“Sometimes it feels as if all human life is contained in this deeply moving documentary from the veteran American filmmaker Ross McElwee,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. “Grief and loss, marriage and family, work, success, failure and fame are all embraced.”

McElwee started making the film in 2008 as a light-hearted personal piece about an attempt by Hollywood producers to turn his 1986 indie documentary “Sherman’s March” into a drama series for streaming.

That project stalled but, following the death of his 27-year-old son Adrian from a fentanyl overdose in 2016, he went back to the footage he had shot for it – and created this documentary. It also makes use of home-movie clips, previous documentaries that Adrian had appeared in, and Adrian’s own work as an aspiring filmmaker.

“Remake” serves as a eulogy for Adrian, but McElwee also asks whether, in constantly filming his son instead of interacting with him directly, he let him down as a parent.

This is “one of the most outstanding films of this year”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times, and easily the “most unapologetically personal”. And while it seeks to celebrate Adrian’s life, it is desperately sad.

“Every shot of Adrian – a cute, chatty little kid, fishing off a pier, pretending to run a restaurant, and slowly getting older and bigger – becomes painfully charged,” said Leslie Felperin in The Guardian.

“It’s not just that the little kid is gone”; Adrian himself is gone. “Remake” slowly reveals what led to Adrian’s death. The result is a “profoundly moving work”, about parenting and about art, which “lingers in the mind long after the tears have dried”.

Who wants to see the new, nearly four-hour documentary about Elon Musk? Not Musk.

The former trillionaire is threatening a defamation lawsuit over explosive claims in Alex Gibney’s film “Musk.” Social media companies are hesitant to allow promotion on their platforms, and Hollywood is whispering that the tech mogul’s power might keep the public from opportunities to see the film.

What did the commentators say?

“So much for free speech,” said The Hollywood Reporter. Social media platforms YouTube, TikTok and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook all initially declined to run the trailer for “Musk,” though YouTube and Meta later backtracked. (Musk-owned X is not accepting ads for the movie.) A hesitance to provide publicity is a problem for the film because “traction on social media is key” to the success of most modern documentaries.

The social media freeze-out comes amid “concerns” that “political considerations are influencing the rollout” of the film, said The New York Times. “Musk” is set for an Oct. 9 release in the United States, but Universal “has yet to announce any release dates” overseas. The studio counters that it “simply needs more time” to schedule foreign markets.

Audiences at this month’s Venice Film Festival “loved” the documentary that depicts Musk as a “plutocrat with questionable judgment and unchecked power,” Lorraine Ali said at the Los Angeles Times. There was a time when Musk would have been featured as a forward-thinking entrepreneur. Now audiences want to see depictions of the “dark side of wealth, fame and alleged genius.”

What next?

“Musk” is scheduled to stream on HBO Max after its theatrical run. But Gibney is nervous the streamer “may not be inclined to back the film” following the merger of Paramount with HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, said The Atlantic.

Paramount is reportedly seeking funding from Musk to help complete the merger. The tech mogul, meanwhile, is making his feelings clear about the film and its future. “Musk” is a “hit piece that misses,” he said on X. The documentary is guilty of the “fatal sin of being boring for four hours.”

To create the illusion of “movie magic”, cinema has always relied on “smoke, mirrors and sleight of hand”, said Evelyn Richards in National Geographic. With the help of cutting-edge technology and behind-the-scenes brilliance, “monsters tower over cities, broomsticks take flight and hand-drawn sketches become fantastical worlds”. The film industry spans all continents, which means there are many fascinating museums where you can learn all about what it takes to “make the impossible look real”. Here are some of the best.

Lumière Museum, Lyon, France

If you want to understand cinema, it “helps to visit where it all began”, said Richards in National Geographic. The Lumière family’s photographic plate factory is aptly located on the Rue du Premier-Film. This was the setting for “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”, filmed in 1895 by Louis Lumière, and “considered one of the world’s first real motion pictures”. In the “ornate art nouveau” Lumière family home, you can look at early cameras, objects and archive material that chart the moving-picture experiments the Lumière brothers conducted. And the “Hangar du Premier-Film, where that pioneering footage was filmed, fittingly houses a cinema today”.
institut-lumiere.org

Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy

The “vertical museum” in northern Italy “takes visitors on an elevator ride through cinema history”, said Chonx Tibajia in Tatler Asia. It is housed in the “striking” Mole Antonelliana, once the tallest masonry building in Europe. One of the museum’s main draws is its variety: “expect vintage cameras, interactive installations and rare stills, from Italian neorealism to spaghetti westerns”. And, once you’ve climbed 500ft to the top, you can sit back and enjoy an extraordinary, panoramic view – a “real-life establishing shot of the city”.
museocinema.it

Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, US

This new museum, created by Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas, gets “five out of five (death) stars from me”, said Kinvara Balfour in The Telegraph. Its “sleek and spaceship-like” design is “comfortable and spacious” both outside and in: “rather like an Apple headquarters on Mars, with a big garden and some Yoda statues on plinths”. There are more than 40,000 exhibits, including a digital Sistine Chapel, silent films, archive material and, of course, plenty of Star Wars and Indiana Jones costumes, props and vehicles. You can also venture beyond film to see art from Banksy, Norman Rockwell and Diego Rivera. It’s a “once-in-a-century kind of a public offering”.
lucasmuseum.org

Sound of Music Museum, Salzburg, Austria

For fans of the cult 1965 film who wish to “start at the very beginning”, this new Austrian museum “could be a very good place to start”, said Joshua Thurston in The Times. The exhibitions celebrate both the singalong classic and the story of the real-life Von Trapp family, who fled the Nazis in 1938. In the 17th-century Hellbrunn Palace, “where many scenes from the film were shot”, you can see “nearly 450 objects, including props, costumes and recordings of the music”. The highlight is a replica of the pavilion used as a backdrop when Liesl von Trapp and her suitor Rolf Gruber sing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”.
salzburg.info

Ghibli Museum, Tokyo, Japan

Even if you haven’t seen “My Neighbour Totoro” or “Spirited Away”, a tour of this museum dedicated to Studio Ghibli’s work will leave you “mesmerised”, said Gregory Wakeman in Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a “children’s, technology and fine arts museum all rolled into one”, and a love letter to animation. The space is designed by Hayao Miyazaki, the studio’s co-founder, so that both adults and kids “can aimlessly walk around and get lost”. The architecture is “gorgeous”, with bridges, balconies, buildings and a rooftop garden. Superfans can also take a trip to Ghibli Park, four hours south of Tokyo, which “brings to life” many of the settings of Ghibli movies, including Mononoke Village from “Princess Mononoke” (1997) and Howl’s Castle from “Howl’s Moving Castle” (2004).
ghibli-museum.jp

‘Primetime’

Directed by Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★

“I’ve admired Robert Pattinson for years,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Still, “nothing quite prepared me” for his maniacal turn as Chris Hansen, host of the notorious 2000s network reality show To Catch a Predator. In Primetime, a movie “shot to look like something between an unearthed videotape and a bad nightmare,” we see Pattinson’s Hansen become increasingly obsessed with using the promise of sex with minors to lure pedophiles into home settings where they could be confronted on camera. As the TV host unravels, Pattinson shows such “stunning” range that “you can’t imagine any other performer of his generation pulling it off.” At the same time, “it’s not exactly clear what Primetime is aiming for,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time.

The despair conveyed by the actors who play the would-be sex offenders “underscores the show’s legally questionable entrapment methods,” but those characters are still terrible people, and the members of the TV team also come across as immoral and “all-round unpleasant.” Add in the film’s “grubby, grainy look,” and “you feel dirty watching it.” The screenplay’s omissions, inventions, and embellishments “might give viewers a misleading impression of what actually happened, and how,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. But as director Lance Oppenheim advances toward a fatal climax, he’s “going for something stylized, bordering on operatic.” Meanwhile, as strong as Pattinson is, “the film’s secret engine is Skyler Gisondo,” portraying an unknown young actor enlisted to play one of the series’ underage decoys. We’re watching a nice young man lose his soul, and the experience “gets under your skin and stays there.

‘Heart of the Beast’

Directed by David Ayer (PG-13)

★★★

“Spoiler alert: The dog does not die,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Animal lovers will appreciate that David Ayer’s “nimbly directed” new survival drama opens by showing us that the canine co-lead, an Army-trained German shepherd named Odin, survives the multiday ordeal we’re about to witness. We’re left less sure about Odin’s owner, a taciturn special forces soldier played by Brad Pitt. But we’re soon immersed in a tale about the pair crossing 50 miles of Alaskan wilderness after their small seaplane goes down. Though their trying adventure sometimes plays like military agitprop, “you can also just enjoy Heart of the Beast as a nice story about a man and his very good dog.”

Pitt proves to be “the right guy in the right film,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “His acting chops are tested” when, in one dramatic scene, “he has to sob and then laugh with joy.” But mostly he’s required to simply be “tough, self-reliant, and laconically good-humored” as he and Odin encounter perilous cliffs, treacherous rapids, and ferocious bears and wolves that, unlike Odin, are CGI animations. You might not expect a man-dog picture from the director of End of Watch and other studies in urban nihilism, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But Ayer has crafted a movie that’s stirring in its primality. Pitt, meanwhile, does something most actors can’t pull off in a wilderness drama: “He gives a true performance.”

‘Resident Evil’

Directed by Zach Cregger (R)

★★★

In a world littered with terrible video-game movies, “Zach Cregger has finally cracked the cheat code,” said Scott Tobias in The Reveal. Resident Evil, a 30-year-old horror game series, has previously spawned seven film adaptations, but it’s taken the director of Barbarian and Weapons to give us one that actually works. Cregger’s “first and best idea” is to make his movie an exercise in slapstick horror. Weapons’ Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a slacker medical courier who’s working late one snowy night when he suddenly must contend with an outbreak of mutating, tentacle-laden, undead beasties. Bryan has “an affable, slow-on-the-uptake personality,” but he’s also just resourceful enough to survive.

“The film’s first act is its most satisfying,” said Jacob Oller in The A.V. Club. Bryan, tasked with delivering a high-priority package to a city hospital, runs into one nightmare scenario after another. But while “Abrams’ magnetism and Cregger’s cynical wit” never flag, the movie loses energy as the visual effects and story stakes grow. Still, this new Resident Evil feels like “the ideal midnight movie,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. It’s “an adroit balance of the funny and the macabre, the frightening and the ridiculous.” See it “with someone you enjoy scream-laughing with,” and be ready to give Cregger his flowers. He’s now “three for three.” These days, “no one is more consistently turning out first-rate horror movies.”

What surprised me, watching the documentary, “wasn’t the massive scale of the killing, or even the coldness of it, but the proficiency”, said Mahmoud Mushtaha in +972 Magazine (Tel Aviv). The 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers interviewed for “NAZA”, a new film, coolly described destroying people’s lives as if they were discussing “a routine errand”; one likened it to a “video game”.

Their testimonies form the basis of the documentary, whose title comes from an Israeli military acronym for “collateral damage”; it is a term used to indicate how many civilians are likely to die in each air strike. The film shows that, guided by AI and automated surveillance, thousands of Palestinian civilians were knowingly killed during the war in Gaza.

‘Factory-scale’ killing

The film received a record 25-minute standing ovation at the recent Venice Film Festival, where it won a jury prize. And in Israel, it has whipped up a storm of outrage, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Miki Zohar, the culture minister, accused its directors, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, of “treason” and called for them to be stripped of their citizenship, a demand endorsed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

“After seeing it, I can understand why Israel finds it so threatening.” It describes “factory-scale”, AI-enabled targeting. Interviewees claim that “20 Naza” – 20 civilians killed for one Hamas member – is the basic benchmark. But to kill one Hamas fighter, one source claims, 500 civilian deaths were approved. (The Israel Defense Forces denies this.) The film shows how indifference to civilian death shades “into deliberate mass killing”.

The allegations warrant serious scrutiny, said Ariel Oseran on i24News (Tel Aviv). But the very fact that the IDF calculates “Naza” figures shows that it assessed, and tried to minimise, civilian fatalities while fighting the war in Gaza. Besides, some of the film’s claims seem very dubious. According to Hamas’ own figures, the largest single strike during the conflict killed 132 people – far below the 500-death figure claimed in the film.

Reality under attack

We need to examine “NAZA” carefully, said The Jerusalem Post. The interviewees speak anonymously; we don’t know their rank or their motivation for speaking out. Their testimony cannot be a “final judgement on Israeli conduct”. And “if ‘NAZA’’s case is flawed, the flaws should be demonstrated in public”. But attacking the filmmakers does not help. “It weakens Israel’s argument by replacing a factual dispute with a loyalty test.”

In Israel, the debate is being played out “purely on the basis of emotion”, said Eli W. Kowaz in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). No ministers have even watched the film, as it is yet to be released here. Nor have the public; yet there have been angry protests outside one of the filmmakers’ parents’ homes. It shows “how detached Israelis are from the global conversation about the Gaza war”.

While the world outside has seen reams of coverage of the war – and seems to have largely forgotten that it started with Hamas’ massacre of some 1,200 people – Israel’s media has mostly averted its eyes from the suffering in Gaza. Consequently, to many Israelis, the film feels like an attack on their country, and “an attack on their reality”.

When it comes to “Britain’s greatest cultural export”, forget James Bond or Doctor Who, said John Nugent in Empire. The accolade surely belongs to Shaun the Sheep, the “claymation lamb with a heart of gold”, whose “silent-movie-esque antics” have made him a “hero in over 170 countries”.

This is Shaun’s third big-screen outing, spin-offs from the TV series he was awarded after making his debut in a supporting role in the 1995 Wallace and Gromit short “A Close Shave”.

In “The Beast of Mossy Bottom”, Shaun and his flock are desperate to make Jack-o’-Lanterns for Halloween. So when a freak accident knocks out their crop of prize pumpkins, Shaun decides to play mad scientist, and concocts a growth potion. Alas, it goes terribly wrong when his beloved Farmer (John Sparkes) accidentally drinks it and turns into a Bigfoot-like monster who terrorises the local village. Think “Frankenstein” crossed with “The Wolf Man”, “only with Plasticine farmyard animals”.

Aardman has delivered “another excellent family film”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian – “crammed as ever with top visual gags” and blessed with a sparklingly fun screenplay. There are clever references here to everything from “Psycho” and “The Archers” to “The Simpsons”. Look out for a hairdressing salon called Barber Black Sheep and the Stephen King pun hanging outside the pub in Mossy Bottom.

It takes Aardman’s animators a whole day to make just two seconds of footage, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times, but “you would never guess how painful the process is from the high-energy joyfulness of the result”. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed more in a cinema, or wished more that I could stay for a second screening to enjoy it all again.”

Aardman Animations is back with its third feature starring Shaun the Sheep, “the claymation lamb with a heart of gold”, said Empire. The latest, a Halloween-themed film – “The Beast of Mossy Bottom” – sees Shaun and his loyal flock accidentally turn their “beloved if ungainly farmer” into a “Bigfoot-like monster who terrorises the local village”.

It’s 50 years since Peter Lord and David Sproxton set up Aardman, but the stop-motion animation remains “as sharp as ever” and the “commitment to silliness is genuinely admirable”. Here are some of the studio’s other prime films.

Chicken Run (2000)

Like every Aardman film, the premise is straightforward – “The Great Escape” with chickens – but “such is the animators’ ability to humanise the birds’ plight that it turns into an improbably emotional epic”, said The Guardian. Julia Sawalha gives what is arguably her best performance as the “feisty” hen Ginger who “practically forces her dozy fellow chickens to save themselves” from the “dreaded pie machine”. An instant hit, the film proved Aardman could “hold its own” in Hollywood.

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

The first full-length Wallace and Gromit film won Best Animated Feature at the 2006 Academy Awards. The action follows the best friends as they attempt to “subdue an enormous rabbit who terrorises Tottington Hall’s vegetable gardens in the nights leading up to their annual Giant Vegetable Competition”, said Vulture. With a star-studded cast of British actors including Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, it’s packed with humour “teetering on the line between silly and absurd”.

Arthur Christmas (2011)

This festive film about Santa Claus’ clumsy son trying to deliver a misplaced present to a little girl is “impeccably put together and goes down a treat”, said The Guardian. Filled with “terrific action sequences” including a “legion of elf-ninjas slamming millions of presents across the planet on Christmas Eve”, the story is a “little more conventional” than other Aardman films but remains a pleasurable watch.

Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Inspired by Aardman’s TV series about a “clever, enterprising” sheep, the film takes the show’s “bare-bones premise and runs wild with it”, said Vulture. Shaun and his flock must travel to the city to save their amnesiac farmer “before Animal Control nabs them all”. Featuring “kid-friendly sight gags” and “adult-friendly puns”, it’s a fun watch for the whole family. But its meditation “on urban alienation” also makes it potentially “the most emotionally mature film in Aardman’s catalogue”.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

The beloved man-and-dog pair returned for this “perfectly made” feature that sees their relationship start to strain when Wallace “begins relying too much on his robot garden gnome”, said IndieWire. Beyond its “glossy and gorgeous” claymation, what really makes the film stand out is the return of the “terrifyingly evil” Feathers McGraw – the criminal penguin from the greatest Wallace and Gromit short, “The Wrong Trousers”. It’s a must-watch.

“There’s no shortage of worthy films about D-Day,” said David Sexton in The New Statesman. To name just a few, there are “The Longest Day”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “Overlord”, “The Big Red One” – and, of course, we also have TV’s “Band of Brothers”. Yet “Pressure”, from the producers of “Darkest Hour” and based on a play by the actor and writer David Haig, “finds a niche not yet occupied”. Uniquely, the drama focuses on the days immediately before the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, and the “momentous” weather forecasts made by Scottish meteorologist James Stagg. Eisenhower had decided Operation Overlord should go ahead on 5 June. Stagg, however, became convinced the day would be stormy – bringing swell and poor visibility that would spell disaster. But on 4 June, Stagg forecast a calm interlude for 6 June. In Pressure, Stagg, played by Andrew Scott (“the film’s main attraction”) must persuade Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), the “irascible” General Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis), and Stagg’s US counterpart, Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina) to trust the data he has gathered, and delay the seaborne invasion by 24 hours.

“Dramatically speaking, this is all a bit more interesting in theory than in practice,” said Adam White in The Independent. The film is “largely confined to a series of identikit studies and war rooms”, and the eventual recreation of the landings sparks “unflattering comparisons to ‘Saving Private Ryan’, budget constraints on full display”. Thank goodness, then, for Scott, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, in whose “every pained expression, we see the gravity of the situation – and an allergic inability to simply smile and nod”. His performance “really is superb”.

The best psychological thrillers use their characters’ paranoia and uncertainty to create similar feelings of dread and doubt in their viewers. These nine classics skillfully keep audiences guessing while depicting different kinds of waking nightmares, making the protagonists’ traumas our own for a few entertaining hours.

‘Rear Window’ (1954)

Endlessly imitated but rarely, if ever, equaled, director Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” stars James “Jimmy” Stewart as Jeff, a photographer laid up with a broken leg trying to pass the time people-watching from his window during a stifling New York City summer. One night after hearing a woman scream and the sound of breaking glass, Jeff notices his neighbor, Lars Thorwald, behaving strangely.

When Thorwald’s wife is nowhere to be seen the next day, Jeff is convinced that Thorwald murdered and dismembered her. Jeff enlists his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), and his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), to help confirm his suspicions. “Witty, suspenseful, sad, funny and wise,” it is “at once accessible to a mass audience and deep enough to be worth dozens of reviewings and critical analyses,” said Kim Newman at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Vertigo’ (1958)

Possibly the best-known and beloved of director Alfred Hitchcock’s library of psychological thrillers, “Vertigo” is both a literal rendering of the main character’s syndrome as well as a description of what you feel as you watch the film. Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a retired detective with a well-earned fear of heights, who is hired by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to surveil Elster’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who Ferguson instead falls for.

After she jumps to her death in front of him, Scottie sees a woman who looks just like her, making him question his sanity and reality itself. A “strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance,” it “keeps “bringing us back to the same places, turning us in relentlessly on ourselves,” said Terrence Rafferty at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (1990)

Tim Robbins is Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran and postal worker who lives with his girlfriend, Jezzie (Elizabeth Peña), in mid-1970s New York City. When he begins to experience hallucinations and seemingly unexplainable phenomena (like being told by his VA clinic that they have no record of him being a patient), he comes to believe that a haunting memory from the war might help explain the strange things occurring around him.

This disturbing film was prescient in its deployment of trauma as a plot device in psychological thrillers as well as a unique entry in the anti-war canon. Director Adrian Lyne’s movie “enters into the hallucinations of a desperate mind and lives there,” while it “evokes a paranoid-schizophrenic state as effectively as any film I have ever seen,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Paramount+)

‘Open Your Eyes’ (1997)

Memory, or the absence thereof, plays a prominent role in so many of the most effective psychological thrillers, including director Alejandro Amenábar’s “Open Your Eyes,” which was remade in the U.S. as “Vanilla Sky.” After he meets Sofía (Penélope Cruz in her breakout role) at a party, César (Eduardo Noriega) is disfigured in a car crash that kills his ex-girlfriend, Nuria (Najwa Nimri).

Sofía can’t bear to see him, and during one evening of self-medication, he awakes into what appears to be a different reality, with his good looks restored and an adoring Sofía at his side. Which reality is the real one? This is an “ambitiously complex, disturbing and terrific-looking thriller” whose “nightmarish, demanding plot giddily leaps from past to present, from fantasy to reality and back again,” said Jonathan Holland at Variety. (HBO Max)

‘Memento’ (2000)

The twisty, mind-bending hit that began director Christopher Nolan’s journey to Hollywood royalty, “Memento” stars Guy Pearce as Leonard, a man whose difficulty forming new memories means that he has to scribble notes on his skin and mirrors. While looking for his wife’s killer, he gets involved with Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a bartender who may be helping or manipulating him. Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) is a cop with his own agenda.

Told in reverse chronological order, “Memento” is more than its central gimmick. Nolan’s “neo-noir puzzle box plays like one of the key artworks of the 21st century, predicting an era where reality is more a personal, selective construct of comforting biases than a widely agreed-upon set of facts,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)

Director David Lynch’s audacious, trippy classic is like two movies in one. You think you’re watching a dreamlike story about an aspiring actress named Betty (Naomi Watts), who helps and falls in love with Rita (Laura Harring) after a car wreck leaves her with amnesia.

But the plot loops and falls in on itself, rendering the dreamlike first half open to interpretation, and leaving viewers to sort through its many possible explanations. A film that offers “certain truths about the grotesque desires at the heart of the American project,” it simultaneously asks viewers to “interrogate ourselves, again and again, in search of some kind of absolution,” said Suzanne Enzerink at the Los Angeles Review of Books. (Prime Video)

‘Caché’ (2005)

Anne and Georges Laurent (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) are comfortable Parisians who begin receiving videotapes of the house they share with their teenage son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), being surveilled. Then more arrive, with increasing menace, turning husband and wife against one another and leading to inevitable revelations, both about an incident from Georges’ childhood as well as France’ brutal colonial past. Renowned director Michael Haneke brilliantly “transforms the viewer into both the author and the participant” in its central mystery and the film stands as an “astounding unification of form and content,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Prime Video)

‘Black Swan’ (2010)

Natalie Portman is Nina Sayers, an obsessively dedicated ballerina who wins the role as the lead in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake for the New York City Ballet after the aging Beth (Winona Ryder) is forced into retirement. But she faces a new rival in the mysterious Lily (Mila Kunis), who triggers hallucinations, jealousy and desire in Nina.

Director Darren Aronofsky’s chilly mind-bender is mesmerizing, terrifying and perplexing in equal measure. A “witchy brew of madness and cunning,” it moves deftly between being “deadly serious, downright goofy and by turns shocking, funny and touching,” said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Watcher’ (2022)

In this slow burn, Maika Monroe is Julia, a young woman struggling to figure out what to do with herself when she moves with her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), to the Romanian capital of Bucharest, where there is a serial killer on the loose. Convinced that a neighbor is stalking her, she tries in vain to convince Francis, and the police, that she is in danger.

Director Chloe Okuno builds an atmosphere of dread, keeps the audience guessing and subtly underlines the film’s message about gaslighting and misogyny. It makes viewers “just as anxious as Julia, staring into the faces of every man that walks by,” and stands as “one of the best thrillers of this style to come out in decades,” said Stephen Rosenberg at Horror Geek Life. (AMC+)

‘Onslaught’

Directed by Adam Wingard (R)

★★

“If you’ve seen this type of movie before, the makers of Onslaught are betting you’ll want to see their ersatz rehash, too,” said Simon Abrams in RogerEbert.com. A sci-fi action-horror flick that might have made more sense if it was released in the 1980s, this “empty-headed” siege drama pits an Army-vet single mom against three government-engineered super soldiers. But while it delivers “some satisfyingly full-throated gore effects,” Onslaught “isn’t thoughtful enough to make you care about its paint-by-numbers story beats” and does nothing with its potentially timely vision of the American military unleashing mayhem on U.S. citizens.

At least it gives the “magnetic” Adria Arjona her first solo lead role, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. Playing an ex-sniper now raising a young daughter in a trailer park, the Andor and Hit Man star “gets to shoot, quip, and chainsaw her way to the center of the frame” when the super soldiers escape from a military lab and begin killing every human in sight. Still, there’s a limit to what Arjona can do with the role because “the situations she’s placed into are not quite inventive enough.” Director Adam Wingard, who’s returning here to indie filmmaking after two Godzilla vs. Kong movies, has called Onslaught a B movie with A-movie polish, but “I’d call it a B-minus success.” Though “the violence is sometimes spectacular,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap, “the actual onslaught part of the movie doesn’t begin until surprisingly late.” More surprisingly, “the film ends just when it’s getting good.”

‘The Dog Stars’

Directed by Ridley Scott (R)

★★

“At this point in his career, Ridley Scott can churn out a feature like The Dog Stars in his sleep,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “The question is, why did he want to when it boasted so little originality?” The director of Alien and Blade Runner, now 88, is “the rare artist who knows how to visually paint on a big-screen canvas,” but that talent isn’t enough to save this “by-the-books” post-apocalyptic drama about an isolated young widower with a dog, a small plane, and, eventually, a second chance at love.

The movie, which bombed on its opening weekend, works best as a character study, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Despite its occasional gunfights and the presence of Josh Brolin, Margaret Qualley, and Guy Pearce in supporting roles, “the loneliness of the grieving survivalist is the main preoccupation,” and Jacob Elordi gets “his Clint Eastwood moment,” proving he could make a career of playing “steely, still-waters-run-deep” types. When the film focuses on Elordi’s dreamer and Brolin’s more distrustful survivalist, it’s “on reasonably solid ground,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. But even those characters “never quite transcend their outlines,” making Scott’s adaptation of a 2012 novel feel “fundamentally hollow.” Still, because any director could have underestimated how much the novel relied on its interiority, “I’m happy this 88-year-old director continues to churn out movies.” In fact, “I look forward to whatever comes next.”

“There’s a marvellous tenderness and generosity to this elegant tale of autumnal regret; an intimate movie acted with effortless grace by Willem Dafoe,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an ageing New Yorker who works for the post office, living alone in a small, book-filled room, drinking and playing pool with his friends in the evening.

One day, he is amazed to be accosted by “a dandyish young hipster” outside his apartment building; this is Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who has found Saxberger’s long-since out-of-print volume of poems. He declares him a neglected genius; he and his rich, “callow and excitable” literary friends take up his cause, and want to use their connections to get him republished.

Amused, and more thrilled than he wants to let on, Saxberger finds the attention of these young people dizzying – particularly because one of them, a beautiful and volatile actress (the “superb” Greta Lee), has “a kittenish crush” on him.

Director Kent Jones has great fun with these “achingly mannered” aesthetes, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. They call themselves the “Enthusiasm Society”, and describe their meetings as “fermentations”; one of them even “wears a cape”. But “drama pulses under the comedy, too”, and a “cool astringency” grows.

“Late Fame”, adapted from a novella by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, is “razor-sharp on class and art”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Unearned riches, it tells us, “are mostly for the rich”.

In the end, “it’s Dafoe’s film”. It’s a reminder that he’s often at his best when he’s not at full stretch in “loony mode” (as in “Poor Things” or “The Northman”). “He’s in nearly every frame, quiet and serious, achingly sympathetic. It’s worth watching just for him.”

With the kids back in school and movie theaters buzzing with their best audience numbers in years, September might be the perfect time to catch a matinee. These six upcoming features should be on your list of possibilities.

‘Fall 2: Deadpoint’

2022’s “Fall” was an unexpected low-budget hit with a simple premise — two best friends climb to the top of a television broadcast tower in the middle of nowhere, get stranded and must figure out a way down. In the sequel, Jax (Harriet Slater) links up with her late sister Shiloh’s friend Luce (Arsema Thomas) to embark on an insanely dangerous trail in Thailand, where they are soon stranded by a rain-driven rockslide. With a “great” concept, directors Michael and Peter Spierig’s film “looks like it’ll have a ton of high-tension moments,” said Anthony Nash at Coming Soon. (in theaters Sept. 2)

‘The Uprising’

Andrew Garfield is billed simply as “The Ploughman” in the new film from director Paul Greengrass (“The Bourne Supremacy”). It tackles the historically consequential 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England against King Richard II (Woody Norman), driven by overtaxation and oppression. Cosmo Jarvis stars as Wat Tyler, the real historical figure at the heart of the uprising. The film, including a siege of London filmed in the signature shaky-cam Greengrass style, has “modern parallels in the anger, inequality and desire for justice that fueled the 14th-century uprising,” said Sophie Miller at Rolling Stone. (in theaters Sept. 10)

‘Bad Apples’

Featuring one of those film concepts whose poor taste is part of the pitch, “Bad Apples” stars Saoirse Ronan as Maria, a struggling young elementary school teacher who inadvertently imprisons Danny (Eddie Waller), the class bully, in her basement when neither the principal (Rakie Ayola) or Danny’s father, Josh (Robert Emms), seem capable of controlling his destructive behavior. She then plays dumb as a massive law enforcement operation is launched to find him. This “warped, needling and sometimes bitterly funny” film is an “odd, wicked little amorality tale,” said Guy Lodge at Variety. (in theaters Sept. 18)

‘If I Go Will They Miss Me’

Lil Ant (Bodhi Dell) is a cerebral 12-year-old with a Greek mythology obsession whose father, Big Ant (J. Alphonse Nicholson), returns from prison and immediately assesses his son as soft and sets about trying to toughen him up, much to the consternation of Lil Ant’s mother, Lozita (Danielle Brooks). Director Walter Thompson-Hernández’s film, full of metaphors and magical realism, unfolds like a cinematic poem. A “gorgeously composed” coming-of-age story, it is “defined by a bracing sense of wonder and an evocatively delivered humanism,” said Robert Daniels at Roger Ebert. (in theaters Sept. 18)

‘The Musical’

Looking to take its place alongside the great education satires like “Election,” director Giselle Bonilla’s movie follows Doug (Will Brill), an elementary school’s embittered theater teacher who uses his annual production to sabotage efforts to become a blue ribbon institution by staging a deranged musical about 9/11.

All because he discovers the object of his affections, Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), is involved with the slick Principal Brady (Rob Lowe). A film about “kids play-acting a previous generation’s trauma,” its “exuberant, hand-made quality” plays like a student film, though in the best possible way,” said Bilge Ebiri at Vulture. (In theaters Sept. 18)

‘Primetime’

Moviegoers of a certain age surely remember the brief run of a show called “To Catch a Predator” hosted by Chris Hansen in which actors play underage kids who lure predatory men in conjunction with law enforcement, amounting to a nationally televised series of sting operations. “Primetime” tells this pretty insane story as a “dark-but-oddly-zany bio-thriller” starring Robert Pattinson as Hansen, said Iana Murray and Jack King at GQ, and its “cultural relevance and basis on real events could be accessible enough to take Pattinson all the way to the Academy Awards.” Skyler Gisondo and singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers costar as an actor and a decoy in the stings. (in theaters Sept. 25)

‘Coyote vs. Acme’ 

Directed by Dave Green (PG)

★★★

In Wile E. Coyote’s latest misadventure, the hapless would-be carnivore “won’t stop until he defeats [checks notes] Warner Bros.,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. In this “gut-bustingly hilarious” romp, Wile E. finally pauses in his Sisyphean pursuit of the Road Runner to try something new: He hires a lawyer to sue the Acme corporation over its defective mail-order products, and Acme turns out to be the parent company of the studio that owns every Looney Tunes character. The really crazy part? Warner Bros. once tried to shelve this movie to earn a tax write-off, only to be forced by a public outcry to sell it to a tiny distributor.

Coyote vs. Acme mixes animation with live actors, said Jacob Oller in The A.V. Club, and it proves to be “slyly intelligent” about what winning means when an underdog takes on an impossibly powerful foe. Will Forte, “maybe the best he’s been since Nebraska,” plays Wile E.’s scruffy lawyer, a guy who’s spent a career chasing tiny payouts for cartoons who’ve been pancaked or blown up. The animation doesn’t match Forte’s level, but it contributes well enough to the movie’s “enjoyably explosive” slapstick humor. “Truth be told, the plotting isn’t quite up to the strength of the premise,” said Justin Chang in The New Yorker. But the “slight slackness” in the narrative allows for cameos by Tweety, Daffy, and other old friends. Most importantly, Coyote vs. Acme isn’t a cash grab. It’s “a fleet, funny throwback, made by artists with an obvious reverence for the original Looney Tunes universe.”

‘Buddy’

Directed by Casper Kelly (R)

★★★

“Buddy is everything you could want from a midnight movie,” said Christian Zilko in IndieWire. A mock horror tale that riffs on the chilling cheeriness of 1990s children’s TV shows like Barney, it features a giant, talking orange unicorn named Buddy who begins murdering the kids in his own series’ cast. In a separate world, a mom played by Cristin Milioti begins digging into buried Buddy history when she comes to suspect she once had a third child, and “the results are electric.” Unfortunately, after a “side-splittingly funny” opening 20 minutes, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post, Buddy struggles to maintain momentum.

Director Casper Kelly made his name with Too Many Cooks, a 2014 parody of a sitcom’s opening credits sequence, and he’s brilliant here when sending up shows that kids once loved but “upon reflection were nightmarish hellscapes that are surely now paying for therapists’ vacation homes.” Because no real scares are built into the Milioti storyline, however, the movie becomes “rather one-note.” But both threads are studies in the effects of living in “profound denial,” said Sam Adams in Slate, and the cast helps sell the whole package. Keegan-Michael Key, who voices the unicorn, “never drops the aw-shucks lilt from his voice” even when Buddy’s at his most murderous. And while Buddy’s crimes are “brutal, even gory,” Kelly’s movie works because “he knows he doesn’t have to turn the dial too far” to make TV’s phony paradise feel menacing.

‘Healthcare is more badly broken than political leaders admit’

Marj Halperin at the Chicago Tribune

While “rising costs are a barrier for too many, even those who can afford comprehensive health insurance are finding money can’t buy you a timely appointment,” says Marj Halperin. Americans in cities are “now in much the same bind as patients in rural areas who have long found limited doctors available for routine care, with specialists often a few hours’ drive away.” It is “time for political leaders to spell out a strategy to speed in the opposite direction.”

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‘A wildly popular movie meets the film world’s most revered label’

Sophia Nguyen at The Atlantic

“‘KPop Demon Hunters’ seems to have completely overtaken culture,” says Sophia Nguyen. But “even the most ardent fans likely did not anticipate the mega-hit’s next big merch drop: a disc release from the Criterion Collection, home to some of cinema’s most distinguished titles.” Some of the “label’s longtime devotees greeted the addition of ‘KPop Demon Hunters’ with an eye roll,” but “Criterion has good reason to widen the net: Netflix, Apple and Amazon make and distribute a significant share of films.”

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‘Trump’s tariffs prove even Canada can’t afford to be nice to the United States anymore’

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board

It “fell to Canada, a country famous for friendliness, to demonstrate the limits of an age-old friendship with the United States,” says The Philadelphia Inquirer editorial board. After a “decade of dealing politely with President Donald Trump’s manic ricocheting between trade agreements and trade warfare, supplies of northern niceness are sorely depleted, and rightly so.” Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “defiance in the face of his neighbor’s unprovoked bullying should inspire other traditional American allies to abandon appeasement.”

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‘Meta’s $18 billion settlement could reshape social media for young people’

Tom Jones at the Poynter Institute

Meta “reached a landmark settlement and agreed to pay up to $18 billion to 47 states” to settle claims it “endangered children through addictive features,” says Tom Jones. Meta’s promised changes are “meant to curb endless scrolling, which can interrupt sleep and have other negative effects on young people’s health and well-being.” The “smart move for Meta was to settle,” as a “major challenge for all social media companies is verifying the ages of their users.”

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Falling in love is close to a universal human experience. So it’s no surprise that audiences return again and again to see glamorous movie stars go through both the mundane and sublime beats of getting swept away — and sometimes shattered — by love, as in these ten brilliant films.

‘Casablanca’ (1942)

“Casablanca” may be unique in the history of cinema for its timelessness and cultural staying power. Humphrey Bogart is Rick Blaine, a gimlet-eyed bar owner in Vichy-governed Morocco, who must choose between his desire for his former lover, Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman), and his ability to use letters of transit for her and her husband, Laszlo (Paul Henreid), an anti-Nazi resistance leader. The iconic film “continues to fascinate audiences in a way that is beyond explanation, except to resolve that the picture seems to result from and fully encompass that somewhat fantastical notion of Movie Magic,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘Roman Holiday’ (1953)

Audrey Hepburn plays Ann, the glamorous princess of some unnamed European kingdom, who is on an exhausting goodwill tour in Rome and slips out for some fun and respite. When she falls asleep on a bench, she is attended to by journalist, Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck), who accompanies her on a tour of the city, planning a scoop but eventually falling for her. The lovingly rendered portrait of Rome has inspired countless romantic getaways to the city. The film “takes an understated, dignified approach worthy of its royal protagonist” and rather than hitting the familiar beats of the romantic comedy, it ultimately “swerves to something more poignant,” said Caroline Siede at The A.V. Club. (Prime Video)

‘Doctor Zhivago’ (1965)

Director David Lean’s follow-up to “Lawrence of Arabia” is another sweeping historical epic, this one set in revolutionary Russia, where doctor and poet Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif) and Lara (Julie Christie) circle one another before, during and after the First World War and the tumultuous Bolshevik revolution.

Their simmering chemistry carries the narrative through war, hardship, romance and tragedy, set to the now-beloved score by Maurice Jarre. It is a “timeless tale, outliving the era when it was set and the era when it was made,” and even with its 3 hour and 20 minute running time, is an “unforgettable experience,” said William Cook at the BBC. (Prime Video)

‘The Way We Were’ (1973)

Director Sydney Pollack’s “The Way We Were” tells the story of the love between the handsome, conservative Hubbell (Robert Redford) and the rabble-rousing communist Katie (Barbra Streisand), set against the backdrop of the early 1950s Hollywood blacklisting affair. They meet in college, marry and then struggle to reconcile their politics when they move West so that Hubbell can pursue his dreams as a screenwriter. It’s “one of those romantic melodramas that can send you to bed in inconsolable tears,” said Steve Vineberg at Critics at Large, yet is nevertheless a “deeply lovable film. (Prime Video)

‘Before Sunrise’ (1995)

The simple premise of director Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” is part of its enormous charm. Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meet on a Vienna-bound train. Taken with each other, Celine agrees to continue talking with Jesse in Vienna before his morning flight. Their one, magical, conversation-driven night together is now the definitive Gen X romance. A film that “isn't just about 23-year-olds in love, but about the condition of being 23 years old,” it also provides a “breathtaking end to, simply put, one of cinema's finest depictions of the delightful immaturity of being young and being in love,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘In the Mood for Love’ (2000)

In perhaps the most beautiful film ever made about unconsummated love, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung Chiu-wai) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung) are neighbors in an apartment building, devoted, or at least loyal, to their spouses, who they realize are having an affair with each other. Chow and Su gradually develop feelings for one another, even re-enacting how they believe their spouses’ affair unfolded. Director Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood For Love” is “ravishing beyond mortal words,” said Ed Gonzalez at Slant magazine, and its protagonists “come to resemble butterflies caught in a rainbow-tinted industrial web.” (HBO Max)

‘Love & Basketball’ (2000)

Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps play Monica and Quincy, best friends, aspiring basketball stars and eventual lovers who are torn apart and later brought back together. Told in four segments, the story takes them from childhood rivalry to heady high school romance through college and their respective professional careers. In addition to the consistently riveting relationship story, “Love & Basketball” is also a superb sports film well ahead of its time by taking women’s professional leagues seriously. The movie is, “at its heart, a passionate love letter to basketball and friendship and Black love and ambition,” said Roxane Gay at Current. (Prime Video)

‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)

Jim Carrey plays Joel, a man who decides to have the memories of his relationship with Clementine (Kate Winslet) digitally erased after discovering that she did so first. During the procedure he realizes he doesn’t actually want to forget and races through a prismatic rendering of his own memories to preserve them. It’s a movie that “makes the unique argument that failure is an essential, precious part of romantic experience” and in so doing “celebrates the essential untidiness of love, the beautiful messes two people can make together,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (2019)

Writer-director Céline Sciamma’s searing love story follows Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a painter newly arrived at a gorgeously rendered, remote seaside town in 18th-century France. She is hired to paint a wedding portrait for Héloise (Adèle Haenel), and the two fall madly in forbidden love. It’s a film that is “about the erotic, electric connection between women when they find their desire for creative experience fulfilled in each other, but it is equally about the powers of art to validate, preserve and console after a romance is over,” said Rachel Syme at The New Yorker. (HBO Max)

‘Past Lives’ (2023)

In director Celine Song’s “Past Lives,” Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) and Na Young (Greta Lee) are childhood best friends whose bond is severed when Na Young moves with her family to Canada. They later rekindle their relationship as adults from a distance before Na Young (who becomes “Nora” in Canada) marries Arthur (John Magaro). When Hae Sung visits Nora in New York more than a decade later, they grapple with their unrealized love and the struggle not to hurt Arthur with their feelings for one another. Its “mix of nostalgia, love and remorse” is what makes the film “so effective and lovely,” said Monica Castillo at Roger Ebert. (Prime Video)

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is “a title so good you feel the film to which it’s attached should really have to earn it”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, and “happily it does”.

Starring Gillian Anderson as “fading horror queen”, it is both “extravagantly funny” and “recklessly bizarre”. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an “earnest yet self-loathing” director who has been asked by a Hollywood studio to reboot “Camp Miasma”, a fictional 1980s US slasher franchise.

The original is now regarded as “embarrassingly non-PC”, chiefly because its villain, Little Death, is the spirit of a gender-nonconforming child killed by other campers. As a celebrated, self-styled “queer filmmaker”, Kris is just the person to make the rebooted film: she’s a horror nerd who has been obsessed with the original since childhood, particularly with Squeak, its “final girl” (the last female character left alive). She tracks down Billy Presley (Anderson), who played Squeak and now lives, in creepy “Norma Desmond-esque” seclusion, at the former summer camp where the original was filmed.

As Kris tries to convince Billy to appear in the reboot, the pair form a bond, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. And as their relationship deepens, fiction and reality begin to blur, and the film turns into something both “sexy” and “slaughterous”.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” “won’t be to everyone’s taste”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in the Daily Mail – the title gives a fairly good sense of whether it’s for you or not. “It gets messy. It gets pretentious.” And it’s not particularly scary (the violence is “almost cartoon-like”). But it is beautifully shot, funny and “marvellously camp – in both senses of the word”. “Either way, Anderson is terrific.”

Filmgoers love sports movies for the same reason that networks linger on players celebrating championships after the big game, then cut to the losers to capture their heartbreak: Sports narratives are innately moving. These nine superb dramas keep audiences riveted because they are about much more than winning or losing.

‘Bang the Drum Slowly’ (1973)

John D. Hancock’s largely forgotten “Bang the Drum Slowly” is the story of a friendship between New York Mammoths star pitcher, Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty), and his unsophisticated catcher, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), a frequent target of his teammates’ cruelty who receives a terminal diagnosis and plays brilliantly through it for one last season.

“From here on in, I rag nobody,” Henry announces at the end of this quiet, moving character study, a mantra more people could stand to adopt. Its “mixture of fatalism, roughness, tenderness and bleak humor” hit home despite the lack of “telegraphed big moments on the field,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Prime Video)

‘Rocky’ (1976)

For a niche sport, boxing has produced an outsized share of the greatest sports movies, including “Rocky,” a movie that still inspires countless people to run up the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sylvester Stallone (“Rambo”) is Rocky Balboa, a down-on-his-luck Philly boxer who gets an unexpected shot at greatness when reigning champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) chooses him to fight in the exhibition bout that comprises the film’s final set piece. A movie that features “some of the most wildly exciting fight footage ever put on the screen,” its most winning element is Rocky himself, a “character of enormous appeal and charm,” said Arthur Knight at The Hollywood Reporter. (Netflix)

‘Raging Bull’ (1980)

The turbulent life of boxer Jake LaMotta gets the biopic treatment in director Martin Scorsese's instant black-and-white classic. Robert De Niro plays LaMotta as almost tortured with kinetic jealousy and bottomless insecurity, at one point pummeling another boxer in front of his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), because she had said he was handsome.

“Raging Bull” is also a groundbreaking film in the depiction of domestic violence, one of the first commercial films to take the scourge seriously. This “brutally nihilist tale” is told in a “stunning, dreamlike series of episodes in and out of the ring,” with the boxer ultimately “brought down by his own toxic machismo,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (MGM+)

‘Hoosiers’ (1986)

Gene Hackman delivers one of the best performances of his long, storied career as Norman Dale, a fallen college basketball coach who steps in to lead the high school basketball team in tiny Hickory, Indiana. Tasked with transforming a motley crew of unseasoned players into a contender, he hires the recovering alcoholic Shooter (Dennis Hopper) as assistant coach, and the team gels and starts winning.

“Hoosiers” sounds like a hundred other sports films. But its attention to detail sets it apart, produced in large part by casting mostly unknown local actors as the players. In director David Anspaugh’s film, the “emotions it asks us to feel are genuine and fairly achieved,” so its “artful familiarity becomes a balm instead of a stumbling block,” said Kenneth Turan at ESPN Classic. (YouTube)

‘Bull Durham’ (1988)

Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) is a baseball groupie who picks one ballplayer a year on the minor-league Durham Bulls to sleep with and tutor. She picks the gloriously named Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), a fireballer with an unfortunate lack of depth and wisdom but comes to prefer the aging veteran Crash Davis (Kevin Costner).

Full of timeless observations like Crash noting that “strikeouts are boring and besides that they’re fascist,” it is uproariously funny but also succeeds as both a romance and a baseball film. Written and directed by former minor-league ballplayer Ron Shelton, it is a “long, smart kiss to baseball” with the “loping narrative rhythm of a baseball season,” said Richard Corliss at Time. (Mubi)

‘Million Dollar Baby’ (2004)

After spending the bulk of his career on Westerns and vigilante films like “Dirty Harry,” Clint Eastwood underwent an astonishing transformation into a widely respected directing auteur. Here he also stars as Frankie Dunn, an aging, dyspeptic coach who agrees to take on the unpolished Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), as she seeks to rise through the ranks of women’s boxing.

The film’s turning point is a tragedy during a fight arranged by Frankie, making its second half more of a dirge than a sports film. A “rueful rumination on sin and absolution,” Eastwood’s “striking framing has the muscular simplicity and directness of Ernest Hemingway's prose,” said Colin Kennedy at Empire. (Paramount+)

‘Moneyball’ (2011)

A movie about the data analytics revolution in baseball is an unlikely contender for one of the best sports movies, but director Bennett Miller’s take on Michael Lewis’ 2003 book gets it done. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the woebegone Oakland Athletics, who hires data wizard Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to revolutionize the team’s scouting and gain an edge over the team’s better-funded peers. Featuring a “sharp, sleek script,” it is as much about a “fundamental cultural shift and the rise of the information elite” as it is about baseball, said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. (Netflix)

‘The Fire Inside’ (2024)

Ryan Destiny (“Grownish”) anchors “The Fire Inside” as Claressa Shields, the two-time Gold Medal-winning boxer from Flint, Michigan, and her coach, Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry). Written by Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and directed by Rachel Morrison in her feature debut, it is both an unflinching look at the obstacles faced by a community that would soon be plunged into a national news-worthy water crisis and an unusually well-shot sports film whose boxing sequences jump off the screen. It asks a question rarely posed in sports films: “If you don’t come from privilege, what happens when you fight your way to the top, only to realize that it looks a lot like where you started?” said Alissa Wilkinson at The New York Times. (MGM+)

‘Marty Supreme’ (2025)

One of the only feature films about the niche sport of ping-pong, “Marty Supreme” is a character study of the distinctly unlikeable antihero Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), one of those people who leaves a wake of chaos, heartbreak and destruction wherever he goes. He also happens to be a truly gifted table tennis player who pursues his dream of becoming the world’s top-ranked with savage self-interest, running cons on everyone from his own love interest, Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), to Gwyneth Paltrow’s depressed, aging film star Kay Stone. Buoyed by Marty’s “endless slippery charm,” it is also a “very unconventional coming of age story,” said Kieran Battams at Voice. (HBO Max)

‘The End of Oak Street’

Directed by David Robert Mitchell (PG-13)

★★★

“I can’t fathom how The End of Oak Street actually exists,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. The movie is, after all, “a perfect example of what the big studios should be doing right now: making original spectacles, ideally ones in which Anne Hathaway fires a rifle at a velociraptor.” Hathaway plays a suburban mom whose neighborhood is suddenly and mysteriously transported from 1982 to prehistoric times, putting family and neighbors at the mercy of hungry dinosaurs. The movie marks the big-budget debut of It Follows director David Robert Mitchell, and “the glee he takes in the carnage he inflicts on this stretch of suburbia is infectious.”

Mitchell “doesn’t have any loftier ambitions for The End of Oak Street than spinning a tale of familial bonding through dino fighting,” said Keith Phipps in The Reveal. “That’s mostly OK,” especially because the four actors playing the Platts, including Ewan McGregor as the dad, “establish a believable family dynamic” as they overcome dysfunction to pursue survival. But given the rote marital woes and shortage of thrilling set pieces, Oak Street turns out to be “one of those movies that’s good enough to make it hard not to wish it was just a little better.” Whatever its flaws, it’s “easily the best homage-slash-ripoff of a Spielberg movie in ages,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Unsurprisingly, “Hathaway is the linchpin, pirouetting from exasperation to affection to hysteria to steeliness in a way that would inspire a fist bump from The Odyssey’s Penelope.” The Oscar winner is “in a serious groove right now.” We and Mitchell are lucky to have her.

‘The Rivals of Amziah King’

Directed by Andrew Patterson (R)

★★★

Matthew McConaughey has appeared in only two movies since 2019, and you can see why the 56-year-old star signed on for this one, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The role of a gregarious, bluegrass-playing beekeeper “fits his scraggly aging-bad-boy redneck charm like a glove”; at the same time, the film itself is “different from anything he’s ever done,” although different “in ways both good and not as good,” with a second half that betrays the promise of the first. The movie “intentionally never settles on one particular tone,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. As McConaughey’s Amziah King is pulled into the investigation of a honey heist and reconnects with a young Choctaw woman who once was his foster child, director Andrew Patterson “cross-pollinates a bluegrass musical, a beekeeping drama, a Native American Western, and a winding Mark Twain journey up a river.”

The daughter figure, played by newcomer Angelina LookingGlass, assumes lead duties once the title character falls. “There’s too much movie,” in short, “but isn’t that better than none at all?” It helps that Kurt Russell plays the villainous businessman who instigates the mid-story shift, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Even so, this picture belongs to its headliner, who delivers “a performance so great it looms over everything—and serves as a reminder that when he’s really cooking, McConaughey is much more than just alright.”

Westerns are often thought to glorify the violence and vigilantism of the 19th-century towns on the expanding American border. But the best films of the genre, including these eight superb entries, generally interrogate rather than reinforce that mythology.

‘My Darling Clementine’ (1946)

Director John Ford’s classic — perhaps better known to modern audiences by way of 1993’s retelling of the same story in the excellent “Tombstone” — is well worth revisiting. Henry Fonda stars as Wyatt Earp, one of three brothers en route to California when they encounter Old Man Clanton and his sons.

While Wyatt goes into the rough-and-tumble town of Tombstone, the Clantons murder his brother James. Wyatt then takes the open job of marshal in Tombstone and sets his sights on revenge — and on Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), the ex-fiancee of local gambler Doc Holliday (Victor Mature). The movie’s themes of transition from lawlessness into civilization on the frontier are explored with “elegance, poignancy and dexterous economy,” and the film builds its world by “eschewing clear-cut character rivalries in favor of more complex emotional and social configurations,” said Matthew Connolly at Slant Magazine. (Prime Video)

‘High Noon’ (1952)

Gary Cooper is Marshal Will Kane, who receives word that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), an outlaw he banished to prison, is coming back on the noon train with his gang to exact revenge. Kane’s wife, Amy (Grace Kelly), begs him to reconsider, but he feels duty-bound to show up.

He tries to rally support from the town’s citizens but finds that they would prefer to let him face the music alone, a plot machination widely regarded as a commentary on how Hollywood treated those blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Director Fred Zinnemann’s “unusually circumspect and politically loaded” film “stands out as the proto antiwestern, questioning the conventions of a genre long before doing so was in vogue,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (MGM+)

‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962)

Part romantic triangle, part political parable about the underbelly of pushing the frontier westward, director John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” might be his finest work. Told in the form of an elaborate flashback, the narrative follows newly minted lawyer Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) from his arrival in a freewheeling town in unincorporated territory through his deepening friendship with Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), their love of Hallie (Vera Miles) and his final confrontation with the nefarious Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).

The give and take between the institutionalist Ransom and the take-matters-into-your-own-hands Tom mirrors long-running debates in American society about law and order and justice. The film is a “somber reflection on what was lost when education and morality” moved westward with the U.S. government and its “civilizing influences,” said Sight and Sound. (Prime Video)

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)

Director Sergio Leone popularized a new subgenre of frontier cinema: the spaghetti Western, named as such in honor of the Italian filmmakers who dominated the format, including Leone himself. The final and best entry of Leone’s trilogy, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” is an origin story for Clint Eastwood's sharp-witted antihero “Blondie.” It’s a preautomotive road movie, as Blondie, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) race across the Civil War-era American West in search of a trunk full of Confederate gold. Featuring characters “united by their greed and virtually shorn of any humanity,” it “makes a mockery of any conception of good and evil,” said John Naughton at Empire. (YouTube)

‘The Grey Fox’ (1982)

Much less well known than most films on this list, director Phillip Borsos’ “The Grey Fox” stars Richard Farnsworth as Bill Miner, a stagecoach bandit who heads to the Pacific Northwest in Canada to rob trains when he is released from prison after thirty years. He falls in love with a radical, Kate Flynn (Jackie Burroughs), as he tries to stay ahead of Detective Seavy (Gary Reineke).

Setting the film on the Canadian frontier rather than the American sets it apart from its peers, and the more languid pacing and character-driven plotting continue to distinguish it as a mannered classic. Featuring a “smorgasbord of wide shots of the Pacific Northwest,” the movie’s “slower pace works, challenging the audience to appreciate not only the nuanced performances of its actors” but also the “natural beauty,” said Thaddeus Buttrey at Loud and Clear. (Kino Film Collection)

‘Unforgiven’ (1992)

Clint Eastwood directed 40 films, but it is this riveting Western that will be remembered as his masterpiece. He also stars as Will Munny, a retired outlaw with a checkered past who is talked into pursuing one last bounty. He enlists his friend, Ned (Morgan Freeman), to help track down and kill the men who brutally scarred a prostitute named Delilah (Anna Thomson). To do so, he must go through Big Whiskey’s corrupt sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman).

“Unforgiven” is full of both quotable quips and savage violence, in the process upending sentimental notions about the American frontier. A film that explores a “range of moral ambiguities and profound historical questions,” it also challenges the “history of the American West and furthermore Eastwood’s own role in defining the West in cinema,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Prime Video)

‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ (2007)

Despite containing a plot summary in its title and a tepid reception when it was released, director Andrew Dominik’s meditative film manages to be both suspenseful and insightful. It narrates the last months of the notorious Jesse James (Brad Pitt), whose gang is riven by suspicion and rivalry. Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) is a young gunslinger who joins James’ gang along with his brother, Charley (Sam Rockwell), but grows resentful of the legendary outlaw. Offering a “kaleidoscope’s prismatic tunnel vision on the Old West,” this is an “immaculately conceived, perfectly cast epic” that “patiently and meditatively observes an outlaw’s obsolescence,” said Nick Rogers at Midwest Film Journal. (Prime Video)

‘True Grit’ (2010)

Once upon a time, the Hollywood landscape was littered with Westerns of varying quality, but today they are somewhat scarce, making gems like directors Joel and Ethan Coen’s remake of the 1969 original all the more notable. When her father is murdered by the bandit Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), 14-year-old Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) hires U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track him down.

The hard-drinking, washed-out Cogburn is joined by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who is after Chaney for a different reason. It “adheres to many of the familiar touchstones of the Western genre, while remaining unmistakably Coenesque” and full of “all kinds of wonderful exchanges, unforgettable scenes and moments of weirdness,” said Ryan Lambie at Den of Geek. (Paramount+)

“Those of us pining to see more Sian Clifford since the end of ‘Fleabag’, in which she played Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s fierce sister”, have been rewarded with this “barnstorming” mockumentary comedy, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Clifford plays Lady Isabella, a “haughty, but troubled” aristocrat who lives on a grand country estate (the movie was filmed at Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk), where she hosts an annual children’s talent competition, Stately Stars. Desperate to prove that she has artistic talent of her own, Isabella decides to compete against the youngsters, staging an elaborate multimedia performance, which includes poetry, action art and photographs of her “apparently dead body around the grounds”.

On hand to witness the mayhem is Sam (Laurie Kynaston), a “pushy, insecure young director” who shows up at the stately home to make a documentary. Funny, poignant and increasingly bizarre, “Lady” plays like a psychedelic “B-side to Saltburn”.

There is plenty of David Brent in this “frequently hilarious” film, said Kevin Maher in The Times, along with “bits of Alan Partridge and a dash of ‘This Country’”. The twist comes when the action suddenly veers into science fiction, and Isabella begins quite literally to disappear. The metaphor is clear – Isabella has become invisible to her husband, her peers and herself – and at times, her desire to be seen is almost “unbearably poignant”.

The shifts “from quirkiness to horror to tragedy” aren’t always seamless, said Gayle Sequeira in Sight and Sound, and some of the jokes go on too long. But by the end, the silliness gives way to something “meaningful and life-affirming”. “‘Lady’, much like the aristocrat at its centre, is an odd duck: erratic, but possessed of a tender heart and scrappy spirit.”

Whether the ’80s were “morning in America” or the beginning of the end for the post-war political consensus, there is no question that the decade produced its share of landmark cinematic achievements as well as seat-filling blockbusters. These nine memorable films include huge box office hits as well as gems known mostly to dedicated cinephiles.

‘The Shining’ (1980)

Novelist Stephen King famously despised director Stanley Kubrick’s take on his story of hard-drinking writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who slowly loses his mind when he serves as the winter caretaker at the snowy Overlook Hotel with his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Beyond its now-iconic scenes, including Danny scribbling “murder” backwards on a door and Jack announcing “Wendy, I’m home!” as he chops his way through a door with an axe, Kubrick’s visionary film continues to lure in new generations of viewers with its mixture of technical wizardry and delirious performances. It’s a film that succeeds in “elevating horror to a different plane, removing its camp wiggeries and bogeymen to infuriate and bedazzle,” said Ian Nathan at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Blade Runner’ (1982)

Harrison Ford, at the peak of his fame, plays Rick Deckard, one of the titular agents who hunt and retire rogue synthetic “replicants” in a bleak, polluted future Los Angeles set in 2019. Deckard is tasked with eliminating a band of rebellious replicants led by Roy (Rutger Hauer) who have returned to Earth to confront their creator, the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation.

In the process Deckard meets and falls in love with Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant programmed to believe that she is human. Director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece raises still-relevant questions about the nature of synthetic consciousness, wrapped in a stylish noir casing. A “visionary” film that presents the “future as a black market, made up of scrambled sordid aspects of the past,” its unforgettable visual canvas gives it its “place in film history,” said Pauline Kael at The New Yorker. (YouTube)

‘Amadeus’ (1984)

A gripping biopic of Mozart (Tom Hulce), told from the perspective of the envious Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), “Amadeus” is one of director Milos Forman’s two masterpieces, along with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Salieri plots to destroy the arrogant, often-unhinged Mozart, upend his relationship with Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones) and steal his final composition, “Requiem.” It gives us a “surprisingly true Mozart — young and tragically flawed, riddled with childlike tendencies whilst possessing the beautiful voice of God through his music” while “exploring themes of legacy, success, betrayal and the nature of talent,” said Victoria Vireikyte at Voice. (Prime Video)

‘Paris, Texas’ (1984)

Director Wim Wenders helms this slow, often surreal drama about a man, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), who suddenly appears in the desert four years after going missing following the dissolution of his troubled marriage to Jane (Nastassja Kinski). His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément), have been raising Travis and Jane’s son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), in Los Angeles, and Travis decides he wants to try to find Jane in Houston. It’s a film that “shreds the emotions, leaving the viewer as raw and wounded as Travis,” while also being a “wholly American piece of storytelling in that the country’s ethos is rooted in self-discovery and redefinition,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘Back to the Future’ (1985)

The ’80s were full of enjoyable pulp science fiction films, including E.T., but it is director Robert Zemeckis’ “Back to the Future” that left the most enduring mark on cinematic culture. Michael J. Fox is Marty McFly, a high school student whose mad scientist mentor, Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd), accidentally sends him back in time to the 1950s in a DeLorean.

While there, Marty inadvertently interrupts the meet-cute that brought his parents together and threatens to snuff out his own existence if he can’t fix it. A movie that turned Fox into a superstar, it is the “modern era’s zippiest comedy about the collapse of the American dream” that might also be “Hollywood’s richest, cleverest blockbuster,” said Amy Nicholson at the Los Angeles Times. (Starz)

‘The Sacrifice’ (1986)

While certainly not the best-known 1980s film about nuclear war, celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice” remains one of his finest. Erland Josephson is Alexander, an actor and journalist celebrating his birthday at his family’s Swedish estate when he and his family get word that World War III has broken out, with much of the world likely already destroyed.

Desperate to avoid the coming nuclear holocaust, he agrees to a bargain with God — to give up all of his earthly loves and possessions if the disaster can be reversed. An “extraordinary and rich film with profound depths,” it represents a “bravely uneasy capstone to a titanic career,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘Full Metal Jacket’ (1987)

Hollywood’s belated reckoning with the disastrous Vietnam War reached its apotheosis in the late 1980s, with two classic films released within a year of one another, first “Platoon” in 1986 and then Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” in 1987, which follows a platoon of Marines including razor-witted Private Davis (Matthew Modine) and much-ridiculed Private Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio) from basic training through the ordeal of combat in Southeast Asia. The first half of this “astonishingly assured piece of film-making” depicts the “steady dehumanization of Marine recruits” at the hands of the abusive Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) while the second half builds to a tragic climax that is a “mini-inferno of sniper fire and gushing bullet wounds, hard to live through but impossible to forget,” said John Patterson at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989)

Writer-director Spike Lee’s groundbreaking film made him a household name, and Lee was only the second Black writer nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. He stars as Mookie, a young father and delivery man at the eponymous neighborhood pizza joint run by Sal (Danny Aiello), a flashpoint for racial tensions between the largely black community and the restaurant’s racist owner. When Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) is killed by police after a confrontation with Sal, the neighborhood erupts in violence. Lee’s seminal film is a “virtuoso act of creation, a movie at once realistic and symbolic, lighthearted and tragic, funny and savage,” said Roger Ebert at the time at The Criterion Collection. (YouTube)

‘When Harry Met Sally’ (1989)

The standard against which all modern romantic comedies are measured, director Rob Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally” is more than the sum of its well-known vignettes, including Sally (Meg Ryan) publicly demonstrating to Harry (Billy Crystal) the ability to fake an orgasm, and Harry’s unforgettable riff about how men and women can’t be friends. Harry and Sally are thrown together for a car trip from Chicago to New York after they graduate from college and dance around one another for years into their 30s as friends before taking the plunge into a romantic relationship. A movie that “treasured its characters, atmosphere, and setting,” it is also a “collection of finely hewn set pieces — nearly all of which pivot around nothing more than a conversation,” said Sonia Saraiya at Vanity Fair. (Prime Video)

There are many stretches from Anthony Bourdain’s “gritty” and “well-chronicled” life that could work for a biopic, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. But in “Tony”, Matt Johnson sticks with “just one summer” in 1975, when the celebrity chef was 19 – long before he found fame and fortune.

Based on the opening chapters of Bourdain’s bestselling memoir, “Kitchen Confidential”, the film opens as Tony – Dominic Sessa, the “deeply talented” young actor from “The Holdovers” – leaves home after failing to get a prestigious summer writing fellowship. He follows the “girl he fancies”, Nancy, to Cape Cod and gets “self-pityingly drunk” when he finds out she has a boyfriend.

After being thrown out of an oyster shack, a kindly chef (Antonio Banderas) gives him a job washing dishes and Tony finds himself in the “cramped, all-male milieu of flying expletives and cruel practical jokes”.

Johnson effortlessly mixes the “toxic camaraderie” of these scenes with montages of Bourdain’s slow-but-steady daily improvements. “It plays like ‘Rocky’ with kitchen knives”.

Gradually, Tony’s “insufferability” is “hosed away”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, and Sessa dazzles in the “contradictory” role of the “charismatic sad-sack”. Johnson has made a “funny, sun-kissed biopic” that is “spry” and “enjoyable” despite the “complicated brief”. “Tony” is aimed at those who know that the chef’s life story will lead to both “glory and tragedy” (Bourdain died by suicide in 2018). The film “isn’t the whole story”. But that’s “probably fitting” – the chef was “nothing if not a spinner of yarns”.

I found it a bit “strange”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Tony” is an “entertaining” watch but the “feelgood trajectory is compromised by what we know” about Bourdain’s troubled life and death. A scene in which Banderas tells Tony about a chef to Louis XIV who “killed himself in shame when the key ingredients didn’t arrive for a banquet” is “presumably there tacitly to acknowledge Bourdain’s heartbreaking fate. It sits oddly.”

Mostly, though, it’s a “rollicking, surprisingly sunny coming-of-age tale”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times. “Picture ‘The Bear’ with less angst and more innocence.” Johnson manages to capture the “blistering, sizzling energy” of Bourdain’s memoir and Leo Woodall is “succulently charismatic” as Tony’s “cocksure, coke-snorting” co-worker, Sal.

But the real star is Sessa who “nails Bourdain’s annoying young Turk braggadocio” while giving us a peek at the “unformed vulnerability beneath”. In all, it’s a portrait of the fiery young chef that’s “spicy, salty, and just sweet enough. I’d happily have second helpings.”

‘Tony’

Directed by Matt Johnson (R)

★★★

Though the new Anthony Bourdain biopic is merely an amuse-bouche, it’s “a memorably tasty one,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. The movie covers only early chapters in the celebrity chef’s name-making memoir, Kitchen Confidential, and because it’s mere prologue to Bourdain’s New York City arrival and globe-hopping TV days, it’s “a tad slight.” Still, as it shows us a cocky but rudderless 19-year-old Bourdain falling hard for the rowdy life of the kitchen during a 1970s summer in Provincetown, Mass., “there’s a spontaneity and genuineness to Tony,” and its familiar coming-of-age story beats have an “endearing prickliness.”

Dominic Sessa is excellent in the lead role, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Making good on the promise he showed in 2023’s The Holdovers, the young actor “nails the contradictory aspects of a slippery character.” When his broke Bourdain lucks into a job washing dishes at a seafood eatery, he’s torn between the hard-partying ways of an oyster shucker played by a terrific Leo Woodall and the focus shown by Antonio Banderas as the operation’s fatherly owner. The movie’s only weak link is an underdeveloped romantic subplot involving CODA’s Emilia Jones. For compensation, we get the “quiet miracle” of Banderas’ performance, said Dana Stevens in Slate. The older actor’s chemistry with Sessa “makes this gentle, low-stakes story simmer along like a cauldron of chowder.” Even if Tony weren’t a biopic about a food-world god who died too soon, “it would be a movie worth watching.”

‘Late Fame’

Directed by Kent Jones (Not rated)

★★★

Though the new Willem Dafoe movie is a modest little drama, it’s “also fairly heartbreaking,” said Tim Grierson in The A.V. Club. Dafoe plays Ed, a Manhattan postal worker well past 60 whose one book of poetry, written when he was young, has been rediscovered by a group of dandy 20-somethings who welcome him into their fold and encourage him to write again. While the movie “has its narrative stumbles, especially near the end,” Dafoe “has rarely been so tender, playing a man allowing himself to dream again for the first time in forever.”

The aging star is well paired here with Greta Lee, who plays Gloria, the literary circle’s only female member, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Gloria is a cabaret singer and Lee “gives the vampish and self-consciously artificial character a magnetic inner life.” In fact, Lee and Dafoe are so good together that it’s a shame the rest of the young poetry devotees are mostly treated as ludicrous poseurs. “They’re ultimately too cartoonish for a film that otherwise feels so lived-in.” But this isn’t a mean movie, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. It’s an “affectionately told” story about “a certain sort of wistful foolishness,” the kind that grips some groups of young people generation after generation. Dafoe’s Ed just happens to be open-minded enough to enjoy being part of all that again.

Anime is a unique version of animated storytelling indigenous to contemporary Japan, a style that exploded in international popularity during the 1990s. With the ongoing proliferation of streaming services, international audiences have greater access to the large and diverse catalog of anime films than ever before, including these eight classics.

‘Grave of the Fireflies’ (1988)

A harrowing anti-war film, “Grave of the Fireflies” follows Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi) and Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi), siblings struggling to survive the final cataclysms of World War II after their mother is killed in the firebombing of Kobe. They move in with an indifferent, cruel aunt and then escape to an empty bomb shelter, where they try to survive by the light of fireflies.

To say that “Grave of the Fireflies” does not soften the cruelty of the children’s fate is putting it lightly, but even in sorrow the movie offers viewers breathtaking beauty. Watching the film is an “emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation” and leaves its haunting impression “not by reproducing reality but by heightening and simplifying it,” said Roger Ebert. (Netflix)

‘Akira’ (1988)

Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) is a teenaged motorcycle gang leader in 2019 “Neo-Tokyo,” a postnuclear apocalypse megalopolis. When his friend Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki) is abducted by military elites bent on turning him into a supernatural killer, Kaneda tries to rescue him. But Colonel Shikishima (Taro Ishida) finds that Tetsuo could become as powerful as the being Akira, rumored to be capable of destroying the world. Director Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira” is “one of the most important flashpoints in the history of animation,” and its depiction of a “rotting society held together with cruelty and desperation” has ongoing relevance today, said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ (1989)

Kiki (Minami Takayama) is a 13-year-old witch-in-training who leaves home for the first time with her talking cat, Jiji (Rei Sakuma). Settling into a seaside hamlet, she uses her new broom-riding skills to work as a kind of analog flying Uber Eats for the baker, Osono (Keiko Toda), who gives her a free place to stay while she trains.

Kiki also befriends a boy, Tombo (Kappei Yamaguchi), who yearns for her ability to fly — until she loses her magic altogether. Whimsical, beautiful and quietly moving, it is a coming-of-age masterpiece. Director Hayao Miyazaki’s “timeless” movie is “made for young hearts but also has a way of growing up with us, taking on new meaning when viewed at different life stages,” said Melanie McFarland at Salon. (HBO Max)

‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995)

Major Motoko Kusanagi (Atsuko Tanaka) is an agent with Public Security Section 9, which tracks cybercriminals in the dizzyingly futuristic New Port City circa 2029, where people can wire their brains directly into the Internet. She’s tasked with apprehending The Puppet Master (Iemasa Kayumi), a hacker who appears to be tapping directly into these networked minds and altering memories. Director Mamoru Oshii's “hugely influential cyberpunk classic” is a heart-racing thriller that also “dialed deep into the potential of the information age, advances in robotics and subsequent philosophical questions” about digital consciousness, said Ben Travis and Luke Bradley at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997)

In 15th-century Japan, Ashitaka (Yoji Matsuda), the prince of a dying kingdom called Emishi, is infected by a forest demon and travels west searching for a forest god that provides a cure. Instead, he stumbles into a war between the rapacious smelters of Iron Town, led by Lady Eboshi (Yuko Tanaka) and a coalition of forest spirits and creatures led by the wolf god, Moro (Akihiro Miwa), and her human daughter, San (Yuriko Ishida).

Crafted by Hayao Miyazaki, it is a film that “stands against intolerance in all its forms, political or social, and demands coexistence and understanding from its audience,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. It is also a “sprawling, perceptive wonder” that “could not be told through another medium.” (HBO Max)

‘Spirited Away’ (2001)

By winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003, “Spirited Away” gave an art form known to Americans mostly through Saturday morning cartoons and the Pokémon phenomenon the kind of prestige previously reserved for high-end Disney and Pixar films. While 10 year-old Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi) and her parents are en route to their new home, they take a wrong turn and wind up in what at first appears to be a derelict amusement park.

There, her parents are transformed into pigs and Chihiro is thrust into a vibrant but terrifying underworld. She is forced to take on a job in a spirit world bathhouse, as she tries to retrieve her parents and return them to their human form. The film is generally regarded as director and animator Hayao Miyazaki’s finest work. A “tremendously original and beautiful film,” it gives viewers the feeling of a “nightmare that’s not at all frightening but instead marvelous in its alienness,” said MaryAnn Johanson at Flick Filosopher. (HBO Max)

‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’ (2006)

If you associate anime with only one kind of genre — futuristic science fiction or magical realism — you’re in for a surprise with the moving coming-of-age story “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.” When adolescent Makoto (Riisa Naka) discovers that she can travel back in time, she uses her new powers to hold her friendships with two boys in suspended animation, traveling back again and again to short-circuit any developing romantic feelings and to preserve their childhood relationships. This “sweet, credible study” has a “fantastical premise” and succeeds with “subtle character studies rather than large-scale effects,” said Kim Newman at Empire. (HBO Max)

‘The Colors Within’ (2024)

Anime filmmaking remains dominated by men, making Naoko Yamada’s “The Colors Within” a triumph on multiple levels. It not only plants a flag for women in the industry, but as a gentle musical driven by character development rather than plot, it is also a departure from the kind of storytelling most commonly associated with the art form.

Totsuko (Sayu Suzukawa) is a boarding school outsider who has a kind of synesthesia, seeing other people’s auras as vibrant colors. When she links up with fellow misfits Kimi (Akari Takaishi) and Rui (Taisei Kido), they form a band and face the challenges of adolescence and growing up together. Yamada’s film “paints an exquisite rainbow of adolescent blues in this gentle tale of music and friendship,” and its “musically diverse songs beautifully channel the personalities of each member,” said Phuong Le at The Guardian. (HBO Max)

What does Enid Blyton’s Land of Spells have in common with the Bay of Pentos in “Game of Thrones”? asked The Guardian. Both were portrayed by the same “sunny archipelago in the Mediterranean”: Malta.

The EU’s smallest country, “no bigger in size than Sheffield”, has over the past decade become “one of the most popular places” for American and British filmmakers to work. It has hosted more than 30 film and TV productions in each of the past three years, including “Jurassic World Rebirth” and Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II”. The “microstate” just south of Sicily has stood in for Greece, southern France and even the Caribbean – in Guy Ritchie’s upcoming “Viva la Madness”.

Malta is “really punching above its weight”, said Adrian Wootton, the chief executive of the British Film Commission. It’s been “very aggressive, in a positive way”.

Small but mighty

Over the last century, the “small but mighty” republic has become “an appealing global destination for major film productions”, said Variety in 2024. After the Hollywood actors strike the previous year, requests to film came in “like crazy”, said co-founder of Valletta Pictures Joshua Cassar Gaspar. “The strikes didn’t affect us because the independent productions kept going, and many of us in Malta service TV shows, which were also unaffected.”

Providers were also less “Hollywood-dependent” than some European countries, such as the UK, said the news site. And productions benefited from a “hefty 40% tax rebate”. It’s probably “the most generous cash rebate in the world”, the producer of “Gladiator II” said on Deadline.

“Every euro that we invest in the rebate, the industry generates back four,” Malta’s film commissioner Johann Grech said in June. Today, film production is one of Malta’s “most effective” sources of investment, he said in MaltaToday. According to an independent report published this year, the industry contributed 0.28% of Malta’s gross value added between 2005 and 2017. That reached a record 2.16% in 2023. Since 2018, film production has contributed €1.2 billion to the GDP.

And “the economic effect is felt throughout the country”, driving infrastructure development, boosting hospitality and tourism, and attracting “numerous high-net-worth individuals” to the island. Film production is “one of Malta’s economic engines”.

A parallel universe?

As ever with “generous rebates”, there has been “some local pushback”, said Deadline. Malta’s infrastructure is “being tested to the limits as its cities, towns and villages regularly turn into film sets”, said The Guardian. Road closures and parking restrictions “have become a bugbear” for locals.

Critics say Malta’s rise as a filming location has “come at the cost of neglecting local cinematic talent”. The Malta Film Commission is “focused on courting international productions”, while domestic production is dependent on the arts council and its much smaller budget. Examples of Maltese films reaching international audiences are “few and far between”. With local crews in demand from international companies, Maltese directors “often find themselves being outbid by Hollywood”.

“There’s a bit of a parallel universe,” said Teodor Reljić, a Malta-based screenwriter. “People in servicing are thriving, but local filmmakers can’t pay a DOP [director of photography] because they are expecting ‘Jurassic World’ fees.”

“It is tempting to sit back and believe the local film industry to be ‘strong’ simply because many foreign productions shoot in Malta,” said producer Malcolm Scerri Ferrante in The Times of Malta. But volume alone “does not constitute a robust film industry, and certainly not an indigenous one”.

The 1990s were a period of transition for the film industry, seeing the rise of both smaller, independent studios and the spectacular growth of home movie-watching. Despite this tumult, the decade produced countless films of enduring artistic and commercial significance, including these eight memorable classics.

‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)

Both Anthony Hopkins as the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as FBI trainee Clarice Starling turn in iconic performances in Jonathan Demme’s downbeat procedural. She is tasked with interviewing Lecter, imprisoned in an asylum for the criminally insane and one of the few characters in the film who doesn’t treat her with knee-jerk misogyny, who may have insights that could help catch “Buffalo Bill,” an active serial killer.

The film’s bleak aesthetic shaped a generation of noir-ish procedurals on the big and small screens. It endures as a classic because it is a “multifaceted interwork of classical storytelling, horror conventions and procedural standards, together reshaped into both a feminist landmark and a powerful study of transformation and identity,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (MGM+)

‘Boyz n the Hood’ (1991)

The late director John Singleton’s drama follows three childhood friends, Tre (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), Doughboy (Ice Cube) and Ricky (Morris Chestnut), first briefly as children and then as teenagers struggling to navigate the endemic violence and poverty of South Central Los Angeles. As one of the first mainstream films to depict the plight of urban neighborhoods with sympathy, humanity and nuance, it stands as a true cinematic landmark. A film that “showed how white supremacy set the conditions that ended in neighborhoods devastated by crime and, ultimately, violence,” it depicts an almost “post-apocalyptic world,” in which “what was destroying their landscape wasn’t an alien invasion or a virus” but racism, said Lawrence Ware at The New York Times. (Starz)

‘Groundhog Day’ (1993)

While time loops are a now-familiar part of the sci-fi landscape, director Harold Ramis’ “Groundhog Day” is the first English-language feature film to highlight the concept. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, an irritable, cynical weatherman sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to report a story about the town’s quaint groundhog ceremony.

Trapped there by a massive snow storm, he realizes he is living the same day over and over again. After fruitlessly trying to kill himself in increasingly clever fashion, he gradually falls for his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell). By avoiding “sentimentality and smalltown stereotypes in favor of one genuinely hysterical set-piece after another,” it is “not only one of the finest comedies of the 90s, but actually remains fresh, funny and original after repeated viewings,” said Caroline Westbrook at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994)

Director Quentin Tarantino’s era-defining, endlessly quotable and propulsive thriller popularized the use of nonlinear narratives in mainstream filmmaking. The impossible-to-summarize plot follows multiple sets of characters over the course of three (very, very eventful) days.

Tarantino uses a “chapter” structure to tell the loosely intersecting tales, including one about philosophizing hit men Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), sent on a job for their boss, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), that goes hilariously awry. Uma Thurman’s career-making turn as Marsellus’ wife, Mia, is just one of many heart-stopping performances in a movie that is simultaneously ultraviolent and side-splittingly funny. An “absolute classic,” it is a project that “set the bar for cinema cool and redefined independent filmmaking,” and in the process “forever changed Hollywood,” said Jordan Crucchiola at Wired. (Paramount+)

‘Big Night’ (1996)

Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci are brothers Primo and Secundo, immigrants operating a failing Jersey Shore restaurant during the 1950s. Primo is the stubbornly perfectionist gourmet chef, a character who prefigures the 2000s-era celebrity chef boom, and Secondo is the slick businessman who regards the popular Olive Garden-esque restaurant up the road, run by Pascal (Ian Holm), with envy while carrying on a secret affair with Pascal’s wife, Gabriella (Isabella Rossellini).

Pascal, who covets Primo’s culinary genius, tells Secundo he can get jazz great Louis Prima to make an appearance at their restaurant, and the brothers plot one last big, extravagant dinner to save the business. A film of “great wisdom and delight,” it is “about food not as a subject but as a language — the language by which one can speak to gods, can create, can seduce, can aspire to perfection,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Paramount+)

‘Breaking the Waves’ (1996)

A film that was a kind of spiritual precursor to the aesthetically austere and hugely influential Dogme 95 film movement, Danish director Lars von Trier’s haunting masterpiece also shaped a generation of independent filmmakers. When oil-rig worker Jan (Stellan Skarsgard) is paralyzed in a work injury, he encourages his new wife, Bess (Emily Watson), to sleep with other men and tell him about it.

Believing this to be a kind of divine mission, she presses on with her struggle despite hostility from church elders and her sister-in-law, Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge), until a truly unforgettable ending leaves viewers stunned. A “raw, crazy tour-de-force,” it dares to “fuse true love with lurid exploitation and pure religious faith,” said Janet Maslin at The New York Times. (Mubi)

‘The Big Lebowski’ (1998)

Joel and Ethan Coen made several 1990s classics, including “Fargo.” But it is “The Big Lebowski” that remains the enduring cultural touchstone. Jeff Bridges is Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, a middle-aged burnout whose apartment is ransacked by nihilist enforcers who are actually after a different person with the same name.

When The Dude tries to get reimbursed for the damage from the intended Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), he gets caught up in a lurid slacker-noir kidnapping caper, encountering a series of memorable goofballs including Lebowski’s daughter, Maude (Julianne Moore). A film that “warns us from the start not to expect any of its narrative threads to lead anywhere,” it takes the audience on a “labyrinthine route followed solely for the diversions encountered along the way,” said Jonathan Romney at Sight and Sound. (Netflix)

‘The Matrix’ (1999)

The brilliance of directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s “The Matrix” has been diluted over time by its inferior sequels and many imitators, but its inventively choreographed action sequences and dystopian narrative endure. Keanu Reeves plays Neo, a computer hacker who discovers that his reality is an illusion maintained by rogue AI overlords who keep humans in a state of permanent suspended animation while harvesting them for resources.

Neo joins a rebellion led by Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) while evading Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). The movie is also the source of the concept of “red-pilling” that plays such a prominent role in contemporary cultural discourse. “The Matrix” is a film of “immense scale and complexity” that “understood where things were headed far better than any film did at the time,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (Peacock)

While promoting his latest blockbuster, filmmaker Christopher Nolan listed scholar Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” as one of his influences. Now, Wilson’s scathing critique of Nolan’s cinematic take on the epic poem has gone viral, inspiring additional backlash from critics and academics alike. Amid the heated controversy over one of the year’s biggest films, there may be a silver lining to the discourse.

Why Wilson trashed Nolan’s adaptation

Wilson’s expertise in the classics is undeniable. She is also no stranger to backlash. In 2017, she became the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” from ancient Greek into English, an interpretation “widely celebrated in academia and the literary world” as “comprehensive, modern in sensibilities and faithful” to Homer’s almost 3,000-year-old classic, said The New York Times. Her translation departs from the “masculine framing used by her male predecessors,” a move that has “subjected her to online harassment and misogyny from men and far-right figures.”

Before Nolan’s movie premiered, Wilson was “pumped” to see how the epic played out on the big screen, she said on The New York Times’ The Daily podcast. However, after seeing Nolan’s adaptation, Wilson said she would be “ashamed to have written any part of this script” at The London Review of Books. The film had “nothing convincing to say,” it lacked “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth,” and the “writing is abysmal,” Wilson added. It was a “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle” comparable to an “elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display.”

Most of the nonwhite actors “play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” Wilson said in her LRB review. She has since expressed regret for this “paragraph about the uses of the POC actors — who are all great, but IMO under-utilized,” Wilson wrote on social media. She still thinks the film “largely wastes its strong cast,” but she “framed it badly.”

A debate reminiscent of the golden era of critics

One of the most prominent figures to come to Nolan’s defense against Wilson was Joyce Carol Oates, a retired professor of the humanities and a prolific writer who has won a National Book Award. Wilson’s “tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said on X. Instead of “disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” Wilson, who has “benefited enormously from Nolan’s film,” speaks in the “crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.” Within the world of translators, Wilson’s review “seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text.” One would expect a translator to be “just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”

Wilson used “baffling arguments” to “flay” Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem, classicist Theo Nash said at Slate. She criticizes Nolan for deviating from the text, “as if the filmmaker’s choices were not also an act of interpretation.” The close attention that informs her translation is “lacking in her reading of the movie,” and the “idea that Nolan might have something new to say about ‘The Odyssey’ is denied.”

Whether or not you agree with Wilson’s perspective, it’s “always exciting to read a particularly full-throated pan,” said critic Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture. Even if you don’t believe Wilson did her job as a critic, she has “done her job as a writer,” which is to “be a compelling read who makes her argument unmistakably clear.”

Figuring out “who is punching down here is really interesting,” VanArendonk added. Since Wilson has “academic authority” and is “writing with such vigor,” it is “easy to forget that she has less power” than Nolan, a Hollywood darling. That is also “part of the pleasure of the conversation.” Wilson is not interested in “softening any of it.” Still Nolan’s the one who “walks away unscathed, no question.” Of all the topics we could watch people fight about online, “how someone adapted ‘The Odyssey’ is such a good one.”

‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’

Directed by Jane Schoenbrun (R)

★★★★

“There is absolutely no one else, alive or dead, who could have made a feature that looks and feels like this one,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Jane Schoenbrun, the nonbinary trans director of I Saw the TV Glow, has followed up that acclaimed 2024 release with an “often spellbinding” film that’s part slasher sendup, part “future cult lesbian classic.” Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a queer indie filmmaker who’s been handed a chance to direct a reboot of a 1980s slasher series whose mass killer was genderfluid. But when Kris decides she’d like the final girl from the original film to appear in the reboot, the “entrancingly sexy” pas de deux that ensues steers the tale in a surprising direction.

Once Einbinder and costar Gillian Anderson are brought together, said Richard Brody in The New Yorker, the heart of this movie becomes a “sharply written” two-hander, “with plenty of scope for the two leads to shine.” Anderson’s Billy lives like a recluse, but she’s funny and insightful, and she helps Kris discard her sexual inhibitions while Schoenbrun is simultaneously weaving in “gleefully gory” scenes from the fictional earlier Camp Miasma movies. Anderson, incidentally, “appears to be enjoying her foray into sapphic high-camp tremendously,” said Jessica Kiang in Variety. But then every actor here seems to be having fun, even as the movie’s second half “uses the silliness of slasher convention to get to some fairly profound places,” particularly about culturally constructed obstacles to women’s experience of pleasure. The result is Schoenbrun’s “most accomplished, most persuasive, and most playful movie yet.”

‘The Samurai and the Prisoner’

Directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Not rated)

★★★

The “detached, dispassionate” tenor of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new film “recalls the work of another Kurosawa,” said Tim Grierson in the Los Angeles Times. A hit this summer in Japan, The Samurai and the Prisoner shares with Akira Kurosawa’s Ran “not just a feudal-Japan setting but also an older man’s dim view of our species’ vain stabs at glory through conquest.” It’s 1578, and a seasoned warrior played by Masahiro Motoki is trapped in his besieged castle after defy ing a fearsome warlord. But fans of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s great horror films “may be thrown off by his new movie’s relatively muted approach.”

They may also be thrown by the title, said Jordan Mintzer in The Hollywood Reporter. This isn’t a samurai film but “a refined murder mystery dressed up in feudal garb.” Inside the castle, an unknown killer begins racking up victims, and Motoki’s clan leader keeps turning to one of his prisoners for help. “This sounds like the perfect setup for a suspenseful feudal thriller—think Knives Out meets Throne of Blood.” Unfortunately, four murders occur, and the story “winds up repeating the same scenario each time.” Be patient, though, because Kurosawa “choreographs his material with grace,” constructing an intricate drama that’s “as psychologically rich as his best work,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. It “reaffirms Kurosawa’s standing as international cinema’s preeminent jack of all trades. Simply put, he can do anything.”

The movies are suddenly thriving. The latest Spider-Man flick is setting records, and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” has dominated discourse for weeks. Americans were slow to return to cinemas after the pandemic sent them to streaming, and the cause of moviegoing was not helped by a pair of Hollywood strikes that disrupted the flow of new films to theaters. Now all that has changed. Can the momentum last?

‘Finally releasing more movies’

“Hollywood has got its mojo back,” Thomas Buckley and Lucas Shaw said at Bloomberg. Analysts expect the U.S. box office to “deliver its best performance” since before the pandemic, aided by the release of a “new potential blockbuster” nearly every weekend this summer.

It is too soon to “fully dismiss recent concerns about the future of moviegoing,” Bloomberg said. Films are making more money, but the rate of movie attendance in the United States has “fallen to half what it was 25 years ago.” The number of people heading to the cineplex “has to pick back up” to sustain the revival. For now, though, studio heads finally have a “belief that they can win again,” actor Seth Rogen said to Variety.

The box office surge is happening because “more studios are finally releasing more movies” following the strikes and pandemic, thus “generating more money,” Scott Mendelson said at The Outside Scoop. The studios are doing “an average of 15-20 wide releases per month,” and that is paying off with more tickets sold. Hollywood still faces “countless issues” like the looming Paramount-Warner Bros. merger and the departure of many productions from California to other states and countries, but “I haven’t been this optimistic about the box office since mid-2015.”

It is not just volume. Movies are “kicking boring TV’s ass,” Johnny Oleksinski said at The New York Post. The obituary for the big-screen experience has been “written so many times.” But Hollywood this year has given audiences a “varied offering of box-office hits” including “dramas and comedies, biopics and animated family fare” and much more. There is arguably not as much on TV these days “riling people up or getting them to cancel their evening plans.” Peak TV is a “hazy memory,” and movie theaters are benefitting.

‘Yearning for shared experiences’

A symbol of the decline and rise of movies is the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. The iconic movie theater is “bouncing back from pandemic bankruptcy” said NPR. Sony Pictures and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema are leasing the long-empty theater and plan to reopen it in 2028.

There was a belief that Generation Z would “forever choose small screens over big ones,” Anonymous Content’s Darren Walker said at The New York Times. The success of films like “Backrooms” and “Obsession” that were made by twentysomething directors have “upended conventional wisdom” about the possibility of reaching young audiences, and there seems to be a “profound yearning for shared experiences and connection.” The entertainment industry remains in a “turbulent time of transition and transformation,” but films are serving the role they always did: “We are rediscovering community.”

“Someone give Tom Holland a holiday,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. Not only did he just give “The Odyssey” its “beating heart”, the 30-year-old Londoner has also been tasked with rescuing the “ailing superhero genre”. The latest – 38th! – instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe opens not with the usual montage of Avengers clips but with images from Holland’s hugely successful appearances as Spider-Man.

After a series of expensive misfires for the most commercially successful film franchise of all time, the message is clear: “Marvel is now the house that Tom built.” “Brand New Day”, Holland’s fourth outing in the role, picks up where 2021’s “No Way Home” left off, with mild-mannered Peter Parker having arranged for the world to forget that he ever existed.

So we find him back at square one, living in a scuzzy New York apartment, “lost and broken” – not least because his sweetheart MJ (Holland’s real-life wife Zendaya) and his best buddy Ned (Jacob Batalon) have been “cruelly memory-wiped out of his life”.

Those opening 20 minutes are “the strongest of the film”, said John Nugent in Empire. Holland is “brilliant” as the once puppyish Peter, “bruised by grief and solitude”. But what rescues the film is Zendaya’s performance, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Playing a non-superhero, she is able to bring a grown-up acting presence to the fore to cut against the silliness.

In other respects, it is the same old Spideyworld, with lots of swinging between skyscrapers and leading, as in all MCU films, to “apocalyptic but weirdly temporary destruction in the digitally confected big city”. It makes for an “entertaining spectacle” – but we could have done with “a more radical reboot”.

What happened

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” brought in $932 million worldwide over the weekend, delivering the second-biggest opening in global box office history after 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” which earned $1.2 billion. The new Marvel blockbuster, released almost five years after its predecessor “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” made $360 million domestically. This marks the “biggest opening ever at the North American box office,” surpassing the “Endgame” total of $357 million, said Deadline.

Who said what

This weekend’s opening was a “perfect storm” for a major blockbuster, combining a familiar character, established intellectual property and strong reviews, box office analyst Chris Colombo told CNN. This was a “mind-blowing” result for the new Tom Holland-led movie, said Variety. “With great power comes truly heroic ticket sales.”

The film’s success fueled the biggest collective weekend in North American box office history, with total takings of about $430 million. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” also had another good weekend, pulling in $51 million domestically, while “Toy Story 5” earned $6.3 million.

What next?

Analysts are predicting another bumper month for U.S. movie theaters. Industry expert Paul Dergarabedian suggested on X that the “$4 billion mark” for this summer’s total takings could “be within reach.”

‘Spider-Man: Brand New Day’ 

Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (PG-13)

★★★

“Brand New Day might not be the most rambunctious or exciting of Tom Holland’s Spider-flicks,” said Brian Truitt in USA Today. Instead, the fourth of the actor’s Spider-Man solo outings “aims to be a little deeper than the average Marvel Cinematic Universe installment while trapping you in its gratifying web.” The story picks up nearly five years after the events of 2021’s No Way Home, in which Spidey/Peter Parker averted disaster by having himself erased from the memories of everyone who knew him, even MJ, his girlfriend. As he now continues fighting criminal types in New York City, most notably a baddie who can jump from body to body, he’s “dealing with more adult problems,” including his isolation.

Holland seems “invigorated by the dramatic shift, giving a dense, great performance, easily his best in this series,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. Eventually, however, Brand New Day “succumbs to one of the biggest problems of late-stage MCU: The feeling that it’s just preparation for more movies.” But while that’s true to a point, said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast, this film “figures out how to integrate its individual and big-picture concerns into a relatively seamless whole.” It weaves in Jon Bernthal’s Punisher as Peter’s ally, the two making “a well-matched pair, with the former’s aw-shucks nobility clashing humorously with the latter’s fascistic gruffness.” Sadie Sink, meanwhile, fills a new role that promises to help keep the story interesting. And so far, the Spidey saga is only getting better. With the “possible exception” of the second Tobey Maguire Spider-Man, Brand New Day rates as the wall crawler’s “best film to date.”

‘I Want Your Sex’

Directed by Gregg Araki (R)

★★★

“I don’t entirely understand how we got here,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire, but apparently, “it’s up to a 66-year-old filmmaker to remind the young people of America that it’s OK to be horny.” In his first movie in over a decade, director Gregg Araki aims to convey that message by casting Cooper Hoffman as a timid college grad who, after signing on as an assistant to an anti-woke artist played by Olivia Wilde, can’t say no when she selects him to serve as her latest sex slave. Unsurprisingly, the pair’s S&M-style trysts turn out to be “more comic than carnal,” and while Araki has made films with more focus and verve, this one “at least offers plenty of delights to gawp at along the way.”

Hoffman and Wilde “sport a playful, teasing rapport,” and Wilde clearly enjoys playing a shameless user who thinks all art is a scam, said Tim Grierson in Screen Daily. But a distracting framing device informs viewers that the story ends in an apparent murder, and because Hoffman’s Elliot becomes overly enamored of his boss, I Want Your Sex “fails to deliver on its initial promise to be an irreverent, libidinous romp.” A prevailing “devil-may-care sensibility” mostly saves the film, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Araki and his cast clearly are having fun, and that feeling proves contagious. “Who ultimately cares if they don’t quite stick the landing?”

As wildfires and record-breaking heat ravage the planet, movie theaters offer the promise of a blessedly dark, air-conditioned escape from reality. And with audiences flocking back to the theaters in numbers not seen since 2019, they have plenty to choose from this month.

‘One Night Only’

“One Night Only” is set in an alternate reality New York where unmarried people can only get it on one night a year. Cue the meet-cute between Allie (Monica Barbaro) and Owen (Callum Turner), both of whom had expected to be spending the night with others.

Despite the dystopian premise, director Will Gluck (“Easy A”) keeps the proceedings firmly in rom-com territory, letting the chemistry between Barbaro (“A Complete Unknown”) and Turner (“Masters of the Air”) crackle. The film features “all the raunchy trimmings of a traditional sex comedy but veers towards more heartfelt territory,” said Shania Russell at Entertainment Weekly. (in theaters Aug. 7)

‘The End of Oak Street’

What if your neighborhood became “Jurassic Park”? That’s the delightfully goofy premise director David Robert Mitchell (“It Follows”) leans into. The Platts look on with astonishment when their idyllic 1970s neighborhood appears to be transported way back in time.

Greg (Ewan McGregor) and Denise (Anne Hathaway) must work with their neighbors to save their kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery), and themselves, fending off dinosaurs and trying to figure out what the heck happened. A “throwback in the best way,” Mitchell’s Spielbergian film delivers a “truly unique premise in a fashion that's warmly recognizable,” said Bill Bria at SlashFilm. (in theaters Aug. 14)

‘The Wrong Girls’

In director Dylan Meyer’s “The Wrong Girls,” Kristen Stewart (“Twilight”) and Alia Shawkat (“Search Party”) star as Frankie and Molly, respectively, a “Broad City”-esque pair of screw-up potheads who are late on their rent. When they take a new designer drug, it gives them the ability to communicate telepathically, including with a cat named Dio, voiced by Seth Rogan. It “looks like classic stoner stuff,” said Travis Hopson at Punch Drunk Critics, including “psychedelic mind trips, talking animals, goofy villains and enough bong hits to make Cheech & Chong jealous.” (in theaters Aug. 14)

‘It Ends’

Horror is all the rage with Gen Z, and movies featuring characters trapped in liminal spaces, like “Backrooms,” are also having a moment. Akira Jackson (“Against the Spread”) is Day, one of four college friends who head out for food and find themselves trapped on an endless road.

As they ponder their bizarre fate, they rationalize, philosophize and work through longstanding issues. A “hangout horror movie rife with existential anxieties,” this “brilliant” film serves as a “stark reflection of what it feels like to peek beneath the surface of one’s being,” said Siddhant Adlakha at Variety. (in theaters Aug. 21)

‘The Dog Stars’

Director Ridley Scott tackles Peter Heller’s best-selling post-apocalyptic novel, set years after a virus wipes out most of humanity. Hig (Jacob Elordi) is a pilot holed up in a Colorado airport hangar with his dog, Jasper, and an ex-Marine named Bangley (Josh Brolin).

Hig spends his days tooling around in an old Cessna, looking for supplies, survivors or signs of life, trying to stay ahead of scavengers known as Reapers, when he is drawn outside the perimeter and finds Cima (Margaret Qualley). Heller’s elegiac novel is an “ideal fit” for Scott and his “blockbuster sensibilities and stories of underdog heroes,” said Ben Travis at Empire. (in theaters Aug. 28)

‘The Sun Never Sets’

Mumblecore auteur Joe Swanberg (“Easy”) returns with this Alaska-set romantic drama. Twenty-something Wendy (Dakota Fanning) is dating Jack (Jake Johnson), an older father of two who loves her but isn’t interested in having any more kids.

Jack encourages her to take a summer to reflect, when she unexpectedly reconnects with her ex, Chuck (Cory Michael Smith). Swanberg has painted a “masterful portrait of humanity’s inability to figure out what we actually want,” said Christian Zilko at IndieWire. (in theaters Aug. 28)

Written and directed by Warrington-born Helen Walsh, “On the Sea” is a “yearningly tender” drama about sex and love set in a small fishing community in north Wales, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. Jack (Barry Ward) is a careworn middle-aged man who has spent his whole life here, working for the family mussel-farming business, and the film opens with a “lovely, rhythmic sequence” – showing the work of gathering and cleaning mussels – which “masterfully” establishes the world he inhabits. Jack is married to his teenage sweetheart Maggie (Liz White), with whom he has a wayward son, and has never acknowledged that he is gay. Then he meets Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen), “a hunky young itinerant deckhand” who “has no such qualms about his sexuality”. Soon, they are going out fishing together, and on the sea, they gradually “find a world of their own”.

Shades of “God’s Own Country” and “Brokeback Mountain” “hover above this thoughtful” tale of forbidden love in a tough community, said Kevin Maher in The Times. You might wonder how long we can keep producing dramas that depend for their tension on a level of “foam-flecked homophobia” more redolent of 1960s Wyoming than the UK in 2026. Still, “gay panic” persists in this village, and “On the Sea” amounts to a carefully observed study of “masculinity under pressure”, as Jack must try to “juggle his multiple fragile identities”. There are some pacing issues, said Alex Davidson in Sight and Sound: too much time is devoted to Jack’s relationships with secondary characters. But the connection between the two men is “sensitively portrayed”, the performances are strong, and the film makes excellent use of its Anglesey locations.

“E. Jean Carroll has had quite a life,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. She made her name as a gonzo journalist, writing first-person features for Esquire and Playboy, before becoming an advice columnist at Elle magazine: her long-running “Ask E. Jean” column became so popular that it was turned into a chat show.

Then, in 2019, she made international news headlines when she accused President Trump of having raped her in a department store changing room in the mid-1990s. Trump branded her a liar, insisting she was not his “type”. Carroll sued him for sexual abuse and defamation, leading to two civil court trials, which she won. Trump recently paid her $5.6 million (£4.1 million) in damages over one; he has yet to pay a penny for the other.

In this documentary, Carroll guides viewers through her career, her decision to break her silence about Trump’s abuse, and the “harrowing experience of going up against one of the most powerful men in the world – twice”.

This is a “solid, unshowy” film, said Wendy Ide in The Observer, which contains some extremely powerful moments, including a present-day conversation in which Carroll talks to her best friend about how she felt immediately after the attack, and her decision not to report it. Yet we learn that, back in the 1990s, she advised abused women to “always press charges” – which creates a “jarring dissonance”.

Still, the documentary is sympathetic to its subject, who comes across as unexpectedly “magnetic” – “curious, mischievous and candid”, said Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter. In the public imagination, Carroll, now 82, has been defined by someone else’s crime; the film paints a broad portrait of “a figure far more interesting than the bad thing that happened to her”.

For more than 50 years, David Thomson has been “watching and writing about movies and hanging out with movie people”, said Ed Potton in The Times. The author of more than 40 books, including the highly influential “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film” (1975), he is “unique in his field”, being “intellectual, opinionated, informed and funny”. Now, at the age of 85, Thomson has written a book “billed as the capstone of his career”. A history of the movies, “from the Lumière brothers to the Coen brothers”, from “Psycho” to “Pretty Woman” to Jean-Luc Godard, it also covers much else besides: “we get detours to John Keats, Gustav Mahler, Werner Heisenberg and Tracey Emin, none of which feels dilettantish”. Thomson also celebrates the “written word”, and suggests that novels are in many ways superior to films. Written in a style that “veers between conspiratorial and donnish”, this book has the “learning of an encyclopaedia, the wisdom of a novel and the zingers of a screwball comedy”.

While he remains as obsessed by film as ever, Thomson is increasingly fearful that “movies may be bad for us”, said Mark Glancy in Literary Review. There is, of course, nothing new about claims that they shorten attention spans and flatten our sense of evil. But Thomson suggests such anxieties have been “given new weight and immediacy by the rise of Donald Trump, with his constant demand for our attention and his indifference to morality”. It’s an argument which seems, alas, a bit of a “rabbit hole”. Fortunately, such “wintry and sombre ponderings” don’t take up too much space, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. For the most part, this book is a “straightforwardly rapturous, rhapsodic celebration of the extraordinary adventure of cinema”, written by an author who, despite his advanced age, is as “eccentric, exasperating and absorbing as ever”.

If you have watched Christopher Nolan's adaptation of “The Odyssey” and feel inspired to embark on an epic journey of your own, consider visiting these stunning locations where key scenes of the movie were filmed. The director and his crew shot in six countries to bring Odysseus’ voyage to life, from the sand dunes of Morocco to the rugged cliffs of Scotland.

Italy

Begin your journey where it started for Odysseus, at his home, Ithaca. Instead of filming on the actual Greek island in the Ionian Sea, Nolan chose to shoot the scenes on Favignana, off the coast of Sicily. Known as the “butterfly island” because of its shape it’s an “easy” ferry ride from Sicily’s Trapani port, said Wanderlust.

The 15th-century “ruined fortress” on the top of the hill “made for the perfect stand-in” for Odysseus’ palace. It had the “most epic landscape” where you could “see the water everywhere you were and the ships [used for filming] could pull up”, said the film’s production designer, Ruth De Jong, for Condé Nast Traveler. However, getting these shots of the water and ships required a 30-minute hike. Despite the “daily challenge”, the crew soon “got into it”. The actual interior for the film’s palace was a set in Los Angeles.

Greece

If you’re reliving a Greek epic, a visit to Greece is, of course, a must. For those feeling brave, visit Nestor’s Cave in the Peloponnese region, which was the filming site for the Cyclops sequence. The crew had to “haul a 60-foot animatronic monster” up to the cave every day because of Nolan’s “aversion” to using green screen, said Wanderlust.

The homecoming of King Agamemnon was filmed in areas outside Messenia and near Athens where the windiness “worked well” with all the flags and the banners in the sequence, De Jong told Condé Nast Traveler. The area gives visitors a holiday that “blends history, mythology, nature and luxury”, with “dramatic beaches” and “ancient palaces”, said Travel and Tour World.

Morocco

Next stop were the “undulating sand dunes” and “mud-brick buildings” of Morocco, said British Vogue. The country brought an “authentically ancient atmosphere” to the film, with the Unesco-listed village of Aït Benhaddou, used as the city of Troy. The group of “earthen buildings surrounded by high walls” has been a “desirable” filming location for many other historical blockbusters including “Gladiator” and “Lawrence of Arabia”.

Scotland

Even though Odysseus “would never have gone to Scotland”, the location “just happened to have the look that we liked”, De Jong told Condé Nast Traveler. The “craggy rocks” and verdant cliffside just outside Cullen in the Highlands, were the perfect place for the witch Circe’s home. And the “atmospheric ruins” of the Findlater Castle, by the Moray Firth, became the backdrop for one of the “most unnerving scenes” of the film when Circe “turns Odysseus’ crew into gluttonous pigs”, said Wanderlust. Visitors can see the site by walking the Moray Coastal Trail. Consider heading west to the sprawling Culbin Forest, too. Although you won’t encounter Laestrygonian giants, you can still enjoy the “wonderful views” and “biodiversity”.

Iceland

This was the one country Nolan knew he wanted to “shoot in from the jump”, said Condé Nast Traveler. The “black sands” and caves of the Hjörleifshöfði mountain were perfect for the “remote” and “otherworldly scene” where Odysseus “journeys to the underworld to consult with the blind Theban prophet, Tiresias”, said British Vogue.

Politics is the art of human beings solving problems without killing each other. Sometimes those efforts fail, never more memorably than in these classic political thrillers. They run the gamut from true storytelling about presidential corruption and the rescue of American diplomats in Iran to entirely fictional yet still believable stories about predatory drug companies and communist surveillance operations.

‘Foreign Correspondent’ (1940)

Hotshot New York Globe crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) is dispatched by his editor, Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport), to Europe on the precipice of WWII to figure out what is about to envelop the continent in director Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller. There Jones discovers an espionage ring bent on selling out the U.K. and the Netherlands to their adversaries.

While the movie functions superbly as a “bold call to action to stop the looming threat of Nazism in Europe,” it also “boasts some of Hitchcock’s most memorable sequences and technical tricks, making for one set piece after another of formal virtuosity” despite the era’s technical limitations, said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘The Conversation’ (1974)

Arriving the same year that a wiretapping scandal brought down the administration of President Richard Nixon, director Francis Ford Coppola’s quietly devastating thriller follows Harry N. Caul (Gene Hackman), a surveillance wizard hired to record a conversation between Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest) at the behest of the shadowy Director (Robert Duvall). Harry’s growing suspicion that the young couple is in danger fuels a twisty narrative that keeps both him and the audience guessing and appraising their relationship with technology. A film that is more than just a “product of its Watergate-era anxieties,” Coppola’s haunting masterpiece is a “chillingly prescient and masterfully crafted character study with themes that echo louder than ever in our hyper-surveilled world,” said Andy Punter at InSession Film. (Prime Video)

‘All the President’s Men’ (1976)

While it may seem quaint by today’s standards, the Watergate scandal consumed American politics for more than a year, ended Richard Nixon’s presidency and permanently decreased the public’s level of trust in the government. Director Alan J. Pakula’s film recreates the sleuthing of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) that blew the conspiracy wide open.

“All the President’s Men” mesmerizes by faithfully depicting the banal proceduralism of good journalism. A film that “intentionally underplays the enormity of the central conspiracy and eludes any histrionic moralizing,” this “subversive detective story” brilliantly “rejects mythologizing the pivotal history behind it,” said Wes Greene at Slant Magazine. (Prime Video)

‘The Official Story’ (1985)

Alicia (Norma Aleandro) and Roberto (Héctor Alterio) are middle-class Argentines with connections in government and business and an adopted daughter, Gaby (Analia Castro), that they adore. But Alicia soon begins to suspect that her daughter is one of the children grotesquely stolen from the desaparecidos, dissidents disappeared by the country’s authoritarian junta, and that her husband might be in on the repugnant scheme.

Director Luis Puenzo has made a “must-see film that, in light of the real events, paints a haunting picture of the cruelty humans inflict on one another” and also delicately “honors the memory of those affected by the tragedy that unfolded in Argentina,” said Matthew Jones at Philosophy in Film. (Tubi)

‘The Constant Gardener’ (2005)

“The Constant Gardener” is the first great paranoid thriller of the 21st century. When his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), dies mysteriously, British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) gradually discovers layers about who she really was, first suspecting her of being unfaithful and then unraveling a conspiracy to test a new drug on unwitting African patients. Helmed by the great Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”), it is a “brainy thriller” whose “visuals create an overwhelming sense of the world gone mad, the world falling down around the hero just as he's beginning to understand the way it works,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘The Lives of Others’ (2006)

At once both chilling and moving, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has created what may stand as the most enduring indictment of the 20th century authoritarian surveillance state. Set in East Germany near the end of its communist regime, it is about Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), who begins surveilling a prominent playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his mistress, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).

The monastic Wiesler eventually comes to believe Dreyman is harmless and in the process doubts the very foundations of autocracy itself. A film that is “alert to the Kafkaesque absurdity of everyday life” in communist regimes, it “has a maturity and breadth of vision rarely found in a debut feature,” said Geoffrey Macnam at Sight and Sound. (Prime Video)

‘Argo’ (2012)

Ben Affleck directs and stars in this zippy thriller about the clandestine efforts to exfiltrate six American diplomats who managed to escape before they became hostages at the U.S. embassy during the Iranian Revolution. Affleck stars as CIA officer Tony Mendez, who concocts a creative cover story about how the diplomats are in Iran working on a Canadian science-fiction film. Affleck “displays a fearlessness when it comes to mixing genre” in this “part-comic, part-thriller narrative” whose mostly-but-not-entirely-true twists and turns “ensure your nails are down to the quick by the end credits,” said Amber Wilkinson at Eye for Film. (Prime Video)

‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’ (2013)

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s haunting “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” had to be smuggled into the Cannes Film Festival to protect its cast and crew, who remain anonymous to this day. It follows two government assassins, Khosrow and Morteza, who are tasked with tracking down, torturing and killing a group of dissidents suspected of distributing a manuscript.

That document pertains to what became known in Iran as the “Chain Murders,” a series of assassinations of intellectuals and dissidents in the 1990s. A “harrowing masterpiece,” it is an “unflinching look at creative oppression” that stands as an “entirely singular film experience,” said Joshua Brunsting at CriterionCast. (Prime Video)

‘Official Secrets’ (2019)

The combination of arrogance and doctored intelligence that led the United States and its allies into the 2003 Iraq War is almost made for Hollywood. In “Official Secrets,” real-life British intelligence officer Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) uncovers evidence of a joint British-American conspiracy to spy on and then pressure diplomats from countries on the U.N. Security Council to secure their votes for a resolution authorizing the war.

Martin Bright (Matt Smith) and Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode) are journalists at The Observer who wrestle with the implications of publishing the story. The film turns a “historical footnote with potent resonance” into a “compelling tale of injustice on an individual and global level,” said Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. (Netflix)

The Odyssey

Directed by Christopher Nolan
★★★★

“Modern mainstream films don’t come more daring, mammoth, and accomplished than Christopher Nolan’s latest,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. But for all the IMAX-size spectacle the director has packed into his hit adaptation of Homer’s 3,000-year-old adventure tale, what makes the movie special is that “Nolan cares deeply about his story’s human element, and there’s rarely a moment when the former overshadows the latter.” A grave Matt Damon plays Odysseus, a military hero who endures a 10-year journey home after the Trojan War, though it’s Anne Hathaway who “proves the film’s emotional core,” playing Penelope, Odysseus’ faithful, agonized wife. “Many of Nolan’s set pieces are marvelous,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. Odysseus and his dwindling crew battle giants, match wits with a Cyclops, and are transformed into pigs by Circe, embodied, in the film’s “most beguiling performance,” by Samantha Morton. But while The Odyssey is certainly “among the year’s best pictures,” I can’t call it one of Nolan’s best. The characters are “not as sharply drawn” as those in his Batman films, the emotions aren’t as deep as in Interstellar, and his current blockbuster isn’t “as propulsively exciting or as suspenseful as Oppenheimer.” Still, Nolan’s passion for movies is evident “in every frame,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. “Even when his characters don’t stir you, his filmmaking does,” and he’s “in his cinematic wheelhouse” as he slips fluidly between the story’s multiple time frames. To me, “His Odyssey is a classic in every sense, a transporting affirmation of the art and a work of pure cinema.”

Her Private Hell

Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn
★★

“Sex, violence, neon, and leather: Nicolas Winding Refn is back,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. Unfortunately, the first film in a decade from the once acclaimed director of Drive “feels like someone trying to rekindle a fire that went out years ago.” Dropping co-stars Sophie Thatcher (Yellowjackets) and Charles Melton (Riverdale) into a bold-colored dystopia, Refn again tries to find filmic beauty in both sex and violence. “And sometimes he does,” reminding you why he has a devoted fan base. More often, Her Private Hell is merely “an echo of something better.” This “disaster” of a film doesn’t even have a story, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Thatcher’s Elle is trying to reconnect with her disreputable father while battling an evil stepmother and trying to avoid a brutal serial killer. Throw in Melton as a soldier trying to find his missing daughter, and the “pretentious” results play like a cross between “David Lynch at his most bafflingly obscure” and “the world’s most avant-garde perfume commercial.” Her Private Hell is “very much not for everyone,” said Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap. Instead, it’s “primarily a series of visceral, vibrant, and increasingly violent visions that you have to let wash over you.” And it helps to be a Refn devotee. “For those who’ve appreciated the way the filmmaker has increasingly stripped away plot to get right to making the equivalent of nightmarish neon paintings, it’s really something special.”

Christopher Nolan is “hardly a stranger to ambition”, said John Nugent on Empire. His first major film, “Memento”, told its story in two sequences – one that moved forward in time, the other backwards. Since then he has tackled wars, “dreams, wormholes, the nuclear apocalypse and Victorian teleportation machines”. But his adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey” – the 8th-century BC Greek poem that is the definition of epic – may be his most ambitious yet.

The first feature to be shot entirely on giant Imax 70mm cameras, it is “jaw-detaching” in its scope and scale. Plunging the viewer into a world of both “divine fantasy and grounded realism”, this is filmmaking “at a magnitude” few directors could imagine, let alone execute.

Nolan has produced a “mythic spectacle” that honours its ancient source material, “while also addressing more topical themes of exile, war trauma and survivor’s guilt”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer.

Like the poem, the film unfolds in multiple timelines. The present-day framing takes place on the island where an exhausted Odysseus (Matt Damon) washed up 10 years after the Battle of Troy, and is now held captive by the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron).

In the same time frame, we meet his sad queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) who – back in Ithaca – is being besieged by “power-hungry suitors”, including Antinous (a marvellously venomous Robert Pattinson), while her restless son Telemachus (Tom Holland) waits for the return of the father he has never known. Incidents from the previous decade are then woven in as Odysseus recovers his battered memory – the deception at Troy, and his adventures in the years after that, including an encounter with the enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton), and a diversion through Hades.

Nolan has conjured some “tremendous” scenes, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, some of which would not be out of place in a horror film (the cyclops is “truly terrifying”). I had my doubts about Damon’s casting, but in the end he does make you care about the man broken by the years he has lost. And though some may find the modern speech jarring, what’s the alternative? We’d struggle if they spoke in ancient Greek.

But for two hours the film is just set-piece after set-piece, backed by a deafening score, which becomes rather wearying. Yes, it’s short on jokes, said Kevin Maher in The Times; but “The Odyssey” – with its extraordinary cinematography and big ideas “about the impossibility of home” and “the absurdity of heroic individualism in a boundless universe” – is a masterpiece nonetheless.

Film fans are embarking on “epic journeys of their own” to see Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” in one of the “few surviving” Imax 70mm cinemas, said The Guardian.

That’s because it’s the first feature film to be shot entirely on 1570 film – “named for the width of the film stock (70mm) and the 15 perforations on each frame”. It’s “the highest-resolution film format in existence”, so it makes sense for fans to watch the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s masterpiece in his “preferred format”, right?

‘Very exclusive’

But getting your hands on “summer’s hottest ticket” is far from easy, said Mashable. Fans are spending “hundreds of dollars”, travelling thousands of miles, and even planning pregnancies around seeing Nolan’s film in Imax 70mm cinemas: the only format that lets you watch “The Odyssey” with the “fullest image possible”.

Those who opt for other cinemas, with formats like the standard 70mm, or 35mm, will have a “sizeable chunk” of the frame cut off. So some of the “sheer vastness of the landscapes that Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema are capturing” will be lost.

Most cinemas shifted to digital around a decade ago and there are just 41 worldwide that are able to show Imax 1570 film, eight of which are in California. The UK is home to three of them: two in London and one in Manchester. No theatres in Asia, Africa or South America can screen Nolan’s film in his intended format, making it a “very exclusive – and very Western – affair”.

I thought the “buzz” around “The Odyssey” being shot on Imax 1570 cameras was “clever marketing hype”, said Charles Pulliam-Moore on The Verge. But to “get a true sense of the story Nolan is telling” you really do need to watch it in an Imax. Many of the scenes are “perfectly fine” in the 35mm format; however, those that feature the film’s “gargantuan monsters” take on a “different gravity” when displayed in the Imax 70mm’s 1.43:1 ratio.

Nolan has made a film that is “immersive” in a way most modern features aren’t. But the higher ticket price coupled with the fact that the “vast majority” of people will never get to watch his film in the way he intended it has prompted accusations that the director is “anti-art and contributing to the culture of obsessive format purism”.

‘Far more fiddly and expensive’

Shooting on 1570 cameras is no easy task as they’re “notoriously heavy, loud and require frequent reloading”, said The Guardian. During “The Odyssey” shoot the film stock had to be changed “every three minutes” and Nolan worked closely with Imax to create a “soundproofing ‘blimp’ to house the 180kg camera to make it quiet enough for him to record dialogue on 1570 for the first time”. Projecting the finished film is also “far more fiddly and expensive” as a highly trained projectionist needs to be present for the entire screening.

But Nolan’s popularity has risen alongside 1570’s “mini comeback”. The number of cinemas able to project these films has risen from 30 to 41 since the release of “Oppenheimer” in 2023. And it’s not just Nolan who has helped spark interest in the format: several other big-name directors have followed suit including Denis Villeneuve who shot “Dune: Part Three” on Imax cameras.

“There’s certainly more demand,” Imax CEO Richard Gelfond told Variety. But adding more 70mm screens isn’t that simple as new Imax film projectors haven’t been made in “about 50 years”. Sources at Imax said many of the parts needed to build them “simply no longer exist”.

Even if Imax does “magically” figure out a way to manufacture more 70mm projectors, there aren’t many cinemas where they could be installed as “exhibitors aren’t building enough auditoriums that are capable of housing its towering 1.43:1 screens because of high construction costs”.

The company remains one of the movie industry’s few “reliable bright spots”, with attendances having “languished” since the pandemic, said Rebecca Rubin in Variety. Buyers have been “circling” and in May it was reportedly in the “early stages of exploring a sale”. For now, Imax is in an “enviable position”.

Sam Neill’s chameleonic charm carried him across screens for five decades. Over 150 films and TV shows, the New Zealander played scoundrels as effortlessly as scientists, proving himself comfortable in supporting or starring roles, in blockbusters or indies. His dashing allure helped jump-start a new wave of Kiwi cinema with 1977’s Sleeping Dogs, yet he could also be terrifying, as in horror films Omen III (1981) and Event Horizon (1997). He won accolades as the jealous husband in The Piano (1993) and as a menacing cop in the BBC series Peaky Blinders. But his best-known role was Alan Grant, the awestruck, resourceful paleontologist in Jurassic Park (1993). Neill said he initially assumed the Steven Spielberg blockbuster wouldn’t do much for his career because the CGI dinosaurs would outshine the actors. Instead, the Oscar-winning film earned him global acclaim. “People just know me all around the world,” he said in 2013. “And they’ll start roaring like dinosaurs.”

Nigel John Dermot Neill—he started going by Sam in childhood— was born in Northern Ireland and raised in New Zealand, his father’s homeland. A stutterer as a child, he began acting at boarding school as a ploy to meet girls and found his speech impediment disappeared onstage. After studying at Wellington’s Victoria University, he landed his first TV part in 1971 and quickly became his country’s biggest acting talent of the day. Neill “combined a credible Everyman quality with rugged good looks and a hard-to-place accent,” said The New York Times, which allowed his roles to span continents and genres. His idol was the equally versatile James Mason, and it showed: “Critics praised him for nuanced performances even in forgettable projects.”

“Neill became a full-fledged movie star” after Jurassic Park, said Rolling Stone, but he made just as much impact with his “jovial persona.” During the Covid pandemic, he built a huge online following sharing videos of animals at his New Zealand vineyard, and himself singing and playing ukulele. Though constantly performing, he never considered himself a celebrity. He was consistently “self-deprecating and unpretentious,” said The Washington Post. “I’ve never had an image,” Neill said in 1995, “nor have I fostered one or wanted one, which has meant that I’ve had fantastic freedom to do whatever it is that appeals at the time.”

The execs at Universal Studios must be “a tad nervous,” said Jordan Ruimy in World of Reel. With Christopher Nolan’s $250 million adaptation of The Odyssey due to open in theaters on the weekend of July 17, Universal barred critics from publishing reviews until the final day before theatrical release as controversy over Nolan’s casting choices continued to stir up loud attacks from online commenters. Since January, right-wing culture warriors, led by Elon Musk, have alleged that the film pushes a “woke” agenda, primarily because Nolan chose a Black actress, Lupita Nyong’o, to play Helen of Troy and cast trans actor Elliot Page as a soldier. And the attacks didn’t stop when critics praised the movie in their initial social media reactions. In fact, Universal blocked comments on its websites after a trailer for The Odyssey racked up more than 700,000 thumbs-downs on YouTube, making it the second-most-disliked trailer ever, behind only 2025’s Snow White, whose haters disliked seeing Latina actress Rachel Zegler as the lead.

In my reading of the tea leaves, said Miles Klee in Wired, “there’s no reason to suspect that anyone at Universal is sweating right now.” Yes, the studio’s review strategy was unusual, but mostly because mainstream critics were given a chance to see and comment on Nolan’s star-packed film before the social media influencers who are relied upon these days to build audience excitement for most new movies. The bulk of the abbreviated early reactions, including from IndieWire and The Guardian, have been rapturous, and ticket presales point toward a $80 million to $100 million opening weekend for the director’s follow-up to 2023’s Oppenheimer, a Best Picture winner. Nolan himself seems unfazed that his take on a landmark cultural artifact is stirring backlash from at least one corner. “Remember,” he said last week, “I spent 10 years of my life dealing with Batman.” The only question now, said Matt McGloin in Cosmic Book News, is whether all those “angry thumbs” translate into empty seats or whether the anti-Odyssey mob “goes down as the loudest minority in movie marketing history.”

In his 1960 novel “Rabbit, Run,” John Updike wrote that growing up means joining, whether you like it or not, a “sky of adults” that hangs over the next generation. The messy, confusing, glorious process of becoming an adult has been the backbone of countless wonderful movies, with some of them, like the underrated 1986 drama “Lucas,” currently lost to the streaming world. While everyone surely has their favorite, these eight beautiful films capture the highs and lows of moving from one phase of life to the next.

‘Breaking Away’ (1979)

In “Breaking Away,” Dave (Dennis Christopher) is a recent high school graduate in Bloomington, Indiana, who becomes obsessed with becoming an Italian cycling champion and passes himself off as an exchange student to his crush, a college student named Kathy (Robyn Douglass). He convinces his townie friends, including Mike (Dennis Quaid), to join him in an informal cycling competition against a group of privileged University of Indiana students.

The friends, all in the process of figuring out who they want to be, spend their last summer together training for the thrillingly staged race. A “treasure,” the film is a “wonderfully sunny, funny, goofy, intelligent movie that makes you feel about as good as any movie in a long time,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Prime Video)

‘The Breakfast Club’ (1985)

In “The Breakfast Club,” a group of suburban Chicago high school malcontents from rival cliques, including a bullying John (Judd Nelson) and the stuck-up Claire (Molly Ringwald), are forced to spend a long Saturday detention together, supervised by vice principal Mr. Vernon (Paul Gleason). They are tasked with writing an essay about who they think they are, which they delegate to the group nerd, Brian (Anthony Michael Hall), and over the course of the day everyone, including the overbearing authority figure, gets a chance to share and humanize their struggles. Director John Hughes’ “simple, one-location talkie” brings Generation X’s “submerged angst to the surface” in a movie that is “still the definitive ’80s teen movie,” said Simon Crook at Empire. (Netflix)

‘Stand By Me’ (1986)

The beloved “Stand By Me,” based on a Stephen King novella, follows 12-year-old Gordie (Wil Wheaton) and three of his friends, Chris (River Phoenix), Teddy (Corey Feldman) and Vern (Jerry O’Connell), as they take an unauthorized hike searching for the body of a missing teenager. Narrated by a grown-up Gordie (Richard Dreyfuss) decades later, director Rob Reiner’s film is a masterclass in atmosphere and character-building. Met with underwhelming reviews when it was released, “Stand By Me” has “aged into a staple of youthful nostalgia for its deft straddling of the line between childhood and adulthood,” said Charles Bramesco at Rolling Stone. (MGM+)

‘Mermaids’ (1990)

Cher plays Rachel Flax, a single mom raising two daughters, 15-year-old Charlotte (Winona Ryder) and her younger sister, Kate (Christina Ricci). Rachel is a free spirit who has moved her kids around every time a relationship goes south, and the film opens with a move to a small town in Massachusetts.

Rachel dates a shoe store operator named Lou (Bob Hoskins), while Charlotte nurses a crush on her handsome young school bus driver and flirts with Catholicism to the chagrin of her Jewish mother. Narrated by Charlotte’s “droll inner monologue,” it is a “fun, heartfelt, well-directed film that still holds up pretty damn well” decades later, said Nadine J. Cohen at The Guardian. (MGM+)

‘Pariah’ (2011)

Adepero Oduye is Alike, a 17-year-old girl whose conservative parents’ marriage is falling apart around her in their Brooklyn apartment. Alike knows she’s a lesbian but hasn’t told anyone, including her father, Arthur (Charles Parnell), a police officer, and her mother, Audrey (Kim Wayans). Her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), is already out, and helps Alike navigate the minefield at home, as Alike explores her identity and ultimately faces a heartbreaking choice.

A tremendous turn from the then-unknown Oduye helps carry this quietly powerful film. It’s a “tender, sporadically goofy, yet candid examination of emergent identity,” making it the “finest coming-of-age movie I've seen in years,” said Ella Taylor at NPR. (Netflix)

‘Boyhood’ (2014)

There may never be another film like director Richard Linklater’s stunning ‘Boyhood.” Linklater followed the same group of actors over the course of 12 years, with a total of just 39 days of filming. Mason (Ellar Coltrane) is 6 when the film begins as his dad (Ethan Hawke), a musician, splits from his college professor mom (Patricia Arquette). Lorelei Linklater, the director’s daughter, plays Mason’s older sister, Samantha.

In a series of vignettes, we see Mason growing up, his dad stumbling toward maturity and a more consistent presence in his life and his mom moving around Texas and seeking stability and happiness. Through its unique structure, this “beautiful, simple and ambitious film” lovingly “creates the closest thing to a real experience as few motion pictures ever have,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Netflix)

‘Moonlight’ (2016)

The haunting masterpiece by director Barry Jenkins (“The Underground Railroad”) follows a young Black Miami man named Chiron through three distinct phases of his life. As a lonely, bullied elementary student he’s played by Alex R. Hibbert and goes by Little. His mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), is a drug addict and Little falls under the tutelage of a drug kingpin named Juan (Mahershala Ali) and his girlfriend, Teresa (Janelle Monáe).

Ashton Sanders plays Chiron as a high school student who develops a taboo romantic relationship with Kevin (Jharrel Jerome); Trevante Rhodes is Chiron as a fully grown man who goes by Black, who follows in Juan’s drug-dealing footsteps and reconnects with Kevin (André Holland). A “moving and mysterious” film, it is “about masculinity, the wounds and crises of which are the same for all sexualities but conditioned by the background weather of race and class,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Hulu)

‘Eighth Grade’ (2018)

Director Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade” stars Elsie Fisher (“The Bear”) as Kayla, a shy 13-year-old who produces a YouTube show whose only fan seems to be her awkward single father, Mark (Josh Hamilton). Anchored by an extraordinary performance from Fisher, the film’s centerpiece is a pool party thrown by the popular Kennedy (Catherine Oliviere), where Kayla sees her crush, Aiden (Luke Prael).

It is both a universal story about trying to fit in and also a quietly searing commentary about the Gen Z milieu, including active shooter drills and ubiquitous smartphones. Burnham’s film “reflects arguably the worst stretch of growing up in America’s education system,” said Andy Crump at Paste magazine, but is nevertheless “compassionate, radiating retroactive kindness for the children we all were to soothe the adults we are now.” (Prime Video)

“I wanted to walk out of ‘Life Support’ many times,” said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, and “I mean that as the highest recommendation.” This “essential” documentary, told from the perspective of international doctors who volunteered to help civilians in Gaza between October 2023 and September 2025, offers a rare glimpse into life – and death – in the besieged enclave.

It is particularly vital considering that, since the war began, no independent foreign journalists have been allowed into Gaza. Using interviews and video footage, director Daniele Rugo weaves together the testimonies of surgeons, paediatricians and other medical staff as they confront “nightmarish wounds” in hospitals that double up as shelters, while bombs fall. In its “stark simplicity” it is “deeply racking”.

Doctors tend to be careful with their words and don’t reach for “overstatement or exaggeration”, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian. But their “measured accounts of hell on earth” make this “devastating film almost unbearable to watch”. The doctors pay tribute to their Palestinian colleagues, who work marathon shifts, often while grieving personal losses. One surgeon takes sitting-down breaks during an operation to avoid blacking out from hunger. Another brings her teenage children to work, reasoning that, if they die, they will die together.

We see “the erosion of life” in Gaza first-hand, said India Lawrence on Time Out, from the “heartbreaking footage” of people relaxing and lounging under beach umbrellas in 2022, to the nightmarish reality of life in wartime. There is no dramatic climax, just the slow, relentless descent towards Gaza’s “total devastation”. “Life Support” is “not a happy watch”, but it is “an urgent and essential piece of reportage”.

“Here we are again,” said John Nugent in Empire. Since 2010, Disney has produced more than 20 remakes “adapting old, animated material into shiny live-action form” – more than one a year. But few have used source material so recent – “or seemed so pointless” – as “Moana”.

‘Shot-for-shot remake’

It is practically a “shot-for-shot remake” of the 2016 animation, which was a “high point” for Disney. Once again, we are in ancient Polynesia, as Moana, a spirited chief’s daughter, goes on an oceanic quest to save her dying island of Motunui, enlisting the help of the narcissistic demi-god Maui.

But whereas the animated version was “fun, funny” and had “fantastic music”, this feels “flat”. It barely counts as live-action, either: a good two-thirds or so is animated, with the CGI often retaining a “cartoon aesthetic”, in a way that feels “awkward” and jarring next to flesh-and-blood actors. At one point, a character marvels at a “sacred place” surrounding them, while pointing to what is plainly a green-screen studio.

‘Exquisite form of agony’

“You will wonder why they bothered to make a replica,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, “except insofar that you won’t wonder at all.” Disney can “hardly be bothered to conceal the fact that their overwhelming priority is to generate dollars”.

There are, though, “flickers of warmth”. Catherine Laga’aia is “engaging” as Moana, and creates “a lively chemistry” with Dwayne Johnson, reprising the role of Maui.

Johnson’s performance is “oddly lacklustre”, said Kevin Maher in The Times, and his wig is ridiculous – he looks like a “demented extra from ‘Hairspray’”. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s songs remain catchy, but mostly the film provokes only “an exquisite form of agony”.

Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated mythic action epic “The Odyssey” is out this week. Count down to its release by watching or rewatching some of the director’s greatest hits.

Oppenheimer (2023)

The word of the summer in 2023 was “Barbenheimer”, as the blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” both hit the big screen. “Oppenheimer”, definitely the darker half of the double feature, is Nolan’s “profoundly unnerving” retelling of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and the part he played in developing the atomic bomb, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Nolan is “committed to understanding the inner workings of his subject”, observing the chapters of Oppenheimer’s life with “sickly wonder” and painting a picture of a “man deep in denial”. The film is carried by Murphy and Robert Downey Jr., who both earned Oscars for their performances.

Inception (2010)

The one thing to know about Nolan’s 2010 thriller, “Inception”, is that “it is not a trick”, said Nev Pierce in Empire. “It is ingenious but not crafty, knotty but not duplicitous.” There is no “‘ta-dah!’ moment” where you find out everything was only a dream. The starry cast of actors is led by Leonardo DiCaprio who plays Dom Cobb – a spy-for-hire who steals his targets’ ideas from their subconscious minds as they sleep. Visually breathtaking, with cities folding in on themselves and zero-gravity fight scenes, it’s an “exhilarating” watch that fully immerses you in Nolan’s imagination. But it’s more than just spectacle: “this is about life and death and what might be beyond and between”.

Dunkirk (2017)

Nolan’s 2017 Second World War film about the evacuation of British troops from the French town of Dunkirk in the face of the German advance has a “heart-hammering intensity”, said Robbie Collin at The Telegraph. The movie features separate narrative strands following soldiers, pilots and sailors to bring the “single pivotal historical moment” powerfully to life on land, air and sea. With the “crisp” landscape shots, “meticulous” period detail, “superb Hans Zimmer score” and all-star cast, Nolan is able to capture the true “British ‘Dunkirk spirit’”.

Interstellar (2014)

Despite being one of Nolan’s more scientifically ambitious movies, “Interstellar” still has a massive “gravitational pull”, said Mark Kermode at The Guardian. Our unlikely hero, Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is “prompted by ghostly forces to lead an exploratory mission through a wormhole beyond the rings of Saturn, abandoning his family in search of a future for all humanity”. With stunning shots of space and imagined planets, “Interstellar” is a “futuristic fable” that leaves viewers “awestruck” and reaffirms Nolan as “cinema’s leading blockbuster auteur”.

The Dark Knight (2008)

The second instalment of Nolan’s Batman trilogy “leaps beyond its origin and becomes an engrossing tragedy”, said Roger Ebert. “The Dark Knight” picks up in the months after its predecessor, “Batman Begins” (2006), with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) navigating the moral dilemmas that come with being the Gotham vigilante. Boundaries of good and evil are blurred even further with the introduction of Batman’s most iconic villain, The Joker, played by Heath Ledger, who died before the film was released. In his “key performance”, which earned him a posthumous Oscar, Ledger presented The Joker as “more than a villain”. Nolan’s gritty retelling of this iconic story redefined the “comic-book movie”.

“Empires fall. Glaciers melt and oceans rise. Monarchs and prime ministers are crowned and toppled,” said John Nugent on Empire. “But the Minions cannot be halted, will never cease, will outlive us all.” And so they are back, in the seventh instalment of the “Despicable Me/Minions” franchise.

As ever, these small yellow gibberish-spouting creatures are searching desperately for a “villainous master to serve, which sees them encounter everyone from the tyrants of revolutionary France to a fearsome cyclops”.

Eventually, the “ageless goofballs” land in silent-era Hollywood, where they try to make their own monster movie. The tone is “as juvenile as ever” – in a film that is “goofy and giggly and resolutely wedded to stupidity” – but happily for “cine-literate parents”, there are some “absurdist treats”, including “the first ‘Citizen Kane’-based fart joke in cinema history”.

The film is “a hoot”, said Ed Potton in The Times, with “world-class slapstick” and a plethora of enjoyable movie references, not just to “Citizen Kane”, but to everything from Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton to “Jaws”. And it boasts a “tremendous” voice cast: Jesse Eisenberg features as a deluded robot, Trey Parker as a small monster, Allison Janney as a museum curator, and George Lucas (as himself) and Jeff Bridges as a pair of Warner brothers-like studio bosses.

It has been billed as returning director Pierre Coffin’s “love letter” to old Hollywood, said Rafaela Bassili in The Guardian, but the pleasures of this set-up prove short-lived. Later acts are “cluttered with extraneous characters and absurd situations”, and you feel you are just watching more of the same Minions fare.

Couple-swapping dramas had their heyday during the sexual revolution, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. And even the most famous of them, such as 1969’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”, look like “curiosities from another era” now. “Yet somehow, sexual perplexities remain in 2026.” “The Invite” started life as a play, by the Catalan writer/director Cesc Gay, which has since been turned into a film everywhere from Italy to South Korea. Now we have an American version, from director Olivia Wilde, and it is “not to be missed”.

Seth Rogen is “better than ever” as Joe, a failed musician unhappily married to frustrated housewife Angela (Wilde). One day he comes home to find that she has invited their hot upstairs neighbours – Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz) – to dinner. Joe is furious. He doesn’t want their company, he wants them to stop having noisy sex, which is keeping him awake at night.

The dinner is a disaster: Angela has failed to check Piña’s dietary needs (“no gluten, no dairy, no meat, no sugar”) and Joe didn’t get any wine in. As the evening descends into “mayhem”, Hawk and Piña reveal that they are into sex parties, and have come to see if their hosts are open to one. Brilliantly executed, “The Invite” is “the funniest film so far this year”.

“If there is more pleasure to be had than watching great actors behaving badly, I would genuinely wish to know about it,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Cruz is wonderful, as sexy and charismatic as you could hope; Norton is “insufferably smug”; and Rogen proves he can do “emotional depth” when he tries.

The film is “hilarious”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, but it is also profound, “offering a genuinely insightful peek into the human, and marital, condition”.

If you are after a good cry, these films will have you reaching for the tissues. From stories of survival and life-changing decisions to heartbreak and hope, here are some of the best tragic tales brought to the big screen.

Titanic (1997)

Director James Cameron became “king of the world” in the 1990s with this “wildly over-the-top weepie romance” between Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) on the so-called unsinkable ship, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Our heroine is “not suited for life in the gilded cage”, said The Hollywood Reporter, and finds herself saved by Jack, “whose joy for life and eagerness for living it to the fullest soon revitalise the young Rose”. Their love is not only tested by class boundaries, but with the “horrible outcome” of the voyage.

If the story was “made of showbiz and hype”, said Roger Ebert, “well – so was the Titanic”. The 194-minute, $200 million (£151 million) epic was “flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding”.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Frank Capra’s Christmas classic is repeatedly voted Britain’s favourite festive film for a reason. It is an “uplifting story of family, love and hope”, said the BBC. It’s “also the story of one man’s struggle with life’s knockbacks”. George Bailey, played by James Stewart, is brought back from the brink of suicide with the help of an angel, Clarence, played by Henry Travers.

George is shown how “worthwhile his life has been and what treasures, largely intangible, he does possess”, said Bert Briller in Variety, when the film first came out in 1946. This recounting of his life is “just about flawless in its tender and natural treatment”.

Atonement (2007)

Another romance set during a tragic historical period, “Atonement”, reflects on how a single error “destroys all possibility of happiness in three lives”, said Roger Ebert. Based on Ian McEwan’s book of the same name, the film begins with a “breathless celebration of pure heedless joy”, as heiress Cecilia (Keira Knightley) falls in love with the housekeeper’s son, Robbie (James McAvoy), on an English country estate.

But the actions of Cecilia’s younger sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan) and then the couple’s separation during the Second World War force us to “think deeply about what betrayal and atonement might really entail”.

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

In this “truish story set in 1980s San Francisco”, Will Smith’s Chris Gardner is a “newly single dad juggling bankruptcy, childcare, and high hopes of an internship” at a stockbrokers for no pay, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. Smith is “sublime and moving” in this “tailor-made, sweetly serio-comic, Julia-Roberts-in-‘Erin-Brockovich’ Oscar vehicle”.

Chris and his son Christopher Jr. (played by Smith’s own son Jaden) navigate poverty, eviction and homelessness, but the hope portrayed in the movie is enough to “turn even the strongest of viewers into a puddle of tears”, said Harper’s Bazaar.

Graveyard of the Fireflies (1988)

Isao Takahata’s animation about two orphaned siblings in Japan during the Second World War is “one of the greatest films to have ever been made about children in wartime”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. Made at Studio Ghibli, it has a “quiet but devastating power that breaks every heart it finds”.

The film creates “magical moments of natural beauty and childish delight” that only make the tragedy of Seita and his little sister Setsuko “even more harrowing”, said Steve Rose in The Guardian. It’s a “war story as wrenching as any live-action movie”.

Never Let Me Go (2005)

On the surface, the three main characters – played by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley – are embroiled in a love triangle, but “this romantic drama tells an entirely more complicated story than you might expect”, said Entertainment Weekly. Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s “devastating dystopian novel”, the film “dives into heavy themes of mortality and ethics with striking clarity”.

The characters are “expertly acted” and played “with such conviction” that “we get caught up in their doomed romance”, said The Hollywood Reporter.

Hotel Rwanda (2004)

The first mainstream film to approach the subject of Rwanda’s genocide, “Hotel Rwanda” focused on the story of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle), who sheltered more than 1,200 people.

Turning such a “brutal and heart-wrenching subject” into “entertainment” has its risks, said the BBC at the time. But director Terry George’s decision to choose the “One Man Who Made A Difference” angle, as seen in “Schindler’s List”, gave “filmmakers the freedom to inject suspense, humour and romance – all the stuff that an audience actually wants to see – into otherwise sombre material”. Cheadle offers a “thrilling portrait of ordinary heroism, a performance that’s matched only by the magnificent Sophie Okonedo as his wife Tatiana”.

Sophie’s Choice (1982)

Meryl Streep delivers a performance “of such measured intensity” that encapsulates the “tragic, voluptuous” heroine of William Styron’s novel “Sophie’s Choice”, that “the results are by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking”, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times when the film first came out.

Sophie, a Polish immigrant, is forced to make an unconscionable decision which will have life-changing and haunting consequences. It’s not a flawless film, but it is a “unified and deeply affecting one” that “casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell”, thanks largely to Streep’s “bravura performance”.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

A “dreadfully sad musical”, said Vogue, “Dancer in the Dark" is “painfully bleak, but very beautiful”. Björk stars as Selma, an immigrant mother losing her vision while trying to provide for her son.

Director Lars von Trier “pushes the limits of modern film-making”, said the BBC, combining the “extreme styles” of “hand-held documentary melodrama” and an “all-singing, all-dancing Hollywood musical shot in vibrant Technicolor-style”. There are “many moving and heartfelt scenes, if you can cope with the burst of a song or two”.

The Notebook (2004)

A romance that “transcends obstacles, space, and time”, said Marie Claire, “The Notebook” follows the romance between Allie (Rachel McAdams) and Noah (Ryan Gosling) from “youthful intoxication to old age”, said Vogue.

Switching from scenes showcasing the “urgency of young romance” to the tragedy of an older Allie “disappearing into the shadows of Alzheimer’s”, it’s a “sentimental fantasy”, said Roger Ebert.

The story builds a relationship that will make you “root for the pair to beat the odds against them”, said Stephen Holden in The New York Times.