From this vantage point, it is impossible to know how 2025 will be remembered. But it certainly seems like the very interesting times everyone is living through are reflected in a crop of films that tackle themes of democracy, rebellion, autocracy and madness.

‘Eddington’

Hollywood has largely assumed that still-traumatized audiences would prefer to keep the annus horribilis of 2020 in their memories and off their screens. Director Ari Aster (“Midsommar”) therefore took a huge risk by zeroing in on one New Mexico town during the summer of 2020, during which Covid guidance-following Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) faces off with Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who believes that masks and social distancing violate personal liberty.

Not content just to litigate still-simmering pandemic debates, Aster also tosses the George Floyd protests into the maelstrom when Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) joins the Black Lives Matter movement and offers a searing indictment of social media-driven polarization. “Eddington” is the “first truly great movie to deal explicitly with the unique madness and malice that the global pandemic revealed,” said Jason Gorber at Paste. (HBO Max)

‘A House of Dynamite’

Most people are largely unaware that we live in a world in which any nuclear-armed country can trigger the total destruction of human civilization in less than an hour. In director Kathryn Bigelow’s unsettling “A House of Dynamite,” an unattributed ballistic missile launch from the Pacific heads toward Chicago, and the film looks at the crucial 20-minute period between detection and impact from several different perspectives.

They include that of Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) a duty officer in the White House Situation Room, and the president (Idris Elba), who is well-intentioned but unprepared for a crisis of such magnitude. Despite an ambiguous ending that may frustrate some viewers, “A House of Dynamite” is a “movie of our time, worth watching, mulling, debating and asking officials why they are doing so little about everything,” said Fred Kaplan at Slate. (Netflix)

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

Rose Byrne, one of the most gifted comedic actresses of our era, breaks out her dramatic chops as Linda, a therapist confronting an absent husband, a collapsed ceiling in her Montauk apartment and a very sick daughter (Delaney Quinn). The film taps into an “enigmatic, fraught lineage interested in interrogating feminine emotional collapse with a surrealist bent” that should nevertheless resonate with anyone “struggling to balance selfhood and sanity in the face of substantial responsibility,” said Melanie Robinson at Flood Magazine.

The film is part of a growing library of art about parents overwhelmed by the demands of caring for children, including the TV series “Fleishman Is in Trouble,” and the 2024 film “Nightbitch,” about a mother whose struggles literally turn her into a werewolf. (Prime)

‘I’m Still Here’

It may be no accident that several of 2025’s standout films tackle themes of autocracy, especially given the ongoing global retreat of democracy. In 1971, Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) seeks answers from Brazil’s military junta when the government disappears her journalist husband, Rubens (Selton Mello).

Eunice refuses to allow the regime make her husband vanish without a fight, engaging in a years-long battle to find out what happened. By “depicting how the dictatorship colored daily life,” director Walter Salles’ Oscar-winning film “conjures a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety” in a story that really belongs to Eunice and her “display of “unglamorous strength,” said John Powers at NPR. (Netflix)

‘It Was Just an Accident’

Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is traveling with his family when their car breaks down outside a factory after they strike and kill a dog. Inside the factory, one of the employees, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), believes the driver of the car is his torturer from a years-ago stint in one of the Iranian regime’s notorious prisons. Vahid follows him and kidnaps him.

But soon, doubt sets in Vahid’s mind about whether he has the right guy. Director Jafar Panahi is a leading figure in the Iranian New Wave cinema movement that is shaped by — and exists in opposition to — the country’s sclerotic autocracy. In a film that is “actually surprisingly funny,” Panahi explores questions “about prisons, the ones time and memory make for us, and the hard-to-find psychological keys that’ll release us,” said Robert Daniels at Roger Ebert. (in theaters now)

‘One Battle After Another’

Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s thriller is set in an alternate version of the United States where a left-wing revolutionary movement, French 75, was brutally put down in the early 2000s and an autocratic police state now rules. More than a decade later, aging guerrilla Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) lives in hiding with his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), when they are pursued by Col Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), Willa’s biological father, who needs to eliminate her to join a white nationalist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers Club.

From the cold open, when French 75 militants jailbreak an immigrant detention facility, it is clear that the themes “resonate agonizingly closely with the current mood.” It is an action movie that “brims with strategic ingenuity and daring, cinematic and political,” said Richard Brody at The New Yorker. (Prime)

‘Sentimental Value’

Danish-Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s first film since 2021’s superb “The Worst Person in the World” stars Stellan Skarsgard as Gustav Borg, an aging film director who is estranged from his daughters, Nora (Renate Reinsve) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas). Elle Fanning is Rachel Kemp, an American actress that Gustav has cast in an autobiographical comeback movie after failing to convince Nora to take the part.

But that plot is almost secondary to the moving exploration of the family’s past and present, including Gustav’s abandonment of the family during Agnes and Nora’s childhood. Strong performances from the cast highlight Trier’s “gorgeous, generous and gut-wrenching meditation about inherited familial suffering,” said Sophie Monks Kaufman at Sight and Sound. (in theaters now)

‘Sorry, Baby’

Released amid an ongoing national backlash to the “Me Too” movement, director Eva Victor’s intimate drama looks at the long aftermath of sexual violence through the eyes of one sardonic survivor. Victor herself stars as Agnes, a literature professor whose life and career was derailed after she was assaulted as a graduate student by her advisor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi).

Cutting back and forth between a present-day visit from her best friend, Lydie (Naomi Ackie), and the assault and its immediate aftermath, the film explores the lingering impact of trauma and the ways that it can return, suddenly and unbidden, even years later. Centered around the “sort of multifaceted, beautifully drawn-out protagonist you rarely see in movies,” Victor’s film is a “truly astounding work of art, from start to finish,” said David Fear at Rolling Stone. (HBO Max)

‘One Battle After Another’

“Sometimes you can tell a movie is going to work from the first frame,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedic thriller, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a former revolutionary trying to protect his biracial teenage daughter from white supremacist
goons, piles up its pleasures. It’s propulsive. It’s also packed with “spot-on needle drops” and “virtuosic” performances. Still, “what makes One Battle the best film of the year is how these all lock together to tell a truth we rarely dare to acknowledge: No generation, no matter how idealistic, will ever solve the world’s problems.”

‘It Was Just an Accident’

Be sure not to miss Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, said Adam Nayman in The Ringer, because “no other movie this year feels more ferocious from beginning to end.” Soon after a mechanic in Iran kidnaps
a man he believes was once his cruel imprisoner, the film “mutates—unsettlingly and hilariously—from a stripped-down revenge thriller into a piece of existential slapstick.” Is the captive even the right guy? Panahi
has been a political prisoner himself, and he’s inviting all of us to consider vengeance and mercy more deeply.

‘Sinners’

“Not merely a great movie but an eternal movie,” Ryan Coogler’s bluesy
period-piece horror musical proved that a smart, fun original drama can still fill theaters, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. When twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan open a juke joint in the Jim Crow–era South and a small clutch of vampires take notice, “we’re expecting a
big, bloody brouhaha, and we get it.” But Sinners also serves as “a hymnal about the struggle to create something beautiful during your time on earth,” and a haunting tribute to oppressed people who refuse to become monsters themselves.

‘Marty Supreme’

Leave it to Timothée Chalamet to deliver one of this century’s “most colossal movie performances” while making it look easy, said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Josh Safdie’s first feature since Uncut Gems has
the same “quicksilver” energy as its young star, who plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring 1950s world table tennis champ ready to steamroll anybody in his path. Marty’s mad dream repeatedly puts his life at risk—until
the movie turns its focus to “how sublime it can be for driven people to start living for something bigger than themselves.”

‘Sentimental Value’

Joachim Trier’s “truly remarkable” new work will speak to anyone who has struggled with parental baggage—“by which we mean everybody,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Stellan Skarsgard plays a filmmaker who, after failing to persuade his actress daughter to star in his auto-
biographical latest project, hires an American starlet instead and starts shooting in the family homestead. Skarsgard and Renate Reinsve make every father-daughter exchange sting, and Trier “uses their prickly
dynamic to explore how storytelling can both mask hurt and facilitate healing.”

‘The Secret Agent’

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s genre blender “takes the shape of a thriller, but is something more mournful and strange,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Wagner Moura is sad-eyed but magnetic as a father
on the run from the dictatorial powers-that-be in 1977 Brazil. As the former academic fraternizes with fellow dissidents and corrupt officials alike, Mendonça’s “beguiling masterpiece” becomes “an elegy for a
dark stretch of the past and for all the relationships it severed.”

‘Hamnet’

“For a movie about enduring the loss of a child, Hamnet is surprisingly warm,” said Shania Russell in Entertainment Weekly. As in Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same name, William Shakespeare loses a young
son and channels his grief into writing Hamlet. But Chloé Zhao’s movie isn’t tragedy porn. The Nomadland director “thrives in the details: the earthy magic of the countryside, the warm flush of first love.” Somehow, co-stars Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley display immense restraint “while
letting raw emotions run wild.”

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

“Sometimes the best films are the ones that are most difficult to describe,” said Lindsey Bahr in the Associated Press. In this dark comedy, Rose Byrne delivers an “utterly fearless” performance as a mother
pushed to the edge by multiplying challenges: a sick daughter, a stressful job, a disdainful shrink, and even a belligerent hamster. “An exposed nerve come to life,” I’d Kick You is also “one of the most audacious films of the year.”

‘Caught by the Tides’

Actress Zhao Tao “has a silent-film star’s affecting eloquence,” and her director husband, Jia Zhangke, uses that talent well in this beguiling picture, said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. During the decades Jia has been making movies, “a staggering human parade has passed before his camera,” and he has repurposed some of his footage into a “turbulent” romantic drama in which Zhao’s character, seen in three different life passages, becomes the viewer’s guide to a ceaselessly changing China.

‘Blue Moon’

“In essence, it’s the story of a man sitting in a bar,” said Dana Stevens in Slate. On the night when his former songwriting partner is enjoying a major Broadway debut, the great lyricist Lorenz Hart drinks alone, waiting for the after-party to start while “alternately charming and
boring whoever he encounters.” But Ethan Hawke’s “body-and-soul transformation into the witty, painfully insecure Hart” is captivating, and as the night continues, director Richard Linklater and his star “quietly reinvent the artistic biopic, custom-tailoring it to fit this one instantly
unforgettable character.”

In Kate Winslet’s directorial debut, “family is everything”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. On screen, the film is a “gentle comic-drama” in which the grown-up children of a terminally ill English matriarch come together at Christmas to be with her in her final days. Off screen, Winslet’s decision to grab the megaphone was prompted by the fact that the film was written by Joe Anders, her 21-year-old son with Sam Mendes, and was inspired by her own mother’s death.

‘Beloved British actors’

Not every screenwriter gets their first feature backed by Netflix, but “such is the film business”. And Winslet has certainly attracted an impressive cast. The “treasured grandma” of the title is played by Helen Mirren; Timothy Spall is her husband, who is in total denial about her imminent death; and their semi-estranged offspring, who must try to put aside their differences to make her last days easeful, are played by Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette and Johnny Flynn. Australia’s Collette apart, it starts to feel like “a game of beloved British actors bingo”, with only Bill Nighy’s absence depriving audiences of a full house.

‘A treacly soup of sentimentality’

There are some “nice lines and sharp moments” in this festive heartwarmer, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But alas, these are “submerged in a treacly soup of sentimentality”. The upshot is a film with the air of “a two-hour John Lewis Christmas TV ad”.

Anders needs to work on his characterisation, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times. He has saddled Collette, for instance, with a “one note version of the same irritating hippie” she played in “About a Boy”. Still, these are fine actors, who sometimes get the chance for a good rally; and this is, at least, “a proper Christmas film of the old school”. It may well end up playing “once a year until the heat death of the universe”.

It’s been 15 long years in the making but the reaction to the newly released trailer for Andy Serkis’ adaptation of “Animal Farm” suggests that time may not have been well spent. The actor and filmmaker’s animated version of George Orwell’s classic dystopian tale swaps the critique of totalitarian Soviet Russia for a takedown of 21st-century capitalism – with twerking pigs and fart jokes.

“My copy of ‘All Art is Propaganda’ burst into flames,” one Orwell fan posted on Reddit. This “Animal Farm” is a “movie about communism working, and being ruined by capitalism”, complained another on X.

‘Baffling’ and flatulent

“Oof magoof”, this trailer “feels so very badly tone deaf”, said Nerdist. It “looks like it’s trying” to turn Orwell’s dark political allegory into something akin to 2006 critter caper “Over the Hedge”. In fairness, “with Serkis directing and Nicholas Stoller writing the screenplay, it’s entirely possible” that the full movie “will reflect the tone of the novella” – but, if so, why is the trailer “so goddamn goofy”?

“The decision to inject lowbrow humour into such weighty source material is baffling,” said World of Reel. This “Animal Farm” is all celebrity voices, mile-a-minute CGI energy and family-friendly jokes. But I suppose flatulence is “one way to sell Orwell to a seven-year-old”.

The film has a “starry” cast, including Seth Rogen, Steve Buscemi, Kathleen Turner and Woody Harrelson, said Variety’s Peter Debruge, who saw a screening of the film at Annecy International Animation Film Festival. But “the message feels muddled” by “all the pratfalls” and the “noxious ‘Old MacDonald’ rap”.

Just “enough of Orwell’s raw material remains for ‘Animal Farm’ to be recognisable” but it’s “too disorderly to substitute for the book” – especially with the invention of new characters like the “ghastly capitalist” Freida Pilkington (Glenn Close) who “drives a Tesla-style Cybertruck” and bribes Napoleon, the pig leader of the animals, with credit cards.

‘Emphatic message’

The “specific allusions to the Russian Revolution” may be gone but Serkis terrifyingly accelerates the “opportunism and populism of Napoleon”, said IGN’s Rafael Motamayor, who also saw the Annecy screening. The pig’s “desperation to belong among ruthless human billionaires and their cyberpunk-esque vehicles strikes close to home in 2025”. Serkis is a “very competent director with a strong eye” and he’s captured “nuanced performances” from the animated characters.

Stoller’s screenplay is “funny and frighteningly perceptive”, said Pete Hammond on Deadline. It’s “wildly entertaining” and – “uncannily”, given the years it’s taken to get to the screen – may prove to “be a little too close for comfort to America’s drift toward authoritarianism” under the second Trump administration.

It’s not as if this is the first time filmmakers have played fast and loose with “Animal Farm”, said Debruge in Variety. In 1954, another animated adaptation was secretly co-funded by the CIA as part of its Cold War efforts to counter communism, “making alterations and trims” as it “saw fit”.

While it may never “satisfy diehard Orwell purists”, said Ben Daly on Screen Daily, this film “still takes a political stance and delivers an emphatic message” about “equality and the power of the collective – albeit one which permits us a little more hope” than Orwell’s novella.

“The Salt Path Scandal” is filled with “tasty nuggets”, said Carol Midgley in The Times. Sky’s documentary follows journalist Chloe Hadjimatheou as she delves into the alleged lies and deceit behind the bestselling memoir “The Salt Path”. Those who read her investigation in The Observer last summer will be familiar with the “fascinatingly tawdry tale”.

Described by publisher Penguin as “unflinchingly honest”, Raynor Winn’s book charts her 630-mile journey along the South West Coast Path with her terminally ill husband, Moth, after losing their home in Wales. But Hadjimatheou’s “original scoop” revealed a series of damaging allegations, including claims she had defrauded her former employer.

Sky’s new film dives back into the “year’s biggest literary controversy”, said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. It’s an “excellent documentary for students of journalism”, as we learn Hadjimatheou’s exposé began with a tip-off “about a book she had never read” – an email that led to her beginning the painstaking process of “finding witnesses, checking sources and consulting experts”.

The gripping film includes a “wealth of new details”, weaving together a “complex story of alleged theft and deception dating back decades”, said Julia Raeside in The i Paper. “Handsome drone shots” transport viewers to the coast and “conjure the romance of Winn’s tale” – a “wholesome yarn spun perfectly into a tapestry of pure hope and triumph over adversity”. But over the next two hours, Hadjimatheou meets former friends and colleagues of the couple, who accuse them of leaving a “trail of emotional destruction”.

Among the biggest revelations is a letter purportedly written by Winn in which she admits to stealing money from her relatives. Raynor and Moth, whose real names are Sally and Tim Walker, declined to take part in the documentary and dismissed the allegations. “I did not steal from family, as others can confirm. Nor have I confessed to doing so and I did not write a letter suggesting that I did,” Raynor said in a statement, adding that the film was part of a “false narrative”.

“How much does any of this matter?” said Midgley in The Times. “If people enjoyed the book, why not let them be, you may say.” But it’s “galling” to see somebody painting themselves as the victim “when they face claims that they have created quite a few victims of their own”.

When Hadjimatheou’s investigation first broke, “The Salt Path” flew back to the top of the bestseller list. And it’s likely the same will happen following this blistering documentary. “Controversy sells.”

‘Marty Supreme’

Directed by Josh Safdie (R)

★★★★

The Timothée Chalamet movie that’s arriving on Christmas Day is “a 150-minute-long heart attack of a film,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In “a career-best turn” that’s “a feverish go-for-broke tour de force,” Chalamet plays Marty Mauser, an aspiring table tennis champ in 1950s New York City who’s ready to lie, cheat, and steal for the chance to become the best in the world. This first film from director Josh Safdie
since 2019’s Uncut Gems turns out to be a character study that “doubles as a cracked American success story,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Marty is a scrawny kid with a pathetic mustache, but he’s also a fast-talking grifter with supreme self-confidence, and his game earns him a trip to London and the world championship tournament before a humbling stokes his hunger for a comeback.

Surrounding Chalamet is “a supporting cast you’d swear was assembled via Mad Libs,” because it features Fran Drescher, Penn Jillette, Tyler the Creator, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and—as a faded movie star Marty sweet-talks into an affair—Gwyneth Paltrow, “reminding you how good she was before Goop became her full-time gig.” To me, it’s the story beneath the story that makes Safdie’s “nerve-jangling, utterly exhilarating” movie one of the best of the year, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “It’s about a Jewish kid who knows just what kind of antisemitism and finely stratified racial dynamics he’s up against in postwar America, and who is using every means at his disposal to smack back.”

‘Is This Thing On?’

Directed by Bradley Cooper (R)

★★★

“There are far worse things that a gifted filmmaker could offer an audience these days than a feel-good divorce comedy,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But it’s still slightly disappointing that screen star Bradley Cooper has followed up A Star Is Born and Maestro with this minor work, due Dec. 19, about a father of two who starts doing stand-up in New York City to cope with the likely end of his marriage. With Will Arnett and Laura Dern as its co-stars, Is This Thing On? is “an observant, bittersweet, and highly watchable movie,” but it’s also so eager to hide the agonies of divorce that it “can feel like it’s cutting corners.”

The 124-minute film “doesn’t really get going until hour two,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Until then, it’s “lethargic and listless,” slowed by long takes “that drag on and on.” Fortunately, Arnett and Dern have real chemistry that kicks in when Dern’s Tess accidentally catches Arnett’s Alex performing his bit about their sidelined marriage and sees him with new eyes. Good as Arnett is, “it’s Dern who’s the revelation as a woman who truly doesn’t know what she wants and is figuring it out in real time,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. Cooper, playing a reprobate friend of Alex’s, gives himself the script’s biggest laughs. More importantly, he proves again to be a director with “a real flair for domestic drama.”

“Brave” is an overused word in film reviews, said Wendy Ide in The Observer – applied to anything from an actor’s weight gain for a role to “an unconventional editing decision”. But Iranian director Jafar Panahi really is brave. His films have been acclaimed abroad, but at home they have put him at odds with the authoritarian regime in Tehran: accused of being an anti-state “propagandist”, he has twice been jailed, and for a long time he was banned from making films.

Yet he continued to make movies in secret, and his latest – “It Was Just an Accident” – is a “direct attack on the regime”.

It tells the story of Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a car mechanic who meets by chance a man he believes to be the sadistic guard who had previously tortured him in jail. Vahid was blindfolded during these ordeals, but he has recognised the squeaking sound made by his suspect’s prosthetic leg.

The next day, he abducts this man on the street, and drives him into the desert. His plan is to exact retribution by burying his prisoner alive, but the man insists he is not the guard, and Vahid starts to have doubts.

From here, things get complicated and surprisingly funny, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Vahid puts his detainee back into his van, and goes off to find fellow torture victims, who he hopes will confirm his suspicions. But they’re also unsure about the man’s identity. So, with echoes of “Waiting for Godot”, they take a circuitous route back to the desert, bonding and sharing stories as they go, while also fretting about what to do next.

Real events have cast a shadow over this film, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent: while promoting it abroad, Panahi was sentenced to jail again, in absentia. The film, however, is a triumph – “striking”, “unexpected” and darkly humorous.

It’s the year’s last dying breath, which means holiday rush, travel stress, last-minute gift purchases, and award-worthy films. Two of the latter are appropriately inspired by the turmoil of real events: one, a historical fiction based on Shakespeare’s life, and the other, a fast-paced sports dramedy inspired by the career of an American table tennis player. And another offers a fantastical respite from reality with James Cameron’s return to the lush jungles of Pandora.

‘Hamnet’

No, this title isn’t a clever misspelling. The real William Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet, whose death at the age of 11 inspired the playwright’s masterpiece “Hamlet.” This film, directed by Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”), was adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 historical fiction novel of the same name and focuses on parental grief over the loss of a child and the transformation of tragedy into art.

It plays like a “more somber and realistic version of ‘Shakespeare in Love,’” said Justin Chang at NPR. “Call it ‘Shakespeare in Grief.’ The chief focus isn’t really Shakespeare at all, though he is sensitively played by Paul Mescal.” The “heart of the movie” is actually Agnes (also known as Anne Hathaway), Shakespeare’s wife, brought to life by the “extraordinary Jessie Buckley.” (in theaters now)

‘The Secret Agent’

Brazilian filmmaker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “The Secret Agent” is largely set in 1977 during his home country’s military dictatorship. Wagner Moura stars as Marcelo, a research scientist who plans to flee with his young son.

“Movies about resisting tyranny rarely inspire mirth,” said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. But this one “embraces a freewheeling sensibility and finds laughter amid the terror.” It steers mostly “clear of the corridors of political power and instead takes place in the sun and on the ground, where people live in the here and the now.” Life under dictatorship is both brutal and bloody, but there is “also love, song, the hot sun, cold beer and, of course, carnival.” (in theaters now)

‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’

James Cameron’s third entry in the “Avatar” film series isn’t out yet, but it was already nominated for a Golden Globe in the category of cinematic and box office achievement. Although its theatrical release is imminent, the sequel’s projected box office performance is impressive: The original “Avatar” (2009) remains the highest-grossing film of all time, and the 2022 sequel is the third highest-grossing.

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” promises a return to the jungle planet of Pandora and will introduce the “Ash” people, or fire-themed Na’vi clan, who are more aggressive than the oceanic Metkayina clan that took center stage in “Avatar: The Way of Water.” (in theaters Dec. 19)

‘Breakdown: 1975’

1975 was a great year for movies: “Jaws,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Taxi Driver,” “Barry Lyndon.” The list goes on. In a new documentary essay film, Academy Award-winning director Morgan Neville (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”) has gathered a list of talking head experts, including Martin Scorsese and Ellen Burstyn, to “track how the culture of the mid-’70s led to some of our best films,” said IndieWire. “As America faced social and political upheaval, filmmakers turned chaos into art,” the film’s logline adds. (Dec. 19 on Netflix)

‘Marty Supreme’

Director Josh Safdie is best known as one-half of a pair. He and younger brother Benny (aka the Safdie brothers) directed the much-lauded crime thrillers “Good Time” (2017) and “Uncut Gems” (2019). But last year, the two announced their decision to pursue solo careers.

“Marty Supreme,” Josh’s first film since the split, stars Timothée Chalamet as Marty Mauser, a character “loosely inspired by Marty ‘The Needle’ Reisman, a real-life U.S. table tennis champ from the 1950s” with an affinity for “betting, hustling and showmanship stunts,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. The resulting flick is, much like the brothers’ last two projects, a “farcical race against time,” a “marathon sprint of gonzo calamities and uproar,” and a “sociopath-screwball nightmare.” (in theaters Dec. 25)

‘The Secret Agent’

Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho (R)

★★★★

“This is one of the year’s best films, and one of the most distinctive,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. An award winner at Cannes, the sixth feature from Brazilian writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho is “a drama, a satire, an intriguingly laid-back espionage film, and a re-creation of a time and place,” yet that’s not all. Wagner Moura stars as a young widower on the run who returns to his home city to check on his young son in 1977, during Brazil’s brutal dictatorship. “Murder is everywhere,” a constant threat. But Mendonça is less focused on the violence than how people learn to adapt to it, and “if you’re willing to bend with the story, The Secret Agent will take you places movies rarely go.” Moura, whose
character goes by the alias Marcelo, “carries the film with a star turn of suave determination,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker.

But Mendonça has made a political thriller that’s “overflowing with sharply drawn characters,” including the elderly den mother of the safe house Marcelo moves into, a female neighbor who takes an interest in Marcelo, and a corrupt police chief. Mendonça’s wandering focus “brings history to life with bracing immediacy,” a feat all the more impressive because of his film’s “audacious twists of cinematic form,” including a hallucinatory sequence in which a severed human leg itself turns murderous. “The filmmaker’s refusal to present a traditional thriller payoff may frustrate some viewers,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Though it’s a surprising choice, “it’s in keeping with The Secret Agent’s depiction of the way in which dictatorships torment and destroy via denial.”

‘Zootopia 2’

Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard (PG)

★★★

“Sometimes more of the same isn’t a bad thing,” said Amelia Emberwing in The Wrap. The original Zootopia, after all, was a 2016 megahit that won
the Oscar for an animated feature while delivering a powerful message about the dangers of discrimination. And while the long-awaited sequel doesn’t break new ground, “there’s a lot to love in Zootopia 2.” The movie returns us to a colorful city populated by anthropomorphized animals. Its
animation is “bright and pop-y.” And it didn’t have to back off its core message to haul in $560 million in its first five days, the largest-ever launch for an animated film. Unfortunately, “the sweetness of the original is absent in the sequel,” said Soren Andersen in The Seattle Times.

Sure, it still features Judy the lovable bunny cop, and she’s paired again
with Nick, a fox who’s learning to be less cynical, but this movie sags when the pair pause the action to analyze the state of their partnership. The rest of the time, the film “seeks to bowl the audience over with
noise, velocity, and an insistent tone that winds up being kind of irritating.” But Zootopia 2 has “the kind of heart that has too long seemed to be missing from other Disney animated offerings,” said Kate Erbland in IndieWire. Not only is there real care put into developing Judy and Nick’s relationship, but this time the duo are also digging into a secret history that explains why there are no reptiles in their city, giving real weight
to the film’s messaging. “That’s not to imply that Zootopia 2 isn’t funny, zippy, and highly enjoyable.” To me, it most certainly is.

Rian Johnson’s detective series “Knives Out” is one of “the most likeable cinematic developments of recent years”, said Patrick Cremona in Radio Times. This “excellent” third instalment sees Daniel Craig return as the brilliant Southern super-sleuth Benoit Blanc, tasked this time with cracking an “impossible crime” that has left local police baffled.

“Weirder”, “darker” and altogether more “unsettling” than its predecessors, it’s arguably the best one yet.

The action unfolds around a small Catholic church in upstate New York, where the “intimidating”, charismatic Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) has developed a cultish following. His younger, more principled assistant priest, Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor) can’t hide his distaste; and when Wicks is found knifed to death just seconds after delivering a “fire-and-brimstone” sermon, Duplenticy emerges as the main suspect. Blanc must discover not just who committed the murder, but how they were able to commit it.

“Under the cosy crime trappings, the default mood is riotous dark comedy,” said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. The political satire is hard to miss, and at times the tone seems a little off: the gags and cartoonish details sit oddly with a serious subplot about faith, in which Craig cedes centre stage to O’Connor.

But the “delicacy and deftness” of O’Connor’s performance gives it “unexpected spiritual depth”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. And he’s supported by “a juicy crew of Cluedo archetypes”, from Andrew Scott’s sci-fi novelist to Glenn Close’s scene-stealing sacristan. Johnson is a great “whodunitician”, and his “watertight” storytelling pays homage to everything from Agatha Christie to “Scooby Doo”. “Wake Up Dead Man” is “typically arch and witty” – and it’s a lot of fun.

It has taken nine years for Disney to follow up its animated blockbuster “Zootropolis”, said Helen O’Hara in Empire. Set in a metropolis populated exclusively by anthropomorphic animals, that film saw earnest rabbit cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) team up with sly fox con artist Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) to expose city-wide skullduggery.

This sequel has the same characters and the same rich detail as the original, but its story is all over the place: it “smacks less of fox-like cunning and more of rabbit in the headlights”.

In “Zootropolis 2”, the city is still “a multi-species paradise”; but we learn that reptiles have been banished from its limits for a century. When Hopps and Wilde – now recruited as a policeman – discover that one has infiltrated the metropolis, they set out to investigate.

Although the film is uneven, “the chases, sleuthing and action are all delightful”, and the city is well worth a return trip: “there are inspired visual gags in every other frame”.

What starts as “a standard buddy cop movie” becomes increasingly complicated, said Brandon Yu in The New York Times. On the hunt for a runaway snake named Gary (Ke Huy Quan), who has pickpocketed an aristocratic lynx, the pair start to unearth “an elaborate conspiracy” to do with “discriminatory city planning” and “fear-mongering toward minorities”. Together, they tumble “through an ark-load of action set pieces”, each one beautifully and expansively realised.

“It’s ambitious until it’s too much”: children will struggle to follow the plot, let alone the complex social allegories. It’s “a tad unsubtle”, said Ed Potton in The Times, but the tone remains “breezy” throughout. “Exuberantly animated and deliciously voiced”, it’s a “perky and amusing” movie.

Sir Tom Stoppard, who has died aged 88, “wrote plays of dazzling language, intricate wit and dependably intelligent characterisation that touched on everything from quantum physics and landscape gardening to moral positivism and the lives of minor characters in ‘Hamlet’”, said The Daily Telegraph.

Over his long and distinguished career, “Stoppard, who had never been to university, was credited with bringing ideas back into British theatre”. The word “Stoppardian” became “shorthand for rapid-fire wit” and “shimmering wordplay”, and for dramatising complex ideas in a way that both flattered audiences and amused them.

‘A bounced Czech’

The critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the key to understanding Stoppard was never to forget that he was an émigré: because he had no native land or mother tongue, he was freed from the cultural constraints that restrict other writers.

Stoppard joked that he was “a bounced Czech”: he was born Tomáš Sträussler, in Zlín, a small town in Czechoslovakia, in 1937. His father, Eugen, was a doctor at the Bata shoe company. When Tom was one year old, the family fled the Nazis to Singapore. When it fell to the Japanese in 1942, Tom, his mother Martha and his older brother Petr escaped to India; but Eugen was detained.

“The past was rarely spoken of” during his childhood. “It was only much later Tom learnt that his family was Jewish, that most of his relatives had perished in the death camps, and that his father had died on a Japanese prison ship.”

In India in 1945, Martha married an English army officer, Major Kenneth Stoppard, who believed, Tom said, “like Cecil Rhodes, that to have been born an Englishman was to have drawn first prize in the lottery of life”. The family lived in Darjeeling, but after independence they moved to Britain. Tom took his stepfather’s name, and was sent to board at Pocklington Grammar School in Yorkshire, which he hated: he was “an average student, a first XI cricketer and the target of bullies”.

He left school at 17 to become a reporter on the Western Daily Press. (Later, he applied for a job as a political reporter on the London Evening Standard. The editor, Charles Wintour, sternly asked him: “So tell me boy, who is the current foreign secretary?” “Look,” Stoppard replied. “I said I was interested in politics, not obsessed with it.”) “His beat as a reporter took him to the Bristol Old Vic,” said Michael Coveney in The Guardian. In the late 1950s, he saw Peter O’Toole play Hamlet and Jimmy Porter in “Look Back in Anger”. “He was hooked.”

Stoppard had some early plays accepted by the BBC for radio, and wrote a novel, today largely forgotten. Then came “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, which features two courtiers from “Hamlet” mulling existence on the sidelines of the action. It was first staged on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1966. When it opened at the Old Vic, it made him an overnight celebrity. Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times called it the most important event in British theatre since Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party” nine years earlier. “The influence of Samuel Beckett was palpable”, as were elements of Kafka and European absurdism, “but this was the first play to use another as its decor.” When asked what it was about, Stoppard, who had a lifelong reluctance to discuss his work, answered: “It’s about to make me very rich.”

He followed it with two plays of “pyrotechnical brilliance”, “Jumpers” (1972) which satirised moral philosophy by comparing it to a gymnastic display, and “Travesties” (1974), which was inspired by the discovery that Vladimir Lenin, James Joyce and the Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara were all living in Zürich in 1917; they are “enmeshed in a performance of ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’... as unreliably recalled by a minor consular official engaged in a dispute with Joyce over a pair of trousers”.

By this point, Stoppard had “exhausted the vein of travesty” and his output “slowed considerably, with perhaps a really good new play emerging each decade”, said The Times. He had rarely aimed for realism, and he had been criticised for failing to portray real people and for a lack of social conscience. “I burn with no causes,” he admitted. “I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself,” he said. That began to change with “The Real Thing” (1982), “a tale of adultery among theatre folk” that was also an exploration of the place of politics in art. “Reality took a bow” in 1991, when Stoppard and his frequent leading lady, Felicity Kendal, left their respective spouses for each other.

Taking on his ‘own personal history’

Stoppard’s first wife was Jose Ingle, a nurse; the marriage lasted from 1965 to 1972. His second wife was Dr Miriam Stoppard, the agony aunt and anti-smoking campaigner whom he had married in 1972 (Stoppard as a lifelong smoker). There were two sons from each marriage, including Ed Stoppard, the actor. Stoppard remained in a relationship with Kendal until 1998, and she starred in many of his plays of the period, including “Arcadia” (1993), which was “classic Stoppard”: a story that ranged from “the age of Byron to that of chaos theory”.

Stoppard often claimed he wasn’t politically engaged enough to know where to place himself, but he was an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, and during the Cold War he was quietly active among dissident groups in the Eastern Bloc. These themes surfaced in “Rock ’n’ Roll” (2006), a “discourse on liberty” about a Czech rock group’s challenge to the communist regime.

Stoppard’s contributions to cinema – “official and unofficial” – were prolific, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. Among many others, he wrote the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s “Empire of the Sun” (1987), and co-wrote those for Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” (1985) and “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), for which he won an Oscar. He also had a very lucrative “shadow career” as a script doctor, working on everything from “Beethoven” (1992) to “Sleepy Hollow” (1999) to “The Bourne Ultimatum” (2007).

In his last play, “Leopoldstadt” (2020), which traces the fate of a Jewish family in middle Europe during the first half of the 20th century, Stoppard “took on his own personal history”, said Bruce Weber in The New York Times. “In a kind of apologia for a lifetime of obliviousness to the oppression and tragedy of many of his relatives”, he concludes with a scene of a Tom Stoppard-like character, an escapee as a child from fascism, visiting the city of his birth. Learning the fates of his family, he breaks down in tears – as did many audience members. Stoppard was knighted in 1997. He is survived by his third wife, Sabrina Guinness, whom he married in 2014, and with whom he lived in Dorset.

“Marty Supreme” is the “best film of the year, and exactly the jolt the coming Oscars season needed”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

Timothée Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, a “ping-pong prodigy” who “bounces frenetically around 1950s New York, as if being thwacked back and forth” by a pair of invisible bats. Working in his uncle’s shoe shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he has “impregnated” his married girlfriend (a “superb” Odessa A’zion), and dreams of becoming a world-class table tennis star.

Loosely based on the life of US table tennis champion Marty Reisman, Josh Safdie’s “whip-crack comedy” follows Mauser as he saves up and travels to London for a competition at Wembley, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. After talking his way into a free room at the Ritz, he develops an “erotic obsession” with fellow guest and retired film star Kay Stone, “for which role Gwyneth Paltrow has very stylishly come out of retirement”.

“‘Marty Supreme’ doesn’t behave like a sports movie.” You won’t find any lengthy training montage sequences here and Mauser is “always a reprehensible character whom no one really trusts”. But the film thrums with the “fanatical energy of a 149-minute ping-pong rally” and the “rhythm and spirit of table tennis” course through every scene. “The pure craziness is a marvel.”

Powered by a “shimmering, surging electro score by Daniel Lopatin” and “energetically shot on grainy, desaturated 35mm by expert cinematographer Darius Khondji”, this is “not your usual handsomely staid period drama”, said Jamie Graham in Empire. “There’s a giddy messiness and electrifying volatility to the crazed plotting”, and the film whizzes by in a thrilling blur of “overlapping dialogue, serrated cutting and sweaty close-ups”.

The movie is packed with “unexpected turns”, said the BBC’s Caryn James. Mauser is “not some clichéd, lovable scamp” but an “arrogant” and “scrawny young man with a pencil moustache”. Chalamet’s “on-screen charm” and his character’s “bravado” are “captivating”, even when Mauser’s behaviour “is at its worst”.

The film’s two-and-a-half hour running time is a “flaw”: while many of the sequences are entertaining, some feel like “indulgent detours”. And it deserved an ending that is “much more inventive”. Still, it’s a “bracing and original” film, and has such “scope, ambition and humour” that these issues are “easy to overlook”.

“What a film this is,” said Collin in The Telegraph. From start to finish, Safdie’s movie had me “vibrating like a tuning fork. It’s a joyous salute to life’s beautiful cacophony.”

‘Hamnet’

Directed by Chloé Zhao (PG-13)

★★★★

The “violent beauty” of Chloé Zhao’s new film “rips your soul out of your chest,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. An adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell’s 2020 novel, Hamnet proposes that Shakespeare’s Hamlet was a response to the death from bubonic plague of the playwright’s similarly named young son, and the grief the movie conjures is so emotionally overwhelming that it “feels like falling in love.” Paul Mescal proves “transcendent” as Shakespeare, but the film is anchored by Jessie Buckley's astonishing performance as the dramatist’s wife, Agnes (pronounced Ann-yis), who doesn’t write but comes across as “an even more powerful creative force than her husband.”

For Zhao, who made a superhero flick after Nomadland won 2021’s Best Picture Oscar, Hamnet is “not exactly a return to form,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. As we come to know the Shakespeares and their angelic children, the movie lurches from “subdued pastoral realism” to "forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism.” I’ll admit that when the climax arrived, my eyes were “blurred by tears.” Still, that doesn’t excuse the movie for presenting one of literature’s greatest works as primarily therapy for two heartbroken parents. But Hamlet has never been just one story, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. During the final scene, “we view Hamlet as an effort by one grieving person to reach out to another,” and “the whole thing opens up in magnificent new ways,” helping us see the play’s multiple layers. By then, Mescal has already powered two of the film’s key scenes with “some of the best acting I’ve ever seen.” Viewed whole, Hamnet is simply devastating—“maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years.”

‘Wake Up Dead Man’

Directed by Rian Johnson (PG-13)

★★★

Rian Johnson’s latest Knives Out entry “maintains the franchise’s undefeated record,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “Another intricate, rousing whodunit,” Wake Up Dead Man hands detective Benoit Blanc his toughest case yet: a homicide that brings the existence of God into play. At a Catholic church in upstate New York, a domineering monsignor played by Josh Brolin is killed moments after stepping off the altar, and the primary suspect is an assistant priest played by Josh O’Connor. But the suspect list is long and as star-packed as usual, this time including Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Thomas Haden Church, and a “scene-stealing” Glenn Close.

Daniel Craig, returning as Benoit, “reins in his urge to chew scenery, and instead he plays Blanc as a brilliant man whose latest case also humbles him,” said Alan Zilberman in Washington City Paper. The film also gets “a huge assist from O’Connor,” who plays the younger priest as a fundamentally decent man who winds up teaming with Benoit while the pair maintain a running debate about the role of faith in their lives. The Knives Out movies are “always a good time,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. This one’s special. “It’s the darkest, scariest, and, undoubtedly, finest acted”; it “might boast the most laughs”; and it “builds to a solid and satisfying ending.”

‘Eternity’

Directed by David Freyne (PG-13)

★★

“Are we finally arriving in the promised land, where stand-alone commercial works of wit and invention can exist again?” asked Richard Lawson in The Hollywood Reporter. This new romantic comedy feels like a throwback, because it rests on a clever original idea. Elizabeth Olsen and Miles Teller play a husband and wife of 65 years who have recently died separately and discovered that they will spend eternity in their youthful prime. The catch: Olsen’s Joan must choose whether her forever will be spent with Teller’s Larry or her more dashing first husband, who had died in the Korean War and is portrayed here by Callum Turner.

The script gives Teller and Olsen “a relatively complex acting challenge,” said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. They have to speak like young adults of the 1950s while conveying the emotional weariness of old age, and “they both manage incredibly well, with Teller “charming in ways we haven’t seen from him.” But while Eternity is “a film of big, audience-swaying emotional swings,” its last act “doesn’t quite reach the emotional highs we expect.” Though the movie and its afterlife world-building amuse for a while, the “cooked-up complications” that delay Joan and Larry’s happily ever after “begin to grow hollow and repetitive,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. In short, “Eternity should have been 90 minutes long, with more energy and more crackpot invention than it has.”

The delights of the action movie continue to thrill audiences around the world, often transcending linguistic barriers with their sparring dialogue and universal themes of heroism, vengeance and justice. And while many other genres feature thrilling action sequences, including science fiction, horror and fantasy, these are among our new quarter-century’s best action films set in the real world.

‘The Bourne Identity’ (2002)

Director Doug Liman’s genre-redefining action masterpiece stars Matt Damon as an amnesia-riddled CIA agent named Jason Bourne. When the movie begins, Bourne is gravely wounded, adrift in the Mediterranean with no memory of his identity or how he was injured when he is rescued by Italian fishermen.

He does, however, seem to possess advanced martial arts, language and espionage talents, and as he gallavants around Europe with his new friend Marie (Franka Potente) trying to figure out who he is, he is hunted by the CIA at the behest of Alexander Conklin (Chris Cooper). “The Bourne Identity” remains a “film that would so heavily influence the future of action film-making that it doesn’t feel the least bit dated today,” said Noah Gittell at The Guardian. (Prime)

‘Oldboy’ (2003)

When businessman Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is released after 15 years of horrific, solitary and mysterious confinement in a greasy hotel room that drove him mad, he sets about exacting revenge on his tormentors. During his ordeal, he discovers that his wife was murdered and that he has been framed for the job.

His first stop is a sushi restaurant, where he meets Mi-Do (Kang Hye-jeong) and begins to unravel the mystery of his kidnapping enacted by Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae). The plot machinations are too complex to relay in a capsule but suffice it to say that you won’t see a lot of the twists coming. Director Park Chan-wook’s film is not for the squeamish and “features virtuoso direction and editing, mesmerising performances and a relentlessly creative exploration of the revenge motif,” said Liese Spencer at Sight and Sound. (Prime)

‘District B13 (2004)’

Remembered in part as the movie that introduced broad audiences to the jaw-dropping art of parkour, director Pierre Morel’s fast-paced thriller is set in a near-future Paris in which the government has walled off a troubled district, Banlieue 13. Bibi Naceri is Taha Bemamud, a scenery-chewing drug lord who snatches a nuclear weapon from the French government and threatens to detonate it in Paris unless his ransom is met.

The police send Damien Tomaso (Cyril Raffaelli) undercover to foil the plot, where he teams up with Leito (David Belle), a nemesis of Taha’s. “District B13” succeeds as an action film because it “features tremendous tricks that thrill not only because they’re fast and smart and acutely choreographed but also because they put real bodies at stake,” said Cynthia Fuchs at PopMatters. (Fubo)

‘Hanna’ (2011)

Adolescent Hanna (Saoirse Ronan) lives clandestinely and alone with her father, Erik (Eric Bana), in the Finnish wilderness, where he schools her in the art of assassination as she trains for a confrontation with CIA honcho Marissa Wiegler (Cate Blanchett). With a plan to meet Erik in Berlin, she summons Wiegler and gets captured, later escaping from a CIA black site in Morocco.

She gloms on to a vacationing family, befriending Sophie (Jessica Barden), in a sequence that highlights how “unfamiliar she is with the quotidian aspects of teenage life,” said Adesola Thomas at Paste Magazine. It’s one of many moments that “refreshingly undercut the otherwise well-choreographed tension” of this propulsive thriller. (Prime)

‘Blue Ruin’ (2013)

Director Jeremy Saulnier’s atmospheric revenge story is more than a straightforward “dig two graves” story. Dwight (Macon Blair) is living on the margins of society when he discovers that the man who killed his parents, Wade Cleland, Jr. (Sandy Barnett), is set to be released from prison.

He kills Wade in a bar bathroom after his release, setting off a chain of events that claims one life after another. The movie finds poignance in the way that Dwight’s love for his parents inadvertently draws new innocents into violence, including his sister Sam (Amy Hargreaves) and her young children. A movie that “contains more incompetence in the pursuit of violence than you’d normally find outside a Coen Bros.” film, it is an “intriguingly nervous piece of pulp noir,” said Jonathan Romney at Film Comment. (Starz)

‘John Wick’ (2014)

Keanu Reeves plays the title character, an aging (and feared) hitman who extracted himself from organized crime and now lives mournfully in a house fit for an oligarch along with the puppy his late wife bought him as a gift before she passed. But when a gang of Russian gangsters led by unstable failson Iosef (Alfie Allen) breaks into Wick’s house, beats him savagely, and kills the extremely cute dog, he embarks on an odyssey of revenge that threatens the criminal underworld’s hierarchy, especially the empire of Iosef’s father, Viggo (Michael Nyqvist), who is also Wick’s former employer. A movie whose “ambitions are aesthetic, not moral,” it relentlessly ‘commits to its defiant unreality, giving us a fantastical underworld of ritual, mythic figures,” said Bilge Ebiri at Vulture. (Disney+)

‘Baby Driver’ (2017)

Some movies are as simple as several hours of pure fun, and director Edgar Wright’s “Baby Driver” falls into that category. Ansel Elgort is “Baby,” a perpetually earbuds-clad and extremely talented Atlanta getaway driver for crime boss Doc (Kevin Spacey) and his rotating crew of robbers.

The catch is that Baby is only participating in these schemes to pay off a debt to Doc, and he desperately wants out of the crime world to start a new life with his girlfriend, Debora (Lily James). He just needs to pull off one more heist, and when Doc gives him an erratic and unstable crew consisting of Buddy (Jon Hamm), his wife, Darling (Eiza González), and Bats (Jamie Foxx), things go from bad to worse. Baby’s “music is simpatico with seemingly every nook of the movie’s style,” leading to a movie that is a “gust of fresh air,” said K. Austin Collins at The Ringer. (Prime)

‘Rebel Ridge’ (2024)

Perhaps the only action film ever to revolve around civil asset forfeiture, director Jeremy Saulnier’s “Rebel Ridge” is an immensely satisfying cinematic parable. Aaron Pierre is Terry Richmond, who opens the film on a bike with a backpack full of $36,000 to pay his cousin’s bail.

When two cops (David Denman and Emory Cohen) knock him over with their car and seize the cash, it becomes clear that the town’s chief of police, Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson), is corrupt. Terry, determined to retrieve his money and save his cousin, goes to battle with Johnson’s gang with the help of courthouse clerk Summer (AnnaSophia Robb). The film’s action sequences are “beautifully structured, always keeping us aware of the geography, akin to how a great Western uses a saloon or rooftops above a dusty road to put us in the heart of the combat,” said Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert. (Netflix)

'Wicked: For Good'

Directed by John M. Chu (PG)

★★★

John M. Chu’s highly anticipated second installment of Wicked “delivers what we might call the ‘whew factor,’ as in: Thank goodness, he didn’t blow it,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. But the film also does more. After last year’s Part 1 "succeeded in wowing audiences," racking up $750 million worldwide, it would have been enough to follow up with a merely solid rendition of Act 2 of the stage musical based on Gregory Maguire's revisionist Oz-set novels. Instead, this movie addresses a common complaint about the show's back half, giving green-skinned Elphaba and her former roommate Glinda more scenes together and adding enough story content that Act 2 "now feels like a robust tale unto itself."

To me, this chapter of the tale still makes "little emotional sense,” said Jesse Hassenger in A.V. Club. As it opens, Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba has been unfairly vilified as the Wicked Witch of the West and Ariana Grande's Glinda is trying to defend her friend while serving as a spokeswoman for Oz's increasingly autocratic government. But that premise requires that viewers ditch their warm feelings for the original Wizard of Oz, and here, when the arrival of Dorothy's tornado-tossed house sets the 1939 film's plot in motion, "the fun really drains from the movie." Yes, this is an "altogether darker" work than Part 1, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com, but that's a strength. As Glinda gradually realizes that she has to move past her people-pleasing tendencies, For Good becomes a "surprisingly relatable portrait of how the world eventually forces us all into dark corners." In this part of the tale, Glinda takes center stage, and a "shocking amount of the picture plays out on Grande's face."

'Rental Family'

Directed by Hikari (PG-13)

★★

Rental Family is a nice movie of the kind that’s “lit brighter than a dentist’s office” and “aimed toward a heart-stirring conclusion about the power that we all have to affect each other’s lives,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. The movie can get “treacly,” but it’s also unsentimental enough at heart to recognize that true human connection and performance aren’t so easily separated. Oscar winner Brendan Fraser plays a struggling American actor living in Tokyo who begins working for a rental family service—one of the many in real-world Tokyo that hires out actors to temporarily fill roles in customers’ lives. And while the premise suggests “a banal family comedy,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap, Rental Family is actually “a love letter to humane performances, the type of roles Fraser always excels at.”

His character, ­Phillip, portrays a mourner at a funeral, a groom at a fake wedding, and a young girl’s long-absent father. The sum of those scenes is “a complex conversation about the craft of acting,” one that doesn’t ignore fakery’s hazards. And while these provocations are interesting, “it’s easy to struggle with how exactly we’re supposed to feel about all this.” Most surprisingly, Rental Family “displays an almost admirable amount of restraint in its tear-jerking,” said Esther Zuckerman in The Daily Beast. The movie is “so restrained,” in fact, that it barely sketches out Phillip’s character. “You leave itching for more of his inner life.”

The term “narco” is derived from the culture of violent crime that grew out of Latin American drug cartels. As the U.S. cocaine and crack epidemics exploded in the 1980s and the government declared a “war on drugs,” filmmakers began to train their eyes on those cartels, depicting the crime, tragedy and corruption that they left in their wake.

‘Scarface’ (1983)

Director Brian De Palma’s ”Scarface” stars Al Pacino as Tony Montana, a Cuban drug boss in 1980s Miami. Pacino doesn’t so much chew scenery as gorge himself on it, turning in a memorably silly performance. Tony arrives as a refugee from Cuba and begins working for Miami drug lord Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia), later poaching Frank’s wife, Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer).

As Tony forges an alliance with Bolivian cartel boss Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar) to outflank Frank, the FBI closes in and threatens Tony’s empire. “What is original about this movie is the attention it gives to how little Montana enjoys” his violent life as a drug lord, said Roger Ebert when the film first came out. The movie is “willing to take a flawed, evil man and allow him to be human.” (Netflix)

‘Traffic’ (2000)

Prolific director Stephen Soderbergh is one of the few high-profile filmmakers who is genuinely untethered to any specific genre. A quarter century ago, he helmed “Traffic,” a sweeping look at the disastrous war on drugs from multiple perspectives.

They include that of Robert Wakefield (Michael Douglas), a judge tapped to be the country’s “drug czar” and his substance-abusing teenage daughter Caroline (Erika Christensen), as well as Mexican policeman Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro), who is working to take down corrupt general Arturo Salazar (Tomas Milian). The “interlocking pieces” of the script “not only give a systemic overview of the ‘war on drugs’ but feed into a damning thesis on its failures,” said The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘Blow’ (2001)

Just before Hollywood’s Villain Industrial Complex relocated to the Middle East after 9/11, Mexican cartels got another long look as the country’s enemy du jour in Ted Demme’s goofy and often funny “Blow,” based on the real-life story of drug kingpin George Jung (Johnny Depp). The story begins in 1968 when George moves from Massachusetts to Manhattan Beach, California, where he enlists a group of flight attendants led by Barbara (Franka Potente) in a drug-smuggling operation along with his friends Tuna (Ethan Suplee) and Derek (Paul Reubens), eventually getting involved with Pablo Escobar (Cliff Curtis) and his Medellín Cartel. The “breezily nonjudgmental” movie is less about drugs and “really about money and the fabulous set and costume design opportunities it can buy,” said A.O. Scott at The New York Times. (Netflix)

‘No Country For Old Men’ (2007)

Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles across a drug deal gone wrong in the Texas desert, absconding with $2 million in cash from a group of murdered men. Moss and his wife, Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald), are then pursued by Mexican cartel enforcers, as well as the mysterious and relentless assassin Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem). Tommy Lee Jones is Ed Tom Bell, a sheriff working the case of the dead men. Based on Cormac McCarthy’s bestselling novel, directors Joel and Ethan Coen’s “literate meditation” about “America’s bloodlust for the easy fix” is a movie that “carries in its bones the virus of what we’ve become,” said Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. (Paramount+)

‘Sicario’ (2015)

Director Denis Villeneuve is best known today for his work on the critically acclaimed “Dune” films, but his filmmaking has spanned many genres, including 2015’s harrowing drug epic “Sicario.” Emily Blunt is Agent Kate Macer, who, after surviving a bloody raid on a Sonora Cartel safe house in the film’s jaw-dropper of an opening, joins a task force led by CIA agent Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) as they attempt to take down cartel leader Manuel Diaz (Bernardo Saracino). The film is “not for the weak of stomach, nor for those who want everything to be wrapped up nice in a little bow,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. Instead, it “creates a sense of unease and ceaseless danger that digs under the viewer’s skin.” (Peacock)

Director Gaby Dellal’s latest film is an enjoyable portrait of “two women sorting their dirty laundry during a crossroads in their relationship”, said Hilary White in the Irish Independent.

Fiona Shaw is “typically resplendent” as Kit, a wealthy, glamorous widow living on Manhattan’s Upper East Side whose sophisticated world is turned upside down by a worrying cancer diagnosis, and the sudden appearance at her door of her estranged daughter Charlotte (Katherine Waterston). She has left her abusive husband and wants to stay in her childhood home while she works out her next steps. There’s clearly “baggage” between the two, and their new proximity will bring that tension to a head.

Charlotte instantly regresses to her teenage self, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Her mother – who is “known for her witty disdain for those less stylish than herself” – responds by seeming to suggest that she should go home and work on her marriage.

As this watchable, if “middleweight”, dramedy progresses, the pair’s relationship becomes “spikier and more intense”, as it dawns on Charlotte that her mother’s “haughty detachment and imperious, droll mannerisms” are masking real pain and fear.

We know, but Charlotte does not, that her mother’s “every barb, slight and curdled insult is informed by the spectre of encroaching death”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. It’s thus a sobering watch, yet also an entertaining one.

The two leads have a “combative chemistry”. Waterston is “staggeringly good” and Shaw’s performance alone is enough to justify the price of entry. Together, they make for “one of the great, and certainly most credible, mother-daughter pairings on screen”.

It’s impossible to miss the similarities between George Clooney and his character in this terrific new film from Noah Baumbach, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

Jay Kelly is a “silvery film star in his early 60s who is recognised everywhere he goes”, and often accused of playing versions of himself. Jay Kelly looks like Clooney, he acts like Clooney, and the clips we see of his films are from Clooney’s own. Where do the parallels end?

It is hard to say, because even Kelly isn’t quite Jay Kelly. Having been in the business for 35 years, he is now realising that “‘Jay Kelly’ is an abstract concept: a face on a poster, a star on a screen, a name on a brand endorsement”. Being him is a 24/7 job, and requires him, and his large entourage, to make sacrifices to keep the show afloat.

Smartly scripted by Baumbach and Emily Mortimer, this identity-crisis story is “deeply mischievous” and “deeply wise”.

The writers cleverly move the focus away from Kelly’s angst about his $20 million paycheques, said Kevin Maher in The Times, to focus instead on his regrets about his flaws as a father. Following the death of the director who gave him his break, Kelly flies to Europe to accept an award and gatecrash his teenage daughter’s travels.

Baumbach “is usually a pin-sharp comic dramatist”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. This, however, is a “soft, Fellini-like satire”, packed with industry in-jokes.

Adam Sandler and Laura Dern are both very good, as Kelly’s manager and publicist respectively; but the film tends to the “twee” (watch out for “zany” scenes on the European train trip) and “nurses a surprising sourness” about Hollywood outsiders. The performances make the film watchable, but the big idea of the “meta resemblance” ultimately feels a bit wasted.

“Even the staunchest defenders of ‘Wicked’, the stage musical about the tragic origins of The Wizard of Oz’s Witch of the West, would have to concede that it peaks just before the interval,” said The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin.

So splitting the screen adaptation in two meant that the second instalment, the newly released “Wicked: For Good”, was always “going to be a bit stingy”. The result “isn’t quite the worst-case scenario some of us were dreading”, but it’s not far off.

‘Little sense of movement’

If your complaint about “Wicked” was that “it was so oddly lit that you could barely see what was going on”, fret not, said The Independent’s Clarisse Loughrey. In “Wicked: For Good”, you’ll mind less because “there’s so little to look at”. Despite “all that budget and talent at hand”, the director John M. Chu “fails to find a satisfactory fix” for the back half of Stephen Schwartz and Winnie Holzman’s musical.

The supposedly wicked witch, Elphaba, (played by Cynthia Erivo) “declared herself a rebel with a cause” during the first film’s climactic “Defying Gravity”. Part Two must deal with the “drier, more bureaucratic business” of getting us from there to “her predestined meeting with a bucket of water thrown by a homesick Kansas native”. Her “former frenemy-turned-bestie Glinda” (played by Ariana Grande) remains with the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) and her fiancé Prince Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey). “But these are all essentially foregone conclusions by the end of the first film.” The second has “little sense of movement, literally or emotionally”.

The “rush to include this ‘Wizard of Oz’ backstory” comes at the expense of “emotional authenticity”, said Francesca Steele in The i Paper. The two films were shot at the same time, and “supposedly turned into two” to maintain character development, but the 137-minute runtime is used less for characterisation than for “dazzling design”. Oscar-winning costume and production designers Paul Tazewell and Nathan Crowley have “clearly had an absolute ball again”, but the pace “feels slightly off”. Still, there’s a “lot more passion in this sequel, and a lot more darkness too”. When Erivo and Grande come together for the central duet “For Good”, they “remain a tour de force”.

‘Deeply lovely update’

“Wicked: For Good” takes us into the timeline of “The Wizard of Oz” with a “great deal of tragicomic brio”, said The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. The focus narrows to two “interlocking love triangles”: one of Glinda the Good, Elphaba the Wicked and the Wizard – and the other consisting of Glinda, Elphaba and Fiyero, whom they both love. Goldblum is “excellent as the Wizard, who pretty much becomes the Darth Vader of Oz”. Bailey “pivots to a much more serious, less campy, more passionate Fiyero”, and Grande is, as ever, “delicate and doll-like as Glinda, though with less opportunity for comedy” as in part one.

Slightly odder is the “tangential appearance of Dorothy”, and the “little origin-myth-type backstories” of her eventual companions the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow. But this “manageably proportioned second half” maintains the “rainbow-coloured dreaminess and the Broadway show-tune zinginess” of the first half.

It surpasses part one in “verve, ambition and emotional ache”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Purging “all the affable scene-setting” of its predecessor, it “arrives as a fiery love triangle between the Judy Garland classic, this deeply lovely update and the resonant ideas that bind them”. There are “audacious touches and additions”, such as the depiction of the yellow brick road as a “slavery-based project”. Schwartz’s new song for Elphaba, “No Place Like Home”, is “both a riposte to Garland’s ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ and an expression of the all-consuming paradox of the story”.

There are “sluggish moments”, including the new song for Glinda, and Michelle Yeoh is “wasted” as Madame Morrible, right-hand woman to the Wizard. But Erivo is “sublime”. She carries the “wounded essence of the entire project” in her “quiet despair”. It’s down to her that the film has a heart. “Best actress Oscar?”

The audacious 2025 robbery of The Louvre was so outlandish that it seemed like it was dreamt up by Hollywood screenwriters. And indeed, many of the most famous heist movies, like “Bonnie and Clyde,” are based on real events. But the enduring allure of the get-rich-quick scheme means that films based on elaborate heists will always find an audience. These movies let directors use the medium to offer social commentary on inequality and injustice or simply give viewers a few hours of escape from reality.

‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967)

Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) are the glamorous outlaws based on the true story of the bank-robbing, kidnapping duo that terrorized the Dust Bowl between 1932 and 1934. Bonnie is a waitress who falls in with small-time criminal Clyde, as they set off a multi-state crime spree that was front-page national news.

The movie was instrumental in loosening Hollywood’s restrictions on the depiction of sex and violence, and their hail-of-bullets death scene at the movie’s end was both graphic and iconic. A “work of truth and brilliance,” the film is a “milestone in the history of cinema” that is “pitilessly cruel, filled with sympathy, nauseating, funny, heartbreaking and astonishingly beautiful,” said Roger Ebert when the film first came out. (Prime)

‘Dog Day Afternoon’ (1975)

The “granddaddy of all heist-gone-wrong films,” director Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece “grants the audience permission to enjoy criminal shenanigans and to identify with the perpetrators without condoning them,” said Adam Smith at Empire. Al Pacino plays Sonny Wortzik, whose plan to rob the First Brooklyn Savings Bank with two of his friends to pay for his lover’s sex change surgery is botched and turns into a tense hostage situation with a police command center set up at a barber shop across the street. Loosely adapted from real events, Lumet’s tense film features a superb ensemble cast including bank employees and eventually Sonny’s lover, Leon (Chris Sarandon), who the cops put on the phone with Sonny to try to get him to relent. (HBO Max)

‘Point Break’ (1991)

A rookie federal agent, Johnny Utah (Keanu Reeves), is partnered with a wise elder, Pappas (Gary Busey), to take down a group of bank robbers called the Ex-Presidents, named after their rubber-mask disguises of Nixon, Carter, Reagan and Johnson. The gang, led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) are surfers, so Utah goes undercover to infiltrate the gang, falls in love with Bodhi’s ex-girlfriend Tyler (Lori Petty) and gets in so deep that Pappas eventually doesn’t know who Utah is working for.

Director Kathryn Bigelow (whose new nuclear thriller “A House of Dynamite” is currently streaming on Netflix) delivers a “celebration not only of the spectacular pleasures of surfing and skydiving and chasing bank robbers” but also of the “remarkably visceral extremes that violence itself can achieve when orchestrated for the cinema,” said Philip Strick at Sight and Sound. (Netflix)

‘Reservoir Dogs’ (1992)

Before he became one of the best-known directors in Hollywood with “Pulp Fiction,” Quentin Tarantino helmed this ultraviolent, quip-filled movie about a diamond heist gone terribly wrong. Harvey Keitel, Michael Madsen, Tim Roth and Steve Buscemi play the squabbling gang of pseudonymous robbers (dubbed Mr. White, Blonde, Orange and Pink, respectively). They all turn on each other after their plan goes violently awry.

Told through perspectival flashbacks and featuring what would become Tarantino’s signature mode of pop-culture obsessed hit men and gangsters, “Reservoir Dogs” is a great heist movie. The characters “argue like coffee-shop philosophes” in a “remarkably disciplined feat of storytelling” that “pierces like a bullet, leaving a clean hole,” said Tom Shone at The New Yorker. (PlutoTV)

‘Die Hard With a Vengeance’ (1995)

A “very underrated entry in the franchise and a film that continues to be great fun whenever it’s revisited,” the third “Die Hard” film is an elaborate bait-and-switch whose “pace is set so frenetically that we don’t have time to worry about pesky action movie buzzkills like logic and plausibility,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. Detective John McClane (Bruce Willis) has hit rock bottom, with his life and marriage in tatters, when he is asked to respond to the demands of a seemingly mad bomber (Jeremy Irons). As McClane dashes from place to place responding to bomb threats around New York City, the real target comes into view: a daring heist of the Federal Reserve’s gold stash. (Disney+)

‘Set It Off’ (1996)

When bank teller Frankie (Vivica A. Fox) is accused of collaborating with a bank robber, she loses her job and teams up with her friends Stony (Jada Pinkett Smith), Cleo (Queen Latifah) and T.T. (Kimberly Elise) to pull off a series of Los Angeles-area bank robberies. Of course, their early success attracts the attention of law enforcement, and eventually leads to tragedy for several members of the group.

Featuring a classic, ’90s hip-hop soundtrack and tackling themes like poverty, racism and police violence, “Set It Off” is the rare heist movie with a serious message. A story about the “love felt between four Black women” who are “failed by everyone in their lives to an infuriating degree,” the film is a “hood classic,” said Najee AR Fareed at Tribe. (Prime)

‘Ocean’s Eleven’ (2001)

Pure escapism, Steven Soderbergh’s remake of the Rat Pack classic was a vast improvement over the source material. George Clooney is Danny Ocean, a newly paroled mobster who puts together a team of criminals to lift $160 million from the vaults of three Vegas casinos. The star-studded heist squad includes Frank Catton (Bernie Mac), Linus (Matt Damon) and Ocean’s associate Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt). In addition to the financial motivation, Bellagio owner Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) is involved with Ocean’s ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts). As “each member’s role in the operation becomes a delicate composite of a seemingly foolproof master plan,” Soderbergh “wisely tones down the action for its megastar crew,” said Ed Gonzalez at Slant Magazine. (Prime)

‘Hell or High Water’ (2016)

The premise of director David Mackenzie’s “Hell or High Water” is an economic recession parable. Two brothers, Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster), start robbing banks to save the family farm from foreclosure. Jeff Bridges is Marcus, the grizzled cop tasked with bringing them to justice and Gil Birmingham is Alberto, his deputy.

Both pairs are given inspired dialogue by “Sicario” writer Taylor Sheridan, which brings the plot’s mechanics into focus without clunky exposition. The action unfolds across the barren, economically depressed expanse of West Texas and Oklahoma, as the brothers target branches of Texas Midlands and ask their victims for small-denomination bills that can’t be traced. The film “expertly mixes jolts of violence with social awareness and a sense of life lived on the edge,” said Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. (Paramount+)

Jay Kelly

Directed by Noah Baumbach (R)

★★★★

George Clooney’s newest film is “the definition of a movie that goes down easy,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Clooney plays the title character, an aging, George Clooney– like movie star, and director Noah Baumbach brings “a great deal of care and affection” to the task of showing how screen fame shapes a life. “But as much as I enjoyed a lot of Jay Kelly, on some level I didn’t buy it,” because the story demands that we believe Jay has a hidden cold side that Clooney is simply too warm and engaging to sell. The whole endeavor feels like “celebrity navel-gazing on an Olympian scale,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. Jay, realizing that he’s been so focused on his career that he’s neglected even his two daughters, chooses to accept a career tribute in Tuscany so he can see France and Italy with his college-bound youngest.

Because Clooney is all surface and Laura Dern, as Jay’s publicist, just rehashes the divorce attorney she played in Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Adam Sandler, as Jay’s calm, generous manager, gives the movie the only character worth caring about. But “what distinguishes Jay Kelly is also what drives Jay Kelly: the Teflon charisma of Clooney,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Like its star, the film, which will hit Netflix soon after its theatrical release, glides along until it finally reveals that charisma can rob other people of their lives. “Clooney plays it all so cool that he and the movie both sneak up on us.” And then you realize: He’s just given “the performance of his life.”

Sentimental Value

Directed by Joachim Trier (R)

★★★★

Joachim Trier's “breathtaking” new film “cements his status as one of the working masters,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. The Scandinavian director, best known for 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, has constructed a drama of his own about a father in the film business who’s struggling to reconnect with his previously neglected daughter. But Trier’s version is akin to “great fiction unfolding in feature film form.” Though we know there will be emotional breakthroughs for the central characters, “they don’t come melodramatically; they come gradually, patiently, and believably.”

Stellan Skarsgard plays a director who is turned down when he asks his actress daughter to star in his autobiographical new film, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, and because Skarsgard appears in so many roles, “I almost forgot how good he can be.” He and his daughter Nora, played by Worst Person standout Renate Reinsve, are both “greedily self-involved and irresistibly charismatic people,” and Skarsgard and Reinsve prove to be “beautifully in sync.” Both will be Oscar contenders, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, even though Elle Fanning is better still as the American star who takes the role Nora rejected. Trier, meanwhile, comes across as divided. He flirts with making Sentimental Value a feisty industry satire yet “seems very aware that the audience for his kind of niche hit wants to sniffle at delicate emotions.” His title, in fact, “seems to be as much about that as anything.”

Adapted from a novella by Denis Johnson, “Train Dreams” is an “elegiac portrait of a man (and his country) undergoing a radical transformation”, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times. Set in America’s Pacific Northwest, it follows a jobbing worker called Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) from his birth in the 1890s to his death in the 1950s. His is a poignantly ordinary story “of love, loss and endurance” that takes place during the rapid industrialisation of an untouched wilderness. The film mourns that vanished US, and “salutes those nation builders who were never visible to begin with”.

Grainier “epitomises strong but silent American masculinity”, said Laura Venning in Little White Lies. Early on, while working on a railway bridge, he witnesses the “horrific” murder of a Chinese labourer at the hands of his colleagues. Later, he falls for the “vivacious” Gladys (Felicity Jones), with whom he has a daughter. They build a house and live a version of the American dream, until tragedy befalls them. That is more or less all that happens, but to recount the plot “is to undermine one of the film’s many strengths: its non-linear unfolding of images and fragments of the story as if we, the audience, are drawn into Grainier’s memory”.

Narrated by Will Patton, the film has a “fable-like quality” reminiscent of Terrence Malick at his best, said Kevin Maher in The Times. It looks “gorgeous” too, offering up “a veritable eyegasm” of stunning landscapes and some extraordinary shots as Grainier and his fellow loggers “chop, blast and slash” the unforgiving wilderness around them. The film “positively pulses with awards season gravitas”: it’s a “stunner”.

November movies oscillate in size. There are big budgets and complex musical numbers alongside small, quiet and contemplative tales. One aspect this month’s new releases have in common: They all feature someone battling something, whether it be the loss of their way of life, their own hormone-addled brain or a fantastical despot.

‘Die My Love’

Jennifer Lawrence stepped away from the limelight for several years, with the brief exception of the 2023 sex comedy “No Hard Feelings,” to focus on her marriage and life as a new mother. It is apt, then, that her return is marked by “Die My Love,” a film about a young woman named Grace who begins to experience postpartum psychosis.

Directed by Lynne Ramsay (“We Need To Talk About Kevin”), the story is also about Grace’s relationship with her husband, Jackson; in that role, Robert Pattinson is “an ideal foil for Lawrence,” said Alissa Wilkinson at The New York Times, “wiry and restrained” where Lawrence is “raw and naturalistic.” Lawrence has always been a force on the big screen, but this performance is being hailed as a tour de force. “Submerged in Grace’s overheated, claustrophobic, tedious, maddening reality, we are drowning, just like her,” said Wilkinson. “It is full-body immersion cinema.” (in theaters now)

‘In Waves and War’

It has often been said that the hardest part of a veteran’s life is the intended return to normalcy — the part when the fighting is over and they find themselves “safely” back at home. But there is also truth to Thomas Wolfe’s famous supposition that “you can’t go home again,” and many soldiers indeed struggle to move forward with their lives post-service.

New Netflix documentary “In Waves and War” follows a group of such veterans, suffering from PTSD and depression, who have sought the help of psychedelics. More specifically, these ex-soldiers travel to a Mexican clinic to take Ibogaine. Derived from a shrub native to Central Africa, the drug is illegal in the U.S., but “to hear the subjects here describe it,” Ibogaine “can work miracles on the battle-scarred, suicidal minds of its users,” said Leslie Felperin at The Guardian. (on Netflix now)

‘Train Dreams’

“Train Dreams” could be the “Best Picture sleeper of the Oscar season,” said Clayton Davis at Variety. Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize finalist novel of the same name is set in the Pacific Northwest and stars Joel Edgerton as a railroad worker and logger, an eccentric holdout in a dying profession.

Amid the beauty of this dense, lush American landscape — Bentley’s eye for aesthetics has been compared to master filmmaker Terrence Malick — the project “paints a portrait of grief and transformation with meditative precision and visual poetry,” said Davis. “What begins as a modest character study becomes a sweeping reflection on death, memory and the ghosts we carry.” (in select theaters now, Nov. 21 on Netflix)

‘The Running Man’

Director Edgar Wright, best known for helming oddball horror comedies like “Shaun of the Dead” and “Hot Fuzz,” is back with an action thriller based on a dystopian Stephen King novel. A remake of a 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film of the same name, this one stars Hollywood’s current golden boy, Glen Powell, as a competitor in a reality series wherein contestants must survive 30 days of being hunted by assassins. “The Running Man” is a “lively, satirical stab at modern-day reality TV, scary big-brother technology, cultural dissension and rampant income inequality,” said Brian Truitt at USA Today. The flick is “slathered in blood-soaked ultraviolence and bonkers charm.” (in theaters Nov. 14)

‘Wicked: For Good’

“Wicked,” the first half of a two-part adaptation of the powerhouse Broadway musical, was released this time last year to great acclaim. The follow-up, “Wicked: For Good,” was also directed by Jon M. Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”).

When the first installment premiered, the country had newly reelected Donald Trump, and “‘Wicked’ felt instantly charged” as a result, said Danny Leigh at the Financial Times, as its “revisionist take on ‘The Wizard of Oz’ involves a circus rogue turned truth-twisting despot and it has a large LGBT+ fan base.” The second movie’s release should be no different in its artistic imitation of modern-day American life since it “picks up the story of scapegoats persecuted and knowledge undermined,” said Leigh. (in theaters Nov. 21)

The arrival of director Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated nuclear war thriller “A House of Dynamite” (in theaters and on Netflix now) heralds the return of a long-forgotten genre: the cautionary tale about atomic Armageddon. Filmmakers over the years have explored nuclear war both from the perspective of the decision-makers and the survivors who may wish they had been blast casualties.

‘Fail Safe’ (1964)

When a lone American bomber squadron receives mistaken orders to nuke Moscow, it sets into motion a chilling series of events in director Sidney Lumet’s haunting thriller. As officials try to get Colonel Jack Grady (Edward Binns) to call off the attack, the president (Henry Fonda) weighs conflicting advice from a militant political scientist, Dr. Groeteschele (Walter Matthau), and the more level-headed General Black (Dan O’Herlihy). Eventually the president arrives at an agonizing crossroads. The film depicts a “system built on the very denial of humanity, one in which individual efforts are completely ineffective and bravery is rendered useless,” said Bilge Ebiri at The Criterion Collection. (Tubi)

‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ (1964)

Stanley Kubrick’s ruthless satire of Cold War tensions stands the test of time as an indictment of the madness at the center of nuclear war. Peter Sellers plays three roles – President Merkin Muffley, Captain Lionel Mandrake and the hilarious titular character, presidential advisor and ex-Nazi Dr. Strangelove. A rogue commander, Colonel Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), takes control of an airbase and issues orders to a nuclear bomber wing to attack the Soviet Union.

The iconic image of Major ‘King’ Kong (Slim Pickens) riding a nuclear bomb into oblivion is just one of countless moments that make this one of history’s greatest and most effective dark comedies. A “goonish-ghoulish portrait of diplomatic insanity that’s zippy, ruthless and cartoonish,” Kubrick’s masterpiece argues that “humanity has already passive-aggressively done itself in,” said Eric Henderson at Slant Magazine. (Prime)

‘Testament’ (1983)

Director Lynne Littman’s wrenching drama focuses on one San Francisco-area family after a nuclear blast obliterates life as they know it. Carol Wetherly (Jane Alexander) is tasked with caring for her three children after her husband, Tom (William Devane), is presumed dead in the blast.

There are no action set-pieces in “Testament,” and no breathless scenes at the White House, just a horrifying look at the kind of ordeal that would face ordinary people if their leaders destroyed civilization. It is “steeped in mourning, in the reality of incomprehensible loss, but it is also unforgivingly rigorous in its depiction of life having to move on,” said K. Austin Collins at Vanity Fair. (Prime)

‘Threads’ (1984)

Virtually unknown in the United States, “Threads” is set in the British city of Sheffield, before, during and long after a cataclysmic nuclear war between NATO and the Soviet Union. Jimmy Kemp (Reece Dinsdale) and Ruth Beckett (Karen Meagher) are a young couple expecting a child when tensions between the superpowers erupt over Iran.

When the unthinkable happens, they must fight for survival in ways that bring to life former Soviet Premier Nikita Kruschev’s remark that in a nuclear war, the “survivors will envy the dead.” A film that is “shocking, harrowing and hard to watch,” its realistic style and science-based narration “allows the film to blur the line between drama and documentary” with a “deadpan detachment that is sickeningly unsettling,” said Helen Wood at Den of Geek. (Tubi)

‘By Dawn’s Early Light’ (1990)

Late Cold War Russian hardliners fire a nuclear missile at Donetsk in then-Soviet Ukraine, making it look like a NATO strike in this tense drama. When the Soviets fall for it and launch a significant nuclear counter-strike, the American president (Martin Landau) must choose how to respond to the devastating volley. Powers Boothe and Rebecca De Mornay play a couple flying a B-52 bomber into the Soviet Union as the carnage increases. The director, Jack Sholder, wrestles seriously with concepts like “limited nuclear war” that were hotly debated at the time. A “splendid cast” highlights this “‘Dr. Strangelove’ nightmare revisited, except this isn’t satire,” said Ray Loynd at the Los Angeles Times. (Prime)

Yorgos Lanthimos’ films (“The Favourite”, “Poor Things”) tend to feature characters who have “untethered themselves from reality and accepted behavioural norms”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Yet even by his standards, “Bugonia” is an “unhinged and savage piece of storytelling”.

‘Deliriously preposterous’

A remake of a cult South Korean film from 2003, it stars Emma Stone, the director’s regular collaborator, as Michelle, the CEO of a pharmaceuticals company. On her way home one day, she is kidnapped by Teddy and Don (Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis) – a couple of “disenfranchised conspiracy nuts” who are convinced that she’s an alien intent on destroying humanity. They chain her up in their basement, shave her head and demand to meet her leaders, leading to “a battle of wits” that escalates into “a bloody standoff”. The storyline is both “deliriously preposterous and uncomfortably of the moment”, and the film is “deranged, extreme and explosively enjoyable”.

Not Lanthimos’ best film

Michelle may not be an alien, but she is a cunning “corporate bot” for whom every exchange is “transactional”, said Travis Jeppesen in Sight and Sound. Teddy, the underdog fighting against our anti-human overlords, is scarcely more sympathetic. All the characters are meant to represent “certain toxic typologies of the zeitgeist”, but they are saved from being “mere types” by the brilliance of the performances. Plemons makes Teddy seem sincere, even if he is wrong; as for Stone, she makes her character so layered, you can hardly take your eyes off her. It’s not Lanthimos’ best film, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. And it’s quite bleak. But typically, he never lets you get comfortable. You have to keep watching just to find out what the hell it’s all about.

Asif Kapadia made his name with a trilogy of “vivid” documentaries about major cultural figures, said Ed Potton in The Times: the racing driver Ayrton Senna, the footballer Diego Maradona and the singer Amy Winehouse. Now he has turned his lens on Kenny Dalglish. Kapadia is a Liverpool fan, so it makes sense that he should want to focus on probably the club’s “greatest player”. And in this “warm and gutsy portrait”, he uses archive footage, with audio overlaid, to trace “King Kenny’s” career, from his working-class childhood in Glasgow to superstardom.

It’s a thrilling watch, said James Pearce on The Athletic. Dalglish, now 74, acts as narrator, offering a characteristically self-deprecating account of his life; and the footage of the matches with which he made his name, first at Celtic and, from 1977, at Liverpool, is “mesmerising”.

But the focus of the film is on Dalglish as the “everyman” whose fate it was to take a city’s “woes on his shoulders”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. He became Liverpool’s manager just after the 1985 Heysel stadium disaster, when riots at the “dilapidated” Belgian ground before a Liverpool vs. Juventus match led to 39 deaths; then came the tragedy of Hillsborough, when 97 Liverpool supporters were killed in a crush. Dalglish was stoical in its aftermath, attending funeral after funeral and repeatedly pushing back against the false narrative that Liverpool fans had been to blame for the disaster. He emerges as a straightforward figure, without the “agonised complexity” that gave Kapadia’s other films their “danger and fascination”; but perhaps it was his “ingenuous simplicity” that enabled him to survive.

Bugonia

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (R)

★★★

“If Emma Stone didn’t exist, some of her movies couldn’t exist—especially not the ones she’s created with edgy director Yorgos Lanthimos,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. The two-time Oscar winner “can play shrewd, silly, gorgeous, repellent, frail, and frightening simultaneously,” and she hits all those notes in her fourth feature with the Poor Things auteur. Stone portrays Michelle Fuller, a Big Pharma CEO who is kidnapped by two men convinced she’s an alien who’s working to destroy Earth. And while a rundown of the abuse Michelle suffers “would sound like a Saw film,” Stone renders the character so slickly insincere that she “makes it OK for us to laugh at Michelle’s torment.” Jesse Plemons, who plays Teddy, the lead kidnapper, “matches her intensity and manages to outdo her craziness,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Teddy orders Michelle’s head shaved because he believes her hair is her means of communicating with fellow ETs. But Lanthimos leaves open the possibility that Teddy is onto something, and “the director’s askew aesthetics are a natural fit for his absurd material,” the use of low-angle imagery adding to the film’s “wobbly sense of reality.” Still, though Lanthimos’ dramatization of the vast divide between the powerful and the powerless feels dangerous, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, it’s “not as dangerous as it could have been.” At least Bugonia gets at a core trouble with our times: There’s no truth we can all agree on.

The Mastermind

Directed by Kelly Reichardt (R)

★★★

If you go into The Mastermind expecting a typical heist film, “you’re going to be disappointed and puzzled,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. Kelly Reichardt’s latest is “a relatively quiet movie that takes its time laying out its plot,” and the director uses the crime that dominates the first half mainly as a pretext to probe the character of the title figure, “a soft-spoken hustler whose profound selfishness becomes more apparent with each scene.” Josh O’Connor stars, playing J.B. Mooney, a privileged, underemployed father of two who in 1970 chooses to nick four abstract paintings from a small Massachusetts museum, and the actor proves again that “he’s one of the great recent finds in world cinema.” It’s “exciting just to watch him sit and think.” Unlike the recent smash-and-grab at the Louvre, J.B.’s hands-off scheme involving two accomplices “goes awry immediately,” said Shirley Li in The Atlantic. “But the robbery isn’t the primary focus.” As J.B. “clumsily goes on the lam,” unnecessarily leaving hurt feelings, The Mastermind builds “a remarkably precise exploration of hubris as a self-destructive force.” Because J.B. makes so many avoidable mistakes, the film may also be “Reichardt’s funniest thus far.” Like Reichardt’s other films, including Certain Women and First Cow, “The Mastermind feels modest when you’re watching it and downright brilliant once it’s had some time to settle in your mind,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. J.B. is a man who’s gotten by for years on charm and his parents’ support. When he eventually seeks sanctuary with two old friends, though, we suddenly see him through their eyes, and “it’s unbearably sad.”

Nouvelle Vague

Directed by Richard Linklater (R)

★★★

“When a movie makes you want to weep, you know something is happening,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Richard Linklater’s second film released in recent weeks is a tribute to Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which means it “may end up being appreciated by only 2.6% of the general population.” But Linklater has poured great care into dramatizing the 20-day shoot in 1959 Paris that produced Godard’s New Wave masterpiece, and to watch this film’s Godard and his crew make the thing is “a particular kind of bliss.” It should inspire many viewers to create something themselves. But there’s “a major problem with Nouvelle Vague,” said Rory Doherty in The A.V. Club, and it’s that it wasn’t written as Breathless was. Godard, who in 1959 was a critic eager to join several peers in making the leap to directing, wrote his crime tale meets love story on the fly. The screenplay for Nouvelle Vague, by contrast, “conforms to the soft, putty-like structure of filmmaker biopics”: An undiscovered genius strains against conventions and at last breaks through. Shot in black and white and acted in French, “Nouvelle Vague is heady with meticulous reconstitutions of period style,” said Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Mostly, though, it’s “a vision of the risks that filmmakers incur in order to seize the freedom needed for their art,” including the risk of driving actors mad. Linklater has been making movies for 35 years now, and this effort, in the end, is “a feature-length thank-you note, from Richard to Jean-Luc, for freeing him to make films his own way.”

Writer-director Kelly Reichardt is “versatile” but also “consistent”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. Whether her films are about a homeless woman searching for her dog (“Wendy and Lucy”) or eco-activist saboteurs (“Night Moves”), they are all, one way or another, “about the American Condition”. Her latest one is set in Massachusetts at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War in 1970 – which are seen and heard in news footage throughout.

Josh O’Connor plays J.B. Mooney, an art-school drop-out who is married with children, and planning to rob a provincial art gallery in an effort to get rich, because his career is going nowhere. The robbery itself (“managed with fine-tuned suspense”) goes well enough. But Reichardt’s real interest is in the crime’s brooding aftermath. Of course, Mooney is not a mastermind – and things do not turn out well.

This is not a heist movie in the conventional sense, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. It is really “a character study of an unexceptional man who believes he is special” being slowly forced to contemplate his own mediocrity; the pathos is that J.B. could have had a perfectly good life, had he not tried to take a shortcut to success.

Reichardt is the “queen of ‘slow cinema’”, said Ed Potton in The Times. Her film is beautifully shot, in an autumnal palette. And the “always-watchable” O’Connor is up with the best of them when it comes to “staring into the middle distance”; but Alana Haim is wasted as his wife, and even if no one would expect “white-knuckle thrills” from this director, I could have done with a bit more to engage with than the “vague hum of disappointment”. Reichardt’s fans will say it has hidden depths; some viewers may find them too hidden.

The essence of dark comedy is sending up the sacred or the unthinkable, often mocking or challenging social expectations. It’s the same kind of maneuver that the recent movie release “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” does with motherhood and director Stanley Kubrick’s classic “Dr. Strangelove” did for nuclear war. Filmmakers in the 21st century have gamely carried on Kubrick’s efforts to shine a light on society’s contradictions, none better than these eight dark comedies.

‘Bad Santa’ (2003)

Billy Bob Thornton is Willie, a miserable, drunk, wise-cracking conman who poses as Santa with his partner, Marcus (Tony Cox), to execute a series of Christmas heists at department stores. After conning his way into the house of a gullible young boy (Brett Kelly), Willie tries to keep his scheme afloat by evading the head of mall security, Gin (Bernie Mac), at one of he and Marcus’ targets.

While “Bad Santa” doesn’t completely escape the pull of Hollywood holiday sentimentality, director Terry Zwigoff is uncompromising in his depiction of Willie’s degeneracy while making audiences laugh harder than they may have thought possible. The movie is a “demented, twisted, unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze style” that takes the “unwritten parameters governing mainstream American movies” and “violates all of them,” said Roger Ebert. (HBO Max)

‘In the Loop’ (2009)

Director Armando Iannucci’s Iraq War satire sees a trigger-happy American administration trying to persuade reluctant Brits to come along for a war in the Middle East. When U.K. minister Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) calls war “unforeseeable,” he sets off a press feeding frenzy, with the Prime Minister’s foul-mouthed fixer, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), dispatched to fix the mess.

Simon is sent to D.C., where he teams with dovish Lt. Gen. George Miller (James Gandolfini) and Undersecretary for Diplomacy Karen Clark (Mimi Kennedy) to talk the Americans out of it. The film excels at “exposing the ugly truths lurking behind the satire,” said Graham Fuller at Film Comment. Chock-full of quotable lines like “To walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be ready to climb the mountain of conflict,” the film stands as perhaps the ultimate takedown of America’s bumbling post-9/11 policymaking. (AMC+)

‘Four Lions’ (2010)

Taking on a subject that is seemingly satire-proof — suicide bombing — director Christopher Morris boldly goes where few filmmakers have dared. Four British Muslims in Sheffield decide to enlist in the global jihad and become suicide terrorists. Omar (Riz Ahmed) is the intellectual leader, who brings along his cousin Waj (Kayvan Novak) and friends Faisal (Adeel Akhtar) and Hassan (Arsher Ali), as well as a white convert named Barry (Nigel Lindsay).

After Omar and Waj are thrown out of a Pakistani training camp for incompetence, the group cycles hilariously through potential targets before settling on the London Marathon. They dress in novelty attire not unlike the inflatable animals currently being used by anti-ICE protestors in the U.S. The “murderous schemes of laughably fallible humans” are “no less tragic for being absurd,” said Ben Walters at Sight & Sound. (Tubi)

‘The Death of Stalin’ (2017)

Another dark comedic instant classic from director Armando Iannucci, “The Death of Stalin” looks at the jockeying to become the successor to the notorious Soviet dictator and génocidaire Josef Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin). Among the contenders are Georgy Malenkov (Jeffrey Tambor), Lavrenti Beria (Simon Russell Beale) and eventual winner Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi) — after much intrigue, backstabbing and murder. “I can’t remember who’s alive and who isn’t,” quips Malenkov at one point, highlighting one of the many absurdities of the Soviet system of tyranny and paranoia. While the film “never asks us to laugh at cruelty,” it does “make us laugh at the absurd pettiness and ultimate small-mindedness of the men perpetrating that cruelty” while also offering a “moderately sympathetic portrait of Khrushchev,” said Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert. (AMC+)

‘The Favourite’ (2018)

Arguably the best and most accessible of director Yorgos Lanthimos’ (“The Lobster”) output, “The Favourite” is a classic love triangle set in early 1700s England. Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) lives an eccentric life with her lover, Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), and their stable of rabbits. The Queen is disinterested in governance, even during a war with the French, and Sarah seems to direct the affairs of state behind the scenes.

But their life is upended with the arrival of the fallen aristocrat Abigail Masham (Emma Stone), Sarah’s cousin, who sees her new, menial posting as a way to return to her former status. The escalating war between Sarah and Abigail is wonderfully fun, biting satire. The “visceral appeal of this movie” is in “watching three formidable women treat each other and everyone around them with brazenly shameless awfulness,” said Dana Stevens at Slate. (Prime)

‘Parasite’ (2019)

The first foreign language film ever to win Best Picture at the Academy Awards, director Bong Joon-ho’s riveting tale spares no one in its indictment of class privilege. Ki Taek (Song Kang-ho) and Chung Sook (Jang Hye-jin) are a struggling couple who live in a ramshackle Seoul basement apartment with their two kids and make a living running small-time scams. Hiding their true identities, they secure employment with the wealthy Park family — and all hell breaks loose. The film shows that “each family has been shaped by oppressive capitalist forces that rob them of their humanity, that push them into constant competition” and ultimately a “need to dominate,” said Roxana Hadadi at Pajiba. (HBO Max)

‘Triangle of Sadness’ (2022)

A relentless takedown of the tastes, hierarchies and mores of the ultra-rich, Ruben Östlund’s epic three-act film takes place partly on a yacht helmed by a hard-drinking, sardonic captain (Woody Harrelson) and populated by Russian oligarchs, influencers, models and a fertilizer baron (Zlatko Buric). Below decks, Paula (Vicki Berlin) and Abigail (Dolly De Leon) try to keep up with the demands of their wealthy paymasters before disaster strikes and a third act twist gives Abigail the opportunity to be top dog. An “immersive, volatile and innately entertaining” film, it is memorable most of all for its “stubborn refusal to be didactic, making sure that our sympathies continually shift throughout the narrative as its power structures evolve,” said Tomris Laffly at The AV Club. (Disney+)

‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ (2022)

On a bucolic Irish island during the civil war, Colm (Brendan Gleeson) decides to suddenly cut off his erstwhile, chatty best friend, simple-minded dairy farmer Pádraic (Colin Farrell). Deprived of his daily banter at the pub with Colm, Pádraic sinks into despair and desperation. Colm, whose heart has inexplicably hardened at his old friend, threatens to cut off one of his fingers for each time Pádraic comes around to try to win him back. If you don’t think he’ll actually go through with it, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Director Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin” blends “odd-couple comedy with toxic bromantic satire” in a film that “swings between the hilarious, the horrifying and the heartbreaking in magnificent fashion,” said Mark Kermode at The Guardian. (Prime)

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere

Directed by Scott Cooper (PG-13)

★★

The new Bruce Springsteen movie “isn’t just another assembly-line biopic—and that’s a blessing,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. But while the brief chapter of the rock star’s life that the film focuses on is “as good as any,” it’s also “a fairly dull story.” In the early 1980s, as Springsteen reached his early 30s, he was just a short step away from megastardom when he instead began recording the dark, radically stripped-down tracks that became the album Nebraska. We see him return home to New Jersey—but “looking for what exactly?” You have to go in already treasuring the 1982 album to find the story fully rewarding.

Jeremy Allen White, in the lead role, “manages to create an ineffably convincing Springsteen,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. He does the trick by playing the singer as a man who fears he’s a fraud. But the movie isn’t confident enough to let the actor’s work convey Springsteen’s emotions. It throws in “ultra-broad” flashbacks to Springsteen’s boyhood clashes with a violent father and over-dramatizes the challenges of persuading the artist’s label to package and release his raw Nebraska tapes.

But after a first act that’s “overburdened with clichés,” said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com, the movie “begins to open up, becoming a soulful and meditative character study,” and in the final third, Springsteen’s depression moves to the forefront and “does so with a wallop.” Suddenly, he’s a relatably flawed and damaged human, “as raw and as frank as the characters in his songs.”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

Directed by Mary Bronstein (R)

★★★

“Can a film succeed too wildly in accomplishing what it sets out to do?” asked Glenn Whipp in the Los Angeles Times. Mary Bronstein’s new pitch-black comedy about motherhood as a lonely, relentless crisis is exhausting and anxiety-inducing, and yet Rose Byrne’s “vivid, impassioned performance” makes the frazzled protagonist both sympathetic and unforgettable. Byrne plays Linda, a mom and therapist whose young daughter requires a feeding tube and constant attention, and as if it’s not bad enough that her scolding husband is never around to help, their apartment ceiling soon collapses in a flood that forces Linda and her daughter to relocate to a motel.

That’s just the beginning of Linda’s downward spiral, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, because Bronstein’s movie is “a portrait of modern motherhood as a nonstop panic attack.” Linda must also contend with a hostile pediatrician, a vicious hamster, unstable clients, and a contemptuous therapist of her own (played by a deadpan Conan O’Brien). All the while, Byrne delivers such an “exquisitely raw” performance that, “if you had any decency, you’d look away.”

The rapper A$AP Rocky, who plays the motel’s easygoing super, allows us to see Linda as more than a bundle of shot nerves, said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. Even so, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You “turns a mother’s anxiety into an almost supernatural force.” At a certain point, and not unhappily, “I realized I was watching a horror movie.”

Frankenstein

Directed by Guillermo del Toro (R)

★★★

Though there was “no discernible need for a new Frankenstein,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, Guillermo del Toro’s “visually opulent” and “emotionally rich” adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel easily justifies its existence. “A tortured saga of fathers and sons, hubris and humility,” the Netflix film, which is briefly appearing in theaters before its Nov. 7 release for home viewing, casts Oscar Isaac as Dr. Frankenstein and an “outstanding” Jacob Elordi as the monster the mad scientist creates from the stray parts of battlefield cadavers.

Until the creature stirs, however, much of this handsome film “feels busy but weirdly lifeless,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Del Toro seems to want his Dr. Frankenstein to appear damaged and less than fully human, which sets the stage for the cruel way he treats his creation. Fortunately, once the monster is zapped to life, “Elordi makes the creature’s awakening, his growing curiosity and hurt, feel fresh, vital, new.” As hurt turns to rage, del Toro executes his own vision with the obsessiveness of a madman. And really, “that’s the only way anyone should make a movie of Frankenstein.”

Blue Moon

Directed by Richard Linklater (R)

★★★

Richard Linklater’s latest movie “would make a fantastic play,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. But don’t wait for the stage version, because Ethan Hawke is “transfixing” in the role of lyricist Lorenz Hart, and the film’s “stunningly smart” screenplay brilliantly imagines the night in 1943 when Hart realized his career was over. He has just walked out on the opening night of Oklahoma!, the new musical packed with songs that his longtime partner, Richard Rodgers, wrote with a new wordsmith. Hart settles onto a barstool, and as he awaits the cast’s postshow arrival, he “hurls insults, tells outrageous tales, hits on anyone with legs,” turning the night into a drunken, wrenching, “intellectually intoxicating” ride.

Hart was short, balding, and gay, and the efforts made to change Hawke’s appearance “can be a little distracting,” said Jake Coyle in the Associated Press. Still, “the actor has simply never been better.” His Hart proves to be “extraordinarily good company,” and though he has an audience of only a few, that few includes Bobby Cannavale and Margaret Qualley, and “they’re a fine crew.”

Many of the most beloved horror movies have scenes, like Linda Blair’s rotating head in “The Exorcist,” that are so absurd they practically invite satire. But other horror films build the laughs directly into the narrative, seeking to frighten and amuse at the same time. Horror comedies are an ideal way for people who don’t really like scary movies to indulge their horror-loving friends and family during October’s spooky season.

‘Return of the Living Dead’ (1985)

Louisville medical supply workers Frank (James Karen) and Freddy (Thom Mathews) open a storage barrel and unwittingly unleash a gas that reanimates the dead as shuffling, brain-hungry revenants in director Dan O’Bannon’s cult classic. They burn one of the zombies, which causes poisonous rain to fall on a nearby cemetery, unleashing total chaos. Soon Freddy’s girlfriend, Tina (Beverly Randolph), shows up at the graveyard with a group of punked-out goofballs in tow and they all fight for their lives. A movie that “makes up for its lack of gravitas or well-developed characters by just being delightfully, deliriously fun,” it remains the “quintessential ’80s zombie movie,” said Jim Vorel at Paste Magazine. (AMC+)

‘Evil Dead II’ (1987)

Whether it’s a sequel, a remake or in Bruce Campbell’s words, a “requel,” director Sam Raimi’s follow up to 1981’s “The Evil Dead” is almost a genre unto itself. The movie begins with a recap of the first film, after which archaeology students Ash (Bruce Campbell) and his girlfriend, Linda (Denise Bixler), head to the same isolated cabin, where they unwisely play a tape of the previous owner, Raymond Knowby, reciting passages from “Necronomicon Ex-Mortis” (The Book of the Dead).

Ash then decapitates a possessed Linda and does battle with both her head and, in perhaps the film’s most memorable sequence, her severed hand. Ash and some new friends fight the dark force until a unique conclusion that includes time travel in an Oldsmobile 88. The film offers “such a unique and singular vision that, though the style is often imitated, it has never been equaled,” said Brian Keiper at Bloody Disgusting. (HBO Max)

‘Dead Alive’ (1992)

Lionel (Timothy Balme) tries to keep his overbearing helicopter mom, Vera (Elizabeth Moody), in the basement of their house after she is bitten by a “Sumatran rat-monkey” at the Wellington Zoo and turns into a ferocious zombie. At one point she eats his girlfriend Paquita’s (Diana Peñalver) dog. The couple try to keep Vera in check by administering tranquilizers, but their containment efforts predictably fail. Director Peter Jackson, who would go on to helm the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, contributes “something genuinely fresh to the rotting genre” and creates a “movie which fans and non-fans alike will find enormously entertaining,” said Jennie Kermode at Eye For Film. (Youtube)

‘Shaun of the Dead’ (2004)

Simon Pegg is Shaun, an aimless, twenty-something retail worker barely hanging onto his exasperated girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield). When she finally cashiers him after he fails to come up with an anniversary plan better than returning to The Winchester, his favorite pub, he and his best mate, Ed (Nick Frost), get so bombed that they barely notice the zombie apocalypse that begins unfolding around them. The action eventually gets genuinely scary and poignant as Shaun and Ed try to rescue Liz and Barbara (Penelope Wilton), Shaun’s mom. A “post-modern masterwork,” the film has the “audience laughing and gasping and recognizing some obscure reference from start to finish,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Peacock)

‘Black Sheep’ (2006)

Sharing the deranged New Zealand sensibilities of “Dead Alive” — the tagline is “There are 40 million sheep in New Zealand, and they are pissed off! — director Jonathan King’s hilarious film follows Henry (Nathan Meister) who discovers that his brother, Angus (Peter Feeney), has been conducting grotesque genetic modification experiments with Dr. Astrid Rush (Tandi Wright) at the family sheep farm. When one of the mutant sheep is released by environmental activists including Experience (Danielle Mason), they must work together to prevent more people from being turned into the film’s singular sheep-zombies. That this “odd, amusing” film turns a “notoriously docile, none-too-intelligent species into a source of menace” is an “impressive, if improbable, feat of filmmaking,” said A.O. Scott at The New York Times. (Tubi)

‘Zombieland’ (2009)

In the post-apocalyptic wasteland two months after a zombie epidemic wiped out most of civilization, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a college student sporting an elaborate list of 33 survival rules, is en route to Ohio to look for his parents when he hitches a ride with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), who takes great pleasure in his zombie kills. They are waylaid by con artist sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who eventually agree to team up to reach a rumored safe zone in Hollywood. A movie that “focuses on the comic possibilities of four misfits indulging their most cherished fantasies under the bleakest circumstances imaginable,” its propulsive “fun proves infectious,” said Nathan Rabin at The AV Club. (Peacock)

‘The Cabin in the Woods’ (2011)

In a rote set-up now so familiar as to be beyond cliche, five attractive young adults including Dana (Kristen Connolly), Marty (Fran Kranz) and Curt (Chris Hemsworth) head for a remote cabin for a weekend of partying. Soon they’ve inadvertently awakened a family of zombies and our heroes start getting picked off one by one after the obligatory sex scene. But then director Drew Goddard pulls the rug out from underneath the audience and the characters with a twist that shall not be revealed — but suffice it to say that there’s more going on here than yet another “Evil Dead” rip-off. This “horror-inflected black comedy is a playful riff on the ‘last girl’ slasher movie,” which doubles as a “dystopian fantasy” said Dana Stevens at Slate. (Hulu)

‘Get Out’ (2017)

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is traveling to an upstate New York estate for a meet-the-parents jaunt with his girlfriend, Rose (Allison Williams), in director Jordan Peele’s instant — and controversial — classic. Dean (Bradley Whitford) and Missy (Catherine Keener) at first seem like relatively harmless wealthy white parents, but Dean’s nervous declaration that “I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could” soon takes on a more sinister meaning. Chris notices odd behavior from the house’s Black staff, who have been hypnotized into a “sunken place” where their minds can be controlled by their white tormenters. The film brilliantly “borrows tones and archetypes from horror movies and thrillers” to show us “what it’s like to be a young black man in the United States today,” said Richard Brody at The New Yorker. (Hulu)

The events that inspired “Roofman” fall squarely into the category of “stranger than fiction”, said Sophie Butcher in Empire. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a US army veteran named Jeffrey Manchester robbed more than 40 McDonald’s fast-food joints, by crawling into their roofs overnight and descending into the restaurants the following morning to hold staff up at gunpoint (while being disarmingly friendly and apologetic throughout).

He was eventually caught but he managed to escape, and then spent months hiding out in a branch of Toys R Us, living on baby food and M&Ms. Director Derek Cianfrance’s film based on these events is gritty but heartwarming, and features a “remarkable” performance from Channing Tatum, who depicts Manchester as “goofy and childlike”, while “effortlessly” walking a delicate path between comedy and tragedy.

The film opens before Manchester goes to jail, said Natalia Winkelman in The New York Times. In a voice-over, he explains that he had been desperate to change his fortunes, and win back his family. Instead, he ended up being sentenced to decades in prison. The section depicting his escape under a delivery van is “wonderfully engaging”, but soon we are in Toys R Us. Emerging during the day to mingle with shoppers, Manchester strikes up a relationship with a lonely single mother (Kirsten Dunst) who works in the store.

Thus the zany premise of the film disappears, as we sink into a mushy but also complex romantic comedy-drama. It’s “watchable” enough, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian, and both stars acquit themselves well. But Manchester – a criminal spinning a web of lies – gets off too lightly. Ultimately, the feel-good vibe feels a bit ill-judged.

A House of Dynamite

Directed by Kathryn Bigelow (R)

★★★

Kathryn Bigelow’s first movie in eight years “takes the unthinkable and puts it right in front of us,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. A nuclear missile fired by an unknown overseas source has been spotted headed toward Chicago, and America’s crisis response team, including the president, has 18 minutes to attempt a defense and decide whether an instant counterstrike is worth risking a potentially apocalyptic escalation. “A real-life horror movie,” A House of Dynamite “lays bare all sorts of global realities we don’t want to think about,” and watching it was “one of the most stressful viewing experiences I’ve had in years.”

The movie is playing in theaters for two weeks before it moves to Netflix on Oct. 24, and its “most unusual” formal choice is a time structure that plays through the crucial 18 minutes three times from different perspectives, said Dana Stevens in Slate. First, we’re focused on Rebecca Ferguson as a senior officer in the White House Situation Room. Then we’re with Anthony Ramos as the young major in Alaska who spotted the missile on radar, and then with the president, played by Idris Elba.

Although the “twist-packed” conclusion isn’t fully satisfying, the movie “keeps surprising you right up to the end.” For me, the repetitions sapped the drama of much of its power, said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe, while the ending proved to be “a hilarious cop-out” that drew “laughter and angry groans” at the screening I attended. But Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of The Hurt Locker, remains “a virtuoso of complex action cinema,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. While the script here “occasionally gets in her way,” she creates and sustains “a powerful sense of forward momentum.”

After the Hunt

Directed by Luca Guadagnino (R)

★★

Luca Guadagnino’s “pretend-provocative” new campus drama proves to be “a mystery with no curiosity, a cautionary tale with no good advice,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Julia Roberts stars as a Yale professor caught in the middle when one of her white male pals on the faculty is accused of sexual misconduct by one of her protégés, a young Black queer woman.

Unfortunately, the director of Call Me by Your Name and Challengers doesn’t care what actually transpired between Andrew Garfield’s Hank and Ayo Edebiri’s Maggie. Instead, “Guadagnino’s driving interest is attacking academia as a rat’s nest of egomaniacs and cowards and insular, faux-radical thinking.” After the Hunt “will be derided as little more than an intellectual parlor trick, a flimsy house of cards,” and “I wouldn’t disagree,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. But Guadagnino clearly savors the drama. “He’s drawn to this material not by the weight of its ethical conundrums but by the chance to watch beautiful people attempt, or pretend, to hash those conundrums out.”

Roberts, “her face a mask,” is rivetingly icy as Alma struggles to pick a side while not jeopardizing her path to tenure. “Sadly, Edebiri feels miscast,” said Siddhant Adlakha in Observer. But also, the script never gives the Emmy winner a chance to deepen her character, and the movie around her winds up settling for easy answers. Alma and Hank accuse their students of engaging in performative discontent, and “so too does the film.”

It Was Just an Accident

Directed by Jafar Panahi (PG-13)

★★★★

Despite the title, “you can’t find a more controlled film,” said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com. From the opening scene of Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, when a family driving at night accidentally runs over a dog, “we’re fully in the Iranian auteur’s grasp.” The mishap sends the father to a garage where an employee susses him out to be the intelligence officer who tortured him in prison.

Yet Accident “isn’t a vindictive picture.” Instead, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast, when the ex-prisoner, Vahid, kidnaps and prepares to bury his presumed abuser, he suddenly suffers doubts about whether he has the right man, transforming the film into “both a nail-biting thriller and a messy moral drama.” Vahid begins visiting and picking up other victims to determine if he’s chosen the correct target and punishment, and resolution for the group proves elusive. “With haunting terror, Panahi suggests that there are no good answers to the questions he raises.”

Panahi has been a victim of government oppression himself, having been banned from filmmaking until recently and twice imprisoned, and he has drawn heavily from that dark experience, said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. His film “draws much of its climactic power from the sense that hell will always follow Vahid like a whistle ringing in his ears, no matter what becomes of the man he has abducted.”

While some kids have parents who let them watch literally anything from a young age, most people first encounter scary movies through more light-hearted fare aimed at school-aged kids and tweens. These films, when done well, can provide thrills for the whole family without unnecessarily traumatizing children whose brains are still developing.

‘Ghostbusters’ (1984)

Almost instantly iconic, director Ivan Reitman's exuberant and frequently hilarious adventure is centered around three recently fired New York City professors of ‘parapsychology,’ including Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), who form a specter-liquidating outfit that they called Ghostbusters. They soon get a service call from Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver), setting into motion a chain of events that threatens the whole city, perhaps most memorably when a demon manifests itself as a giant marshmallow man stomping through Manhattan. “Rarely has a movie this expensive provided so many quotable lines,” said Roger Ebert, possibly because “everybody talks to each other like smart graduate students who are in on the joke.” (Peacock)

‘Gremlins’ (1984)

Director Joe Dante's beloved creature feature is named after the seemingly harmless creatures who turn into monsters if you feed them after midnight or expose them to water. Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) is desperate for a Christmas present for his son, Billy (Zach Galligan), when he stumbles into an antique store and talks the owner’s grandson into selling him a “mogwai.”

The elaborate rules of caring for the mogwais are predictably violated, spawning more creatures and turning them homicidal with a mix of horror and comedy. The film “rouses nihilistic glee with the demonic antics of the title critters, who rip its greeting-card façade apart” even as it “elicits nostalgia for the idealized small town created on Hollywood back-lots,” said Michael Sragow at Film Comment. Parents beware: This is probably the scariest move on our list. (HBO Max)

‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ (1993)

One of the most popular films to use stop-motion animation, this musical horror-comedy follows Jack Skellington (Chris Sarandon, with Danny Elfman singing), the Pumpkin King of an occult-themed world called Halloween Town. When Jack stumbles into an alternate universe devoted instead to Christmas, he decides he needs to liven things up by adopting some of the universe’s rituals, including abducting Santa Claus (Edward Ivory). Based on a poem written by Tim Burton (who produced but did not direct), the movie “draws inspiration from everyone’s favorite yearly holiday television specials” and amassed a “large cult following” with its “reinvention of classical holiday iconography,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Disney+)

‘Super 8’ (2011)

Borrowing the “lightly supervised tweens in jeopardy” scheme from “The Goonies,” writer-director J.J. Abrams' thriller is about a group of small-town friends, including Alice (Elle Fanning) and Joe (Joel Courtney), who witness a train derailment while filming an amateur zombie movie. As strange events envelop the town following the derailment, the friends are caught up in a government conspiracy involving aliens and have to fight to save themselves from an extra-terrestrial menace. Like the “Spielberg movies this film lovingly plunders,” the movie makes for a “rollicking afternoon at the multiplex for kids around Joe’s age,” said Dana Stevens at Slate. (Paramount+)

‘Frankenweenie’ (2012)

It's almost impossible to choose between Tim Burton's films, any of which could be on this list, including "Corpse Bride" (2005), but "Frankenweenie" might be the one that speaks most directly to children about the death of a pet. When Sparky, the beloved bull terrier of young teenager Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan), is killed chasing a foul ball, Victor takes the advice of his science teacher, Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau), and reanimates his best friend in a makeshift attic laboratory.

Unfortunately, Victor’s secret gets out, sparking other efforts at reanimating the dead and a furor when other townspeople catch wind. The animated retelling of “Frankenstein” is a “great introduction to the horror genre for older kids and tweens who are ready for some scares,” said Sandie Angulo Chen at Common Sense Media. (Disney+)

“Too tall and too ‘kooky’” – that was one casting director’s verdict on Diane Keaton in the late 1960s, said The Guardian. But when the actress, who has died aged 79, auditioned for the original stage production of the comedy “Play It Again, Sam”, its writer, Woody Allen, was transfixed. Keaton was, he recalled, “adorable, funny, totally original in style, real, fresh … One talks about a personality that lights up a room, she lit up a boulevard.”

A few years later, he cast her in the film version – in the same year as she proved her dramatic skills with her “heartbreaking” performance as Kay, the wife of Al Pacino’s character Michael in “The Godfather”, a role she reprised in its sequels. But it was Allen’s “Annie Hall”, in 1977, that turned her into one of the biggest stars of her era.

By then, she and Allen were ex-lovers – and he had, she said, based the role on her. (Her real surname was Hall; her nickname was Annie.) Her performance won her an Oscar, and helped establish the Diane Keaton persona, said The New York Times. This rested partly on her nervous, jittery delivery (“La-di-da, la-di-da, la-la,” is her famous line in the film), but also on her “unmistakable aesthetic” – quirky takes on “traditionally male looks”, including ties, button-down shirts, waistcoats and trilby hats.

Famously self-deprecating, she downplayed her role in creating her “signature look”, but even if she had been inspired by the “Soho chic” she saw on New York’s streets, it was Keaton who devised the wardrobe, and who made the clothes such a key part of the character.

Conveying ‘Keaton-ness’

A versatile actress, she could disappear into roles (such as in Warren Beatty’s 1981 film “Reds”, for which she was nominated for an Oscar), but her ability to convey “Keaton-ness” was a skill in itself.

Diane Hall was born in Los Angeles in 1946, where her father was a civil engineer, and her mother an amateur photographer. As a child, her female role models included Katharine Hepburn, to whom she would later be likened owing to her strength and intelligence, as well as her way with trousers. At 19, she moved to New York, where she won a role in “Hair” (she took her mother’s maiden name, as Hall was already taken). She made her film debut in 1970; “Annie Hall” was the fourth of the eight films she made with Allen – a lifelong friend whom she publicly defended when he was accused of abusing his adopted daughter.

Beyond acting

She remained in demand in the 1980s and 1990s, with notable roles in films including “Father of the Bride” and “Baby Boom”. In 2004, she was nominated for another Oscar, for “Something’s Gotta Give”, in which she played a buttoned-up writer who is pursued by both a dishy young doctor (Keanu Reeves) and an ageing roué (Jack Nicholson).

She herself never married, but she had long-term relationships with two of her co-stars – Pacino and Beatty. She adopted two children, and took time out to raise them, and also to look after her younger brother, Randy, who suffered from mental illness. With interests well beyond acting, she directed an episode of “Twin Peaks”, wrote books about art and architecture, published her photographs, and made a documentary examining beliefs about the afterlife, called “Heaven”.

Roofman

Directed by Derek Cianfrance (R)

★★★

“This is a rom-com with a big but,” said Steve Pond in The Wrap. In Roofman, Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst play 40-something single parents who fall in love. But...Tatum’s character is based on a real-life military veteran who robbed 45 McDonald’s restaurants and met Dunst’s salesclerk while he was living inside a Toys R Us after escaping prison. Because he appears doomed to soon end up back behind bars, Roofman comes across as “the saddest romantic comedy ever, or maybe the most lighthearted tragedy,” with the charming Tatum somehow making Jeffrey Manchester, his model, appear merely a little misguided.

In a “more textured” movie, Manchester would have been less purely likable, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. But Roofman, so named because Manchester robbed the fast-food joints after slipping in through the roof, is an action drama that’s “eager to please,” and “it works mostly because of Tatum and Dunst.”

Still, director Derek Cianfrance, who made the cutting drama Blue Valentine, establishes a delicate tone here that “makes room for lightness, comedy, romance, and quietly searing melancholy,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. The film “never tries to justify Jeff’s criminality” but effectively touches on the reasons he may have chosen the wrong path, and it’s “such a heartfelt movie that it’s both funny and affecting. Just give in to it.”

Kiss of the Spider Woman

Directed by Bill Condon (R)

★★

“It is rare for a famous singer who also acts to avoid doing a movie musical for as long as Jennifer Lopez has,” said Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair. In this new film, based on the stage musical adaption of Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel, Lopez fills the role of a long-gone movie queen, “and she attacks it with starry gusto.”

Unfortunately, the source material is “an odd mélange,” and director Bill Condon “has trouble with the story’s crucial juxtaposition”: the grim reality of two prisoners’ daily life in juntaruled Argentina and the glamorous movie world that one of the men recalls with relish as a means of brief escape. That prisoner, played by the actor Tonatiuh, moves like a woman, while his cellmate (Diego Luna) is a macho insurgent.

Yet “Condon is shrewd not to overexplain the pair’s relationship,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. Though the Dreamgirls director is restrained here, he remains “a wizard with actors,” and he lets Tonatiuh shine in the role that William Hurt won an Oscar for in 1986.

“The phrase ‘a star is born’ has been overused, but it’s hard not to think of those words when watching Tonatiuh,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “If only the rest of the picture could match his vitality.” For a movie this ambitious to succeed, “one frankly needs a director with a lot more imagination.”

“A generation ago, Tourette syndrome was the butt of bad jokes,” said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. In this warm-hearted comedy-drama based on the life of the Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson, “it’s the source of all the good ones”. The film stars Robert Aramayo as Davidson, who was born in Galashiels in 1971 and began exhibiting symptoms when he was 10. It does not stint in showing us how hard it was to go “through the most awkward adolescence imaginable in an era when the condition was barely understood”; Aramayo also brilliantly conveys “the intense frustration and fatigue engendered by Tourette’s”.

Yet “I Swear” is “inescapably hilarious” too – “such is the weird power of swearing when the swearer can’t keep a lid on it”. The film opens in 2019, when Davidson is at Buckingham Palace to receive an MBE for services to mental health. Suddenly, his nerves get the better of him: “F**k the Queen!” he shouts in front of Elizabeth II herself. We then flash back to 1983, when young John (Scott Ellis Watson) is growing up; he is a confident boy, but then the tics start.

At school, he is marked out as different and the other children are brutal, said The Observer. Meanwhile at home, his “stony mother” (Shirley Henderson) treats him as an outcast.

Kind people, however, see beyond his syndrome and offer him a loving home, and later a job. “Beyond all the tragicomic plot peaks and troughs”, “I Swear” argues that John’s main problem was never the Tourette’s itself, but the “ignorance and hostility of other people”. This “neat and tidy” message is delivered a “little didactically”, but we do, in fact, leave the cinema feeling better informed by this funny, touching, feel-good film.

“One Battle After Another” has caused quite a stir, scooping a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and garnering plenty of Oscar buzz. If you’ve seen it, loved it and are wondering which of director Paul Thomas Anderson’s films to watch next, there’s plenty of quality work to choose from. Here are some of his best movies to add to your watchlist.

There Will Be Blood

This epic period drama captures “the pursuit of the American dream in all its nightmarish horror”, said Esquire. Set in early 20th-century New Mexico, it follows the “ruthless quest for wealth by silver-prospector-turned-oil-baron Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day-Lewis in an Oscar-winning performance)”. It begins with a silent prologue as a lone Plainview hacks at a rock in a small mine in a desolate landscape (the first dialogue doesn’t come until almost 15 minutes in), and concludes with an “emotionally explosive” finale. Tackling themes of cold-blooded ambition, corruption, greed and the clash of Church and state, it’s a “true modern masterpiece”.

The Master

“There’s really never been a performance like the one Joaquin Phoenix gives as Freddie Quell”, a “shattered and strange” Second World War veteran, said Vulture. Struggling to readjust to society and his old life, he falls under the spell of charismatic cult leader Lancaster Dodd, played by a “spectacularly preening” Philip Seymour Hoffman. Anderson’s filmography is “full of bangers” but “The Master” is “the greatest of them all”, filled with characters who are “at once intensely human and also the stuff of otherworldly fables. Watching it is like seeing the world from a new, upsetting, moving angle.”

Inherent Vice

“Part silly and part sad”, this faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel follows “stoner detective” Larry “Doc” Sportello as he’s “drawn into a labyrinthine world of power and corruption” in Los Angeles “by his wayward ex-girlfriend”, said the Los Angeles Times. Anderson expertly hones “what could be a sprawling mess into something that knows just where it’s going”. The film “reveals itself to you layer by layer”, as Sportello gets caught up in a tangle of ever-more complex criminal conspiracies. It’s “downright intoxicating”.

Phantom Thread

This intimate film about the relationship between a “tyrannical couturier” and a headstrong waitress is “the most romantic movie to feature a consensual poisoning by omelette”, said Vulture. Daniel Day-Lewis stars as the “tetchy” and controlling Reynold Woodcock, who meets Alma (Vicky Krieps) in the restaurant where she works. The film soon unfurls into a “love story as a battle”, with Alma “laying siege to the sealed-off life” Reynold has built for himself, and refusing to be another “muse and helpmate to be discarded”.

Boogie Nights

“If you were a male filmmaker coming of age in the 1990s, chances are you had a coke- and cock-addled crime epic percolating within you, à la Martin Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas’ and Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’,” said Slant magazine. “Boogie Nights” is one of those but what makes it stand out is Anderson’s obvious “affection for his characters”. The movie chronicles the rise of Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), a nightclub dishwasher who becomes a porn actor under the tutelage of adult film director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds). Diggler builds a supportive circle of friends and soon becomes a porn star but his spiralling drug habit and growing ego threaten to bring his world crashing down. “Anderson tries to be a bad boy but settles, thank God, for being a humanist.” It’s an “amazing achievement”.

Punch-Drunk Love

Adam Sandler plays the socially awkward and struggling Barry Egan in this absurdist romantic comedy. Tormented by his sisters and making “desperate calls to phone sex hotlines”, he urgently “needs a life vest, fast”, said Collider. Then he meets Lena (Emily Watson), a “sweet, kind, empathetic and odd” woman who turns out to be exactly what he has been missing. As their love “blooms into thrilling, unique sweetness”, “darkness” also looms as Barry finds himself being blackmailed by a phone sex line owner. “Captivating” and “absolutely perfect”.

One Battle After Another

If you haven’t yet seen it, there’s still time to catch “One Battle After Another” at the cinema. Anderson fans “whip themselves up into a lather” over any small thing the filmmaker turns his hand to but this movie is “anything but minor”, said The Guardian. Loosely based on another Pynchon novel, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a “former far-left revolutionary turned schlubby dad trying to protect his daughter from a psychotic colonel (Sean Penn, in his best performance in God knows how long)”. Packed with thrilling shoot-outs, car chases and other expertly choreographed action sequences, it’s “a hell of a ride: ambitious, scary, funny and poignant in parts”. The Anderson aficionados will “love it – and I suspect plenty of others will too”.

Don’t expect many giggles from October movies. It’s spooky season, after all! This month’s new releases include frights like inhumane prison conditions, a zombified man-monster, wrongful incarceration, depression and being a mom. A motley assortment but but each is equally terrifying, albeit in very different ways.

‘The Alabama Solution’

Director Andrew Jarecki is known for his hard-hitting exposés, including Emmy-winning “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst,” a 2015 HBO series investigating the real estate heir suspected of murder. Jarecki now turns his incriminating lens onto the American prison industrial complex with “The Alabama Solution.”

This six-year investigative documentary about the varied injustices of the state’s prison system uses interviews with inmates and video footage taken by prisoners on contraband phones to depict violence, forced labor, overcrowding and shoddy facilities. “The public is already conditioned not to believe a person who is incarcerated,” says Robert Earl “Kinetik Justice” Council, one of the inmates featured in the doc. This movie aims to change that. (on HBO Max now)

‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’

Mothers rarely have it easy, and Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is about that brutal truth. Linda, played “magnificently and unflinchingly by Rose Byrne,” is a woman struggling to “juggle the mysterious illness of her daughter and the sudden collapse of her literal and metaphorical ceiling, leaving her with no pillars to support her,” said Cortlyn Kelly at Roger Ebert. The film ratchets up the theme of parental stress as Linda’s house floods, her husband is away on a work trip and her therapist — played by Conan O’Brien — grows increasingly unhelpful. Byrne is already generating Oscar buzz for this “performance of a lifetime,” said Richard Lawson at Vanity Fair. (in theaters now)

‘Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere’

Musician biopics are a dime a dozen, but this is the first about America’s favorite singer-songwriter, the blue jean-clad “Boss” Bruce Springsteen. Jeremy Allen White (“The Bear”) stars as the titular rock icon in a film that narrows the focus to Springsteen’s difficult period in making his 1982 album “Nebraska.” Written and directed by Scott Cooper (“Crazy Heart”), “Springsteen” features a “sweat-drenched White belting out ‘Born to Run’ to a roaring arena crowd or jamming before a smaller gang of the Jersey Shore faithful at the Stone Pony.” But it also renders the “depressive breakdown that Springsteen experienced” in the aftermath of the album’s creation, making it a “story about the fragility of mental health and the limits of art alone to sustain it,” said Ben Sisario at The New York Times. (Oct. 24, in theaters)

‘It Was Just an Accident’

Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi (“Taxi,” “This is Not a Film”) took home this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or for “It Was Just An Accident,” a “politically barbed but comedic” film that “follows a group of wrongfully incarcerated working-class people seeking revenge against the prison guard who tortured and terrified them,” said Deadline.

The movie is an “emphatic rebuke of the authoritarian regime by which Panahi himself has been persecuted and censored,” said Interview magazine, referring to Panahi’s 2023 incarceration. He was imprisoned for criticizing the Iranian government and banned from making movies for 14 years — so the new project had to be filmed in secret. Clearly, it’s possible to keep art alive under authoritarianism. (Oct. 15, in theaters)

‘Frankenstein’

One of the world’s foremost horror filmmakers, three-time Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro, has been teasing his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s literary masterpiece “Frankenstein” for a long time. The Netflix film stars Oscar Isaac as the famed scientist Victor Frankenstein, whose penchant for playing God results in the creation of Frankenstein the monster, portrayed here by Jacob Elordi. Certified scream queen Mia Goth also stars in a picture that promises to eschew computer-generated imagery in favor of tangible sets and practical effects. “It’s extremely important for me to keep the reality of film craft alive,” del Toro told Variety. “I want real sets. I don’t want digital. I don’t want AI. I don’t want simulation. I want old-fashioned craftsmanship.” (Oct. 17, in theaters; Nov. 7, Netflix)

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, scripted by Noah Oppenheim, confronts a truly terrifying possibility, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: “that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it”.

It imagines a scenario in which a nuke has been launched from the Pacific and is heading for Chicago. Its predicted impact time is just 19 minutes. Blindsided, the US military at various bases scrambles to try to intercept the missile and figure out who launched it and how best to respond. They could launch a counterstrike – but that decision, which only the president (Idris Elba) has the authority to make, is very much complicated by the fact that, although North Korea is a suspect, they don’t know for certain who the enemy here is.

The action takes place mainly within this crucial 19 minutes, but to build tension and stretch out the running time, Bigelow examines the nail-biting countdown from three perspectives, said David Sexton in The New Statesman.

In the first, we follow Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), a mother with a sick child at home who finds herself in charge of the White House Situation Room on this terrible day; the second is set at US Strategic Command, where a bullish general (Tracy Letts) is urging a counterstrike. These sections are fast-paced and tense; but it all gets a bit slack in the third, when we see the unfolding crisis from the perspective of the president, who comes across as unconvincing and clownish.

Bigelow allows herself the odd indulgence, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, but she is “a virtuoso talent”. Her film is a highly effective “symphony of dread” – which creates a catch: “I don’t remember the last time I saw a film this formally brilliant that I also wanted to stop.”

When big stars take on roles requiring facial prosthetics, “it’s often a sign they want to be taken more seriously”, said Dulcie Pearce in The Sun. Think Bradley Cooper in “Maestro” and Steve Carell in “Foxcatcher”. Now, for indie director Benny Safdie’s biopic, Dwayne Johnson has spent hours in “the make-up artist’s chair” to make himself look like the real-life mixed martial arts fighter Mark Kerr.

Of course, Johnson (aka The Rock) was himself a wrestling champ before he became one of Hollywood’s most bankable action stars, and he still has the bulked-up physique to prove it, but this role requires him to flex his acting muscles rather more than he has in his career to date.

Kerr is a fearsome figure “whose biggest struggles” are mostly on the inside, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. When the film starts, he is “at the top of his game”, so addicted to the high of winning that he has never lost a fight. But things begin to unravel when he starts taking part in tournaments in Japan. His substance abuse spirals; his relationship with his girlfriend (Emily Blunt) becomes increasingly volatile; and his rapport with his training partner (Ryan Bader) bows under the pressure.

The plot is repetitive (he goes to fights and comes home, which is probably true to life, but you do miss the peaks and troughs that usually appear in sports movies), and Blunt is stuck with an annoying role, “somewhere between a mob wife and a leftover homecoming queen”.

But Johnson is “magnetic” as a frightened man whose need to win comes from somewhere deep within. It’s “an extraordinary performance”, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Communicating Kerr’s troubles with impressive subtlety, he delivers a faultless portrait of a “man-machine” learning to become human.

Anemone

Directed by Ronan Day-Lewis (R)

★★

“It’s touching that Daniel Day-Lewis came out of retirement to launch his son’s movie career,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Alas, the project that the pair made together turns out to be “a dud of a movie—aridly pretentious and static, with too much self-conscious art photography and not enough drama.” As great as the 68-year-old actor often has been, he’s “not especially memorable” here, and though 27-year-old first-time director Ronan Day-Lewis “shows flashes of talent,” Anemone, for most of its 125 minutes, “just sits there.”

It arrives eight years after Daniel’s previous film, Phantom Thread, and the three-time Oscar winner’s magnetic intensity “remains undimmed,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. He plays Ray Stoker, a traumatized former British soldier who has been living alone in a remote cabin for 20 years when his brother seeks his help with a troubled family scion. But the role of Ray’s brother is “mostly reactive,” putting co-star Sean Bean at a disadvantage, and the screenplay, co-written by the film’s director and star, is built around a few “chewy monologues” that feel stagy.

Two of Day-Lewis’ monologues, at least, prove “mesmerizing,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. But the film’s peaks are “quickly swallowed again by the booming sense of import.” Still, the younger Day-Lewis could well evolve into a solid filmmaker. “Anemone certainly looks serious,” complete with “swirling skies” and “eerie montages” that suggest “weighty themes and big emotions.”

The Smashing Machine

Directed by Benny Safdie (R)

★★★

“The Smashing Machine is satisfying as much for what it doesn’t do as for what it does,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Dwayne Johnson stars in the new biopic, playing former UFC champ Mark Kerr. And though Kerr’s cage career traced a familiar arc from early success to addiction and a comeback, director Benny Safdie “doesn’t try to apply any Rocky-style narrative formulas.” Johnson’s Kerr is simply a guy who takes life as it comes, and he and the film’s other characters “feel lived-in, not written, with flaws and attributes that chime with things we see in our family, our friends, ourselves.”

Johnson, who was a pro wrestling star before beginning his film career two decades ago, is “by far the best thing in the movie,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “Actually, he’s kind of the only thing in the movie,” because so little attention is devoted even to Kerr’s up-and-down relationship with his girlfriend and wife that Emily Blunt can’t flesh out the character. Safdie, by trying to avoid sports biopic clichés, wound up with a film that’s “too understated and glancing for its own good.”

You might expect plenty of adrenaline-fueled action in a UFC biopic from a director who co-created Uncut Gems with his older brother, said Trace Sauveur in Paste. Instead, Safdie has given us “a quiet drama about a gentle giant.” A 2002 documentary about Kerr, also titled The Smashing Machine, was “somehow more potent.”

For decades, audiences around the world have been drawn to the seductive, ultraviolent world of organized crime. Mob stories have become a genre filmmakers return to over and over again, despite the well-worn narrative arcs, stock characters and fundamental repulsiveness of what gangsters do for a living. Creating a list of the best mob movies is therefore not for the faint of heart and is sure to inspire many exclamations of “Get outta here!”

‘On the Waterfront’ (1954)

When he was young, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) took a dive in a prizefight at the behest of mob boss Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb). “I coulda been somebody” had he not thrown the match on purpose, he laments to his brother Charley (Rod Steiger) in one of cinema’s most-quoted scenes. Years later, as a longshoreman in a union controlled by Friendly’s syndicate, Malloy is asked to testify against his bosses in an investigation. Director Elia Kazan’s film showcases the agonizing moral quandaries that organized criminals often create for ordinary people. It “fused elements of neorealism with the German-influenced expressionism of popular noirs to achieve an unusual tone of gritty fantasia,” said Chuck Bowen at Slant Magazine.

‘The Godfather’ (1972)

Based on Mario Puzo’s 1969 novel, director Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” is the saga of the Corleones, a New York City crime family headed by Vito (Marlon Brando). When violence breaks out with a rival family and Vito is wounded, his eldest, Sonny (James Caan), steps into the role, and his younger son Michael (Al Pacino) is slowly drawn into the family business. While it sometimes has the “quality of a romantic fable whose principal characters are in some ways charmed,” it also offers “as dark and ominous a reflection of certain aspects of American life as has ever been presented in a movie designed as sheer entertainment,” said Vincent Canby at The New York Times.

‘Goodfellas’ (1990)

Director Martin Scorsese’s brisk, often hilarious mafia movie is based on Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 book, “Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family,” about Henry Hill, who joins a New York crime syndicate as an 11-year-old and then rises up the ranks. Playing Hill as an adult is the late Ray Liotta in a triumphant, unnerving performance alongside fellow mobsters Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) and James Conway (Robert De Niro), who are working for the local capo Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino). Hill and his wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), ascend to the heights of the underworld and then unravel with impeccable flair. “Goodfellas” is a “triumphant piece of filmmaking — journalism presented with the brio of drama,” said Pauline Kael at The New Yorker.

‘Gomorrah’ (2008)

A “film about the day laborers of crime,” this award-winning Italian drama “looks grimy and sullen, and has no heroes, only victims,” said Roger Ebert. While many classic mafia movies like “Goodfellas” give their characters the illusion of glamour, wealth and power before pulling the rug out in the final act, “Gomorrah” is proudly, almost relentlessly bleak throughout. The film explores the seedy criminal underworld of the real-world Camorra crime syndicate through the eyes of five people touched by its violence, including Totò (Salvatore Abbruzzese), a 13-year-old boy who joins the organization after recovering a bag of drugs. The movie’s success led to a well-regarded TV series of the same name.

‘A Prophet’ (2009)

When 19 year-old Malik El Djebena, an illiterate Algerian petty criminal, is sent to prison for assaulting police officers, he is inducted into the Corsican mafia in a bleak French prison by carrying out a hit for the group’s boss, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup). Most of director Jacques Audiard’s celebrated movie is set in the prison and follows Malik as he gradually earns Luciani’s trust and earns a bigger role, especially during daylong furloughs from the prison. Malik is also haunted by the specter of Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), the inmate he offed to gain protection in the first place. The film is an “acknowledgment of social conditions that create smarter, better criminals, as opposed to rehabilitating them,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review.

“Tinseltown” has lost its lustre, said The Hollywood Reporter. The biggest players in movie and streamer TV production have moved headquarters to London, filming in “state-of-the-art shooting facilities” in and around the UK capital.

“Brollywood” is booming, after years of struggle, thanks to Britain’s generous tax breaks and cheaper labour. But there’s a black cloud on the horizon, as Donald Trump threatens to impose 100% tariffs on “films made in foreign lands”.

‘Best’ tax breaks in the world

The UK’s film and and TV studios and soundstages are “running at full capacity”, said The Hollywood Reporter. Production revenues reached £5.6 billion in 2024, up 31% from the previous year, according to the British Film Commission. And £4.8 billion of that came from external investment and international co-productions.

Disney’s Marvel Studios, for example, recently made a “huge move” out of Georgia in the US to take “a long-term lease” at Buckinghamshire’s Pinewood Studios, said Screen Rant. The forthcoming Spider-Man movie, as well as the next two Avengers movies will be filmed there.

Key to Brollywood’s success has been a “competitive and well-developed tax incentive system”, said City A.M. Not only can producers shooting in the UK claim 40% off their final tax bill, the Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit provides them with a tax credit worth 34% of their production costs and 39% of their visual-effects costs. Indie films with budgets of less than £15 million can also use the Independent Film Tax Credit to claim 53% back. These tax breaks ”are among the best in the world,” said The Hollywood Reporter.

On top of all that, the UK has an established, experienced, cheaper workforce and, crucially for US production companies, said Screen Rant, there’s no requirement, as there is in America, to “subsidise workers’ medical expenses”.

Threat of tariffs

Brollywood’s boom, though, has meant Hollywood’s contraction. Once the “global hub of film, wealth and glamour”, Los Angeles has “become a casualty of the worldwide production plunge”, said The Hollywood Reporter. The number of productions filming in the US in the second quarter of 2024 was down 37% compared with the same period in 2022, according to industry tracker ProdPro.

Enter President Trump. Diagnosing the US film industry to be facing a “very fast death”, he declared his intention to “‘make Hollywood great again’ by wielding his preferred economic weapon – tariffs”, said The New York Times.

His threat of 100% levies on foreign-made films remains just a threat for now – and it is unclear how he would actually implement it – but there is concern that even uncertainty around tariffs could “wipe out” the gains made British film and TV production has made since the dearth of work during the pandemic and then the US screenwriters’ strike.

The worry about tariffs is “really disempowering” and “destabilising”, Marcus Ryder, chief executive of the Film and TV Charity, told The New York Times. “Even a short-term tariff could have a long-term devastating effect on the workforce.”

“Dead of Winter” is “a sturdy action thriller with a twist”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. The curveball in question comes courtesy of Emma Thompson, a much-loved actress but not one you’d normally expect to see in “a movie that leaves your ears ringing with gunshots” and which invites comparison to the Coen brothers’ “Fargo”. She plays Barb, a kindly widow who has set out to a frozen lake in Minnesota to scatter her late husband’s ashes. Barb gets lost on snowy back roads, however, and finds herself at an isolated cabin where, it turns out, a teenage girl is being held hostage.

Realising that she is the girl’s only hope, Barb determines to rescue her, but this is far from simple, said Jessica Kiang in Variety. There’s no phone signal in this desolate spot, her car has broken down and she must do battle with the girl’s “deranged” kidnappers: a scary bearded man (Marc Menchaca) and his equally scary, Fentanyl-lollipop-sucking wife (Judy Greer). Barb, however, proves pretty tough and shifts into “kick-ass” mode, brandishing a gun, dodging bullets and using a hook from the fishing box in the back of her car to stitch up her own wound. It’s twisty and entertaining, but by the time the film’s improbable climax rolls around, the “narrative ice” has worn “so thin that it cracks under the weight of a moment’s thought”.

Yes, it is often “preposterous”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. But Thompson plays Barb with folksy charm (and a Minnesota accent), while effortlessly communicating the character’s “fear, pain, grief and absolute resolve”. It’s “well made, tense, fun”; and if ever you’ve “longed to see an ordinary, sixtysomething-year-old woman brandish a gun or put a claw hammer through someone’s foot, you will not be disappointed”.

Hollywood has long been obsessed with tales of popular actors fighting to keep young rivals from replacing them on the marquee. Exhibit A: “All About Eve.” Now the competition is coming not from fresh-faced ingenues but from an artificial intelligence “actor” named Tilly Norwood.

Norwood is a “British-accented brunette” who does not exist in the real world, said Vanity Fair. The creator, Dutch producer Eline Van der Velden, expects to sign Norwood with a talent agency and hopes it can rival stars like Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson at the box office. Norwood “is not a replacement for a human being but a creative work — a piece of art,” Van der Velden said on Instagram. The backlash from Hollywood has been both fierce and a bit despairing. The arrival of an “AI actor” is the “end of the industry as we know it,” director Luca Guadagnino said on X.

"Guilds, actors and filmmakers” have reacted to Norwood’s emergence with an “immediate wave of backlash,” said The Associated Press. Acting performances should remain “human-centered,” the Screen Actors Guild said in a statement. Film and TV audiences “aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.” The use of AI in film and TV productions was a “major bargaining point” in the 2023 actors strike, said the AP, but its implementation continues to be “hotly debated."

What did the commentators say?

Calling Norwood an actor is “inaccurate, it’s insulting,” Jenelle Riley said at Variety. Van der Velden calls Norwood a “creation,” though terms like “deepfake” or “animated character” might also work. Van der Velden’s references to Portman and Johansson reveal a “grotesque lack of understanding” of how acting works and “precisely what makes those actors special.” Norwood is merely an “attractive face that can repeat lines.” Unlike Johansson, “you’re not going to see Norwood suing Disney for pay she’s owed.” That may be part of the appeal.

Norwood “represents Tinseltown’s death knell,” Vinay Menon said at The Toronto Star. Artificial intelligence is already making it a “scary time” to be a “law student, a young software engineer, a young data analyst, a young accountant” or any other kind of young professional starting a career. The problem? “Human greed.” There is no evidence Norwood “could nail a Nespresso ad,” but AI is “impervious” to the annoyances of human actors who “flub lines” and “have contract demands.” The best that those humans can hope for is that Norwood’s debut is a “box office bomb."

What next?

Finding an agent for Norwood might be tough. Norwood “does not have a future” at some of the best-known talent agencies, said The Wrap. “We represent humans,” said Richard Weitz, the co-chairman of WME Group. Gersh Agency will also not sign Norwood, said Variety. But the issue of AI performance is “going to keep coming up,” said Gersh President Leslie Siebert. “And we have to figure out how to deal with it in the proper way."

After his Oscar-winning performance in “Oppenheimer”, Cillian Murphy could have been forgiven for settling into a career as a Hollywood leading man, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Instead, he has opted to appear in a string of bold indie films, the latest of which is “Steve”, a “gripping and exhausting” drama set on a single day in 1996, and adapted by Max Porter from his own novella.

Murphy plays Steve, the dedicated but frazzled head teacher at “a last-chance” boarding school for “delinquent, damaged teenage boys” in rural England. Steve is battling personal demons, and at work setbacks pile up “on top of disasters”: for starters, a news crew has arrived to shoot a local-interest segment, which has made the boys even harder to control than usual.

To make matters worse, a pompous Tory MP (Roger Allam) has popped in for a photo op. When Steve learns that the council plans to close the school down within six months, events spiral into chaos. “A work of some integrity”, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times, the film aims to show “how society deals with young men on the brink of social exclusion”. But while its agitated camerawork and overlapping dialogue are no doubt designed to communicate “the challenge of too few people” trying to solve too many problems, it ends up dividing the viewer’s attention, making the characters “come across as mere sketches”.

Yet the cast is outstanding, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Tracey Ullman turns up as the deputy head; Jay Lycurgo is superb as a particularly troubled student; and Murphy delivers one of his most “uninhibited and demonstrative” performances to date. Suffused with “gonzo energy” and moments of “bizarre black humour”, “Steve” is an impressive effort.

From “Boogie Nights” (1998) to “There Will Be Blood” (2007) and beyond, Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) has consistently refused to do the predictable thing, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. Yet even by his standards, “One Battle After Another” is an “electrifyingly improbable” proposition – a funny, “Dr. Strangelove”-style political satire cum action thriller, which “features not one, but two of the best car chases in years”.

Set in an alternative America in which migrants are being herded into concentration camps, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a washed-up, long-retired left-wing militant and explosives expert. He is surviving off grid with his 16-year-old daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) when his old nemesis – a white supremacist army colonel named Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) – rematerialises to settle a score and advance his “crazed” new political agenda.

As the hapless Bob is dragged out of his druggy stupor and back into battle, the scene is set for “shootouts, military executions, bank robberies and city-wide sieges”, said David Jenkins in Little White Lies.

Yet the film – which starts with a dazzling prologue in which we meet Bob in his insurgent heyday, when he is pursuing a relationship with a notorious fellow radical (Teyana Taylor) – is one of PTA’s more melancholic works, a study of characters who’ve seen their idealism fade away and, in the years since their revolutionary actions, the return of a dismal status quo.

The film is part high-octane action thriller, part a swipe at Trump’s America, and part a tender family drama, said Kevin Maher in The Times. I’m not sure that it’s PTA’s masterpiece, but it’s terrifically entertaining, thundering “joyously along” for its entire run-time, and a “surefire Oscar frontrunner”.

“The 77th Emmy Awards turned out to be one of the most surprising in years,” said Missy Schwartz in The Wrap. In “an evening of upsets,” HBO’s new throwback hospital drama The Pitt scored the biggest coup by topping the surreal workplace thriller Severance as best drama series. Meanwhile, stars Colin Farrell, Kathy Bates, and Harrison Ford lost acting races to less celebrated rivals, and Seth Rogen’s new Hollywood spoof The Studio, while favored to win best comedy series, shut out previous awards darling The Bear and set a record with a total one-year haul of 13 statuettes. Sure, Adolescence’s victory for best limited series was also no surprise. But the Netflix show about a 13-year-old charged with murder added a “jaw-dropper” when its adult lead, Stephen Graham, denied Farrell a trophy for his title turn in HBO’s The Penguin.

As usual, the evening’s best moments were unscripted, said Alan Sepinwall in Rolling Stone. Veteran actor Jeff Hiller was “stunned and visibly shaking” after winning a supporting actor honor for HBO’s “lovely and underseen” Somebody Somewhere. And Severance supporting actor Tramell Tillman movingly thanked his mother for being his first acting coach. Still, it was Stephen Colbert who “stole the show,” said Rob Sheffield, also in Rolling Stone. Colbert garnered two standing ovations, one when he presented the first award and one when his The Late Show won its category’s Emmy for the first time, and did so on the very network that has announced it is canceling the show. “While I have your attention,” Colbert quipped, “is anyone hiring?”

Host Nate Bargatze devised a running joke for the broadcast that “probably seemed like a good idea on paper,” said Shirley Li in The Atlantic. He declared that each winner would have just 45 seconds to speechify and that every second of overrun would reduce a pledged $100,000 donation to the Boys & Girls Club of America. It all backfired. As an onscreen clock ticked off the thousands that chatterbox winners were costing needy children, many victors panicked. The stunt wound up underlining “just how necessary speeches are to the show’s pageantry” and how “lethargic” the scripted banter of presenters has become. Each time Bargatze mentioned the seconds supposedly wasted, he “undermined the emotions of the speeches while making the Boys & Girls Club come off more as a punch line than a worthy cause.”

And the winners were...

Drama series: The Pitt

Comedy series: The Studio

Limited series: Adolescence

Performers in a drama series: Noah Wyle

(The Pitt) and Britt Lower (Severance)

Performers in a comedy series: Seth Rogen

(The Studio) and Jean Smart (Hacks)