
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Drama
Mountains
Reviews Mountains Every afternoon, as Xavier (Atibon Nazaire) pulls into his driveway after work, one of his neighbors, like clockwork, walks by his home talking on his cell phone. Sometimes they greet each other, others they simply perform this unspoken, synchronized ritual we can assume has happened for years. Each instance of this interactions is shot from the same angle to visually reaffirm the notion of a treasured routine—which becomes even more noticeable when absent. Partly a tribute to the routine occurrences that collectively make a place feel like one belongs, Monica Sorelle’s delicately galvanizing slice-of-life debut “Mountains,” set in…
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Drama
Close Your Eyes
Reviews Close Your Eyes The opening twenty minutes of “Close Your Eyes,” the third fiction feature from Spanish director Victor Erice, and his first film in thirty years (his documentary, “The Quince Tree Sun,” came out in 1993; the debut feature that made his reputation was 1973’s “The Spirit of the Beehive”), are as quietly spellbinding as anything you’ll see this year, or decade, or century. The time is 1947, shortly after the Second World War, and the Spanish Civil War as well; the setting is an estate outside of Paris called Triste Del Rey—the sadness of the king—and the…
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Drama
Rob Peace
Reviews Rob Peace “Rob Peace,” based on a true story about the tragically short but inspiring life of a young Black American, is a kind of movie that doesn’t get made too often anymore. Should real lives that made headlines carry spoiler alerts when somebody makes a film about them, or writes a book, both of which were the case with the title character of “Rob Peace”? I don’t know, but you should make your own determination about whether to read the rest of this review, knowing that the movie comes recommended to viewers but is not what a studio executive would call “an…
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Drama
Close to You
Reviews Close to You There are two main types of stories about smalltown people finding themselves: ones where they move away from the suffocating place where they grew up, and ones where they come back. “Close to You” is the second kind of movie. Written and directed by Dominic Savage, starring Elliott Page in his first lead performance as a trans man, and based on a story that Page co-wrote, it’s about a trans man going home to the small town where he grew up to visit his family after four years of finding himself in a big city. It’s raw…
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Thriller
The Union
Reviews The Union Director Julian Farino’s “The Union” follows Mike (Mark Wahlberg), a construction worker content with his job, dive bar outings with his friends, and sleeping with his former seventh-grade teacher (an awkward joke that remains a punchline over the course of the film’s entirety). When his adolescent flame, Roxanne (Halle Berry) returns to the east coast after decades of no contact, what he thinks is a meet cute down memory lane turns into an international intelligence operation. Hackers have accessed the personal information of all of the Western world’s government employees, from soldiers to cops and the FBI.…
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Drama
Skincare
Reviews Skincare When you have a name like Hope Goldman, two words lacquered in shiny aspirational vibes, you probably know it’s ought to be shared with the masses. Indeed, who wouldn’t want someone named Hope to bring exactly that into their lives; their one-way journey towards the inevitable? In frequent music video director Austin Peters’ nifty and gleamingly cinematic LA exploit “Skincare,” that name belongs to an agile Tinseltown aesthetician played by Elizabeth Banks and decorates the minimally designed containers of her upcoming skincare line—products that collectively offer a sense of hope for the future. Maybe they’ll give you back that…
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Horror
Consumed
Reviews Consumed There’s a great high-concept premise at the start of “Consumed,” an otherwise frustrating creature feature about a married couple who go camping and then fall apart. A rift has already formed between Beth (Courtney Halverson) and Jay (Mark Famiglietti) before they set out on a long hike, so tension only continues to grow once they’re attacked by a crazed outdoorsman (Devon Sawa) and what may or may not be a flesh-eating monster. There’s more than enough situational peril baked into Beth and Jay’s marital problems to sustain a brisk 97-minute runtime, though Sawa’s haunted and generically standoffish antagonist…
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Drama
Caligula: The Ultimate Cut
Reviews Caligula: The Ultimate Cut When “Caligula” arrived in theaters in 1979, it came in on a tidal wave of hype, most of it on the negative side. The production of Penthouse Magazine publisher Bob Guccione’s grand experiment in creating an adult film that included the elements innate to a typical Hollywood spectacle was filled with such strife that both screenwriter Gore Vidal and director Tinto Brass attempted to remove their names from the project. The big-name actors involved—including Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, John Gielgud, and rising star Helen Mirren—disavowed themselves from it when they discovered that, after firing Brass and taking over…
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Drama
My Penguin Friend
Reviews My Penguin Friend There’s something radical about the old-fashioned approach of “My Penguin Friend.” It’s an earnest, crowd-pleasing family film – nothing snarky or self-referential, no on-the-nose needle drops – just a sweet, beautifully made movie that earns the emotion it’ll surely draw from its viewers. Director David Schurmann tells the true story of the unlikely bond between a penguin and a fisherman, which lasted over several years and thousands of miles. The penguin would migrate every June from Patagonia at the tip of Argentina, along the Eastern edge of South America, to Ilha Grande off the coast of Brazil. It’s like “Same Time, Next Year,” with a flightless bird in place of Ellen Burstyn. In the script from…
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Documentary
Rule of Two Walls
Reviews Rule of Two Walls More than 900 days since Russia first launched its invasion and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine, aimed at annexing territory and erasing Ukrainian identity, the conflict rages on — but in terms of achieving his strategic objectives, President Vladimir Putin has already lost. In seeking to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government, dismantle its statehood, and assimilate any surviving civilians into Russia, the Kremlin made its war an existential conflict for Ukrainians, who’ve demonstrated extraordinary resilience, passion, and unity in defending their sovereign nation. In threatening to impose its autocratic regime, Russia has succeeded only…
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Comedy
The Good Half
Reviews The Good Half “Are you lost?,” an old lady at the mall asks sad-sack Renn Wheeland (Nick Jonas) during one of his omnipresent bouts of millennial ennui. It’s the kind of innocuous statement that, when revealed in stark close-up, is meant to convey a broader thematic underpinning in Robert Schwartzman’s weepy indie dramedy “The Good Half.” You see, Renn is lost, in the way so many sad white boys in movies like these are: His mom (Elisabeth Shue) has recently passed, and he’s too emotionally stunted and cynical to deal with it in any sort of healthy way. So, too,…
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Drama
Good Bad Things
Reviews Good Bad Things “Good Bad Things” is an intimate, small story about the gigantic issue that challenges and terrifies us all: the collision between the desperate need to be seen and loved and the fear that what people might see will repel rather than attract them. Written by lifelong friends Shane D. Stanger (who also directed) and Danny Kurtzman (who also stars as a character named Danny), it is partly inspired by Kurtzman’s experiences as a person with muscular dystrophy. The Danny of the movie runs a tiny advertising and marketing company with his best friend and roommate Jason (a…
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Action
Jackpot!
Reviews Jackpot! “Jackpot!” is a trashy and repetitive action comedy about greed and bloodlust set in a world full of people who are proud to be awful. Directed by Paul Feig (“Spy”), it’s set in near-future Los Angeles, which begins to seem like a statement in itself as the movie goes along. There’s a statewide lottery. For some reason, the state government has decreed that citizens are permitted to hunt and kill winners to try and take their prize money. A handful of rules govern the hunt. One is, only those who’ve purchased a ticket and lost the draw can take part. Another rule is:…
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Science Fiction
Alien: Romulus
Reviews Alien: Romulus When Ridley Scott released “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” the main criticism levied against them essentially boiled down to that they didn’t provide the same kind of sci-fi thrills as “Alien” and “Aliens,” two of the most beloved films of all time. Anyone who dislikes those films because they have too much philosophy and not enough acidic alien spit will be satisfied by Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” a movie with so many callbacks to the entire series (even both Fincher’s “Alien 3” and William Gibson’s unproduced script for that film have echoes here, as do the prequels) that…
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Drama
Mothers’ Instinct
Reviews Mothers’ Instinct “Mothers’ Instinct” gets by on its pulpy potential more than anything else. There’s something intrinsically appealing about watching two phenomenal actresses go head-to-head in an old-fashioned melodrama. Still, director Benoit Delhomme (the excellent cinematographer who shot “A Most Wanted Man,” “At Eternity’s Gate,” and many more) can’t quite figure out what movie he’s making. At its best, it feels like what used to be called a ‘women’s picture,’ a descendant of films like “Leave Her to Heaven” or “Gaslight.” But there’s a deep undercurrent of sadness in this film that hints at a more traditional modern grief…
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Drama
The Last Front
Reviews The Last Front “The Last Front” is a first-rate calling-card movie—a medium-budget project that feels much bigger because it puts all the money on the screen, as studio executives like to say, and that will make people want to trust first-time director Julien Hayet-Kerknawi with bigger budgets moving forward. But it seems more likely that it’ll be a Dwayne Johnson action thriller than a historical drama, which is troubling considering the subject matter of the film: the attempts to liberate a small Belgian farming community from German troops who’ve occupied it during World War I, and the unrelenting cruelty that invading soldiers inflict on…
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Documentary
Daughters
Reviews Daughters In 2013, Angela Patton gave a TEDXWomen Talk that went viral. She spoke about a program she created in Richmond, Virginia, to bring girls and their incarcerated fathers together in an environment that would make the fathers and daughters feel cherished and connected. These “Daddy Daughter Dances” have been so impactful the program has expanded to other prisons. “Daughters,” co-directed by Patton, is a documentary about the first of these dances in a Washington D.C. prison. In the film, she says that when she wrote the man in charge of proposing it, he responded with a quick yes:…
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Horror
Cuckoo
Reviews Cuckoo “Cuckoo” gets more confusing the more it explains itself. The further writer-director Tilman Singer goes in articulating the strange goings-on that drive this stylish, unsettling thriller, the less compelling it becomes. Trying to comprehend the hows and whys of this twisted mystery creates a distraction from which the film never recovers. Either we needed to know more, or we needed to know less. Ambiguity actually would have been preferable; Singer creates such a foreboding mood, it would have been enough to hold us in its spell. Instead, we go from “Whoa” to “Wait, what?” Still, deeply committed…
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Documentary
Not Not Jazz
Reviews Not Not Jazz There’s a scene in “Not Not Jazz,” a film about the fusion jazz trio Medeski Martin & Wood, where the camera prowls slowly around bassist Chris Wood as he slowly saws his upright bass on an upstate New York tennis court dotted with fallen leaves. There are a lot of scenes like that in “Not Not Jazz.” I suspect that if you’re as interested in the process of music as in the result, it’ll be one of the elements you’ll like most about the movie. Directed by Jason Miller—and shot by camera operator Htat Lin Htut with such musicality…
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Drama
Dance First
Reviews Dance First The final words of his 1953 novel “The Unnamable” — “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” — are among the most famous written by Irish poet, playwright, essayist, and novelist Samuel Beckett. They epitomize both the hopelessness and the senseless resilience of what we’ll call the human spirit in an utterly plain and compelling way. They express despair and overturn it. They are, in a sense, exemplary of his larger work. This movie’s title, “Dance First,” derives from his more famous dramatic work, the bleak absurdist comedy “Waiting for Godot,” a revolutionary work that changed theater forever.…
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