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.

‘The Invite’

Directed by Olivia Wilde (R)

★★★

Olivia Wilde’s new comedy drama is “the kind of smart, well-crafted film for adults we are constantly complaining we don’t get enough of,” said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. Wilde, in her third directorial offering, co-stars as a stay-at-home-mom who, to the consternation of her failed musician husband, Joe, has invited the freewheeling couple upstairs to dinner. With Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Penelope Cruz filling out the cast, the charged get-together soon turns into “a night that Edward Albee would approve of,” except that this evening hits peak tension when the guests extend a surprise invitation to join them for a night of group sex.

Perhaps because it’s an adaptation of a 2016 Spanish play that has spawned overseas film versions, The Invite is “an American film that feels vaguely international,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. Though the first half is overdirected to the point of being “irritating,” the showy camerawork fades away as the actors take over, creating a second half that’s “the best work Wilde has yet done as a director.” While all four actors excel, “it’s Rogen who’s the revelation,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “His line readings fill out Joe’s backstory brilliantly, a guy who was always used to being rejected, somehow landed a girl way out of his league 20 years ago, and now is miserable that she doesn’t really want him anymore.” In this movie, relationships change because people change. “To me, that feels true.”

‘Minions & Monsters’

Directed by Pierre Coffin (PG)

★★★

Though they’re “one of the more enduring creations of 21st-century cinema,” the Minions “still get no respect,” said Scott Roxborough in The Hollywood Reporter. Maybe, though, this seventh film in the Despicable Me franchise will finally end a 16-year awards shutout, because it’s a love letter to cinema that argues, between its mile-a-minute gags, that the highest-grossing animated franchise of all time deserves a place in Hollywood’s canon. Minions & Monsters is “very much a film of two halves,” said Drew Taylor in The Wrap. In the first, a quick history tour revisits how bad Minions have been in their quest to find villains to serve, until one group lands in 1920s Hollywood and stumbles into stardom. A flurry of homages to Buster Keaton and other legends follows, until talkies arrive and put the gibberish-spouting Minions out of work.

The second half offers more-conventional Minion action, yet it “builds to an open-hearted tribute to the power of the communal moviegoing experience.” When two of the Minions start work on creating a monster movie using real monsters, this outing “does rather lose momentum,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. But as the film speeds toward a standard save-the-world climax, the latest Minions serves up the usual mayhem “with gusto and a delirious cartoon grin.” It’s “a clear peak for the series: a Minions movie with an actual idea at its core beyond general cheerful chaos.”

Even with the many streaming-induced changes to the film industry’s operations, July remains a month for blockbusters. This July will include an intriguing mix of madcap comedies, sweeping action epics and independent fare hoping to get as many viewers into theaters — or in front of their televisions — as possible.

‘Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass’

Gail (Zoey Deutch) is so shocked when her fiance, Tom (Michael Cassidy), uses his half-joking “celebrity sex pass” — an exception to marriage vows if the opportunity arises to sleep with your most-lusted-after famous person — that she decides to even the score by traveling to Los Angeles and convincing actor Jon Hamm to go to bed with her. Featuring a “tone that’s broad, antic, overemphatic and a bit wacked,” director David Wain (“Wet Hot American Summer”) brings us a film “so aggressive in its meta absurdity that it makes an episode of ‘Seinfeld’ look like Ingmar Bergman,” said Owen Gleiberman at Variety. (in theaters July 10)

‘Reading Lolita in Tehran’

After a year of protests and war for Iran, the timing for an adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s celebrated 2003 memoir is exquisite. Golshifteh Farahahi (“Invasion”) stars as Nafisi in Israeli director Eran Riklis’ film that follows her from her sacking as an English professor at the University of Tehran following the 1979 revolution to her emigration to the United States in 1997.

The book gets its title from the secret book club Nafisi conducted in her home for her students, including Sanaz (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) and Mahshid (Bahar Beihaghi), after her dismissal. The film’s “message about the humane power of literature” makes it a “work of art rather than an exercise in sloganeering,” said Arash Azizi at The Atlantic. (in theaters July 10)

‘The Odyssey’

There may be no more bankable director working in Hollywood today than Christopher Nolan (“The Dark Knight”). He has succeeded at everything from science fiction (“Interstellar”) to war (“Dunkirk”).

In “The Odyssey,” Nolan tackles Homer’s epic story of Odysseus (Matt Damon), the king of Ithaca, and his journey home to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), following the Trojan War. An extraordinary cast includes Zendaya as the goddess Athena and Jon Bernthal as Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Nolan “has been circling this kind of scale for much of his career, but ‘The Odyssey’ marks a new technical milestone even for him,” said Rodrigo Perez at The Playlist. (in theaters July 17)

‘The Dink’

Sports comedies like “Dodgeball” don’t always get the critical love they deserve. In “The Dink,” director Josh Greenbaum (“Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”) looks to capture the zeitgeist with a big-hearted satire of the pickleball phenomenon.

Jake Johnson stars as Dusty Boyd, an over-the-hill tennis pro slumming it as a children’s tennis teacher at his father Chuck’s (Ed Harris) country club, where pickleball is squeezing out tennis. When an injury forces Dustin to try pickleball, he meets Candace (Mary Steenburgen) and reevaluates his kneejerk loathing of the sport. It has “all the hallmarks of a typical sports redemption story,” said Ryan O’Rourke and Maggie Lovitt at Collider. (July 24 on Apple TV+)

‘A Sad and Beautiful World’

Nino (Hasan Akil) and Yasmina (Mounia Akl), who were born on the same day in a Beirut hospital, are childhood friends who rediscover each other as young adults and fall in love against the backdrop of Lebanese political turmoil and violence. The country’s tragic 21st-century travails provide much of the fodder for the couple’s drama in director Cyril Aris’ moving film, including whether to stay or emigrate, with touches of magical realism and whimsy providing levity. A movie that “combines exuberant comedy with soft-hearted drama,” it “builds its entire thesis on the idea that there is still reason for hope,” said Matthew Joseph Jenner at International Cinephile Society. (in theaters July 24)

Jodie Foster has appeared in several French films, said David Sexton in The New Statesman – she speaks the language fluently, having attended the Lycée in Los Angeles as a child and lived in France for nine months, shortly after her breakthrough role in “Taxi Driver”. But this is her first lead role in French, and “it is her casting that makes this movie, a teasing melee of genres, work – more or less”.

Foster plays Lilian Steiner, a bad-tempered Jewish-American psychoanalyst, living in an elegant apartment in Paris, but now separated from her French husband Gaby (the “ever enchanting” Daniel Auteuil).

Things are not going well for her. One of her former patients has seemingly died by suicide using drugs that Lilian had prescribed her illicitly. She is being blamed, but Lilian suspects foul play by the patient’s partner and daughter, and recruits her ex to help her with some “dodgy sleuthing”. The set-up is good, and for the first few minutes it is “hugely enjoyable and promising”, and you wonder where it’s heading: “a satire on therapy? A family romance? A murder mystery?” Alas, the film tries to embrace them all, while never quite fulfilling any.

There are points when the story “probes potentially rich psychological territory”, touching as it does on Lilian’s suppressed childhood memories and her Jewish identity, said Philip Concannon in Sight and Sound. But ultimately, this “convoluted mystery, cluttered with red herrings and signifiers, doesn’t grip”.

Still, it is worth watching for Foster’s performance alone, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. “She is Lilian through and through – and there isn’t a single scene where she doesn’t make an interesting choice or something doesn’t flicker over that face that keeps you hooked.”

While some people may grow up dreaming of a career in public office, politicians sometimes come from a less conventional source: Hollywood. There’s a long list of film and television actors who have gone on to roles in politics, including President Donald Trump, who expanded his standing in the public eye as the host of “The Apprentice.”

Al Franken

Al Franken took perhaps the most ironic leap in U.S. politics: going from parodying a U.S. senator on television to actually getting elected as one. Franken was widely known for his time on “Saturday Night Live,” during which he often portrayed former Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) during the show’s cold open sketches. But it turns out he wasn’t satisfied with merely pretending to be a politician.

In 2009, Franken became a Democratic senator for Minnesota in a contest that saw “more than 2.9 million Minnesotans cast votes in the state’s U.S. Senate race — one of the most expensive in the country,” said PBS News. After a judicial review, the election ended when Franken “won by 312 votes,” one of the closest Senate races ever. However, Franken’s political career abruptly concluded in 2018 when he resigned after several women said he “groped or tried to forcibly kiss them,” said Politico.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Action star Arnold Schwarzenegger dominated the 1980s in projects like “The Terminator,” “Predator” and “Conan the Barbarian.” But the Austrian-born actor became an “increasingly politically active Republican during the 1990s,” and he “ran for the California governorship and won when Gray Davis was recalled in 2003,” said Schwarzenegger’s gubernatorial biography.

Thus, the Terminator became the “Governator,” and despite initial skepticism, proved to be a popular leader of the Golden State. In 2006, despite a “poor year nationally for the GOP, he was re-elected with 56% of the vote” and a “margin of well over 1 million votes,” said Politico. But after this, Schwarzenegger’s popularity waned, and he left office in 2011 “with a record-low 23%” approval rating, only “1% higher than that of Davis when he was recalled.” Schwarzenegger has since taken on an active role in denouncing MAGA and the Trump wing of the GOP.

Clint Eastwood

After getting his start as a major Western star, Clint Eastwood publicly espoused a wide variety of political views, supporting both Democrats and Republicans. “Politics are evidently always simmering with Eastwood,” said The Guardian, though in his later years he became much more associated with the GOP. But even then, his views often remained fluid.

This became even more evident in 1986, when Eastwood was elected the nonpartisan mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Though associated with conservative values, during his time as mayor Eastwood was “sympathetic to environmental concerns and less sympathetic to big business,” said The Guardian, bucking traditional GOP tenets. After leaving office, Eastwood remained in the political sphere, most notably the bizarre moment when he “spoke to that empty chair at the 2012 Republican National Convention,” said The Washington Post.

Jerry Springer

While Jerry Springer made several film and television appearances over the years, it was his eponymous television show that made him a household name, often featuring “controversial subjects like adultery, occasional nudity and even physical violence,” said Biography. But the show was a second career for Springer, who started in the Democratic political arena.

After working as a campaign adviser for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) in the 1960s, Springer made his way to Ohio and was “elected to Cincinnati City Council in 1971 but unexpectedly resigned in 1974,” said Biography. The hiatus didn’t last long, as Springer was re-elected to the city council in 1975 and “became Cincinnati mayor in 1977.” Though he only served as mayor for one year before his political career largely fizzled out, Springer “considered runs for the U.S. Senate and a second attempt as Ohio governor in 2018.”

Ronald Reagan

When thinking of actors who turned to politics, there is one name everyone probably recalls instantly: While other Hollywood stars have held important positions, former President Ronald Reagan is the only one to have occupied the nation’s highest office. Before moving into the White House, Reagan’s career started on screen in 1937, when a contest “won him a contract with Warner Brothers in Hollywood,” said the White House Historical Association (WHHA).

Over the next 20 years, Reagan “appeared in 53 films, including ‘Kings Row’ and ‘Knute Rockne, All American.’” He later turned to politics with a staunch Republican platform, and in 1966 “defeated incumbent Pat Brown to become governor of California, and was reelected in 1970,” said the WHHA. From there, Reagan looked to the national stage, and amid the Democratic Party’s rising unpopularity, he defeated sitting President Jimmy Carter in a landslide during the 1980 election.

Sean Duffy

Several television personalities occupy spaces in President Donald Trump’s White House, most notably Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy. Before earning his law degree, Duffy “got his TV start in his 20s on ‘The Real World,’ appearing on the Boston edition of the show's sixth season,” said People. This version of the show, as with the other seasons of “The Real World,” followed Duffy and six other strangers who lived together in a converted firehouse in Boston.

After his reality television debut, Duffy “moved into law in his home state of Wisconsin, serving as the district attorney of Ashland County for a decade,” said People. He went on to serve Wisconsin in Congress, “representing the state’s 7th Congressional District, from 2011 to 2019.” After winning the 2024 election, Trump nominated Duffy to lead the Transportation Department. Several controversies have marked his tenure.

Sonny Bono

Sonny Bono remains best known for the singing duo he formed with his wife Cher, which made the pair two of the most iconic celebrities of the 1960s. But Bono was also a longstanding member of the Republican Party and was active in GOP politics throughout his life. His entrance into the political sphere came after he “fell almost completely out of the public eye following the cancellation of ‘The Sonny and Cher Show’ in 1977,” said History.

Soon after the show was axed, though, Bono began to make a new name for himself in politics, and he was elected mayor of Palm Springs, California, in 1988. After serving as mayor for four years, Bono “set his sights on national office,” and in 1994 he was “elected to Congress as a representative from California’s 44th Congressional District,” said Biography. While in Congress, Bono became known for his “wit and his deeply conservative views,” and he remains the only member of Congress to have scored a number one single on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

‘Maddie’s Secret’

Directed by John Early (Not rated)

★★★★

“The secret of Maddie’s Secret—or maybe it’s the central joke—is that the movie’s creator and star takes the whole thing seriously,” said Peter Debruge in Variety. In this “tricky, one-of-a-kind stunt,” comedian John Early sends up disease-of-the-week TV movies of the 1980s and ’90s while cross-dressing to play the title character, a woman with an eating disorder that’s reactivated by sudden fame. But the Search Party star “treads lightly here,” spoofing a movie genre while taking Maddie’s bulimia utterly seriously. The blend of high camp and deep sincerity works only because Early, while playing Maddie, “wins the audience over so thoroughly,” said Monica Castillo in The A.V. Club. Maddie is thrust into food-world stardom after her husband shoots a video clip that goes viral, but the pressure causes her to unravel. Some scenes in the movie are light and silly, including those pairing Maddie with a lesbian friend, played by Kate Berlant, who clearly loves her. Other sequences “take a deeply serious turn,” even landing Maddie in a hospital.

By then, “Maddie’s Secret has, without any fundamental shift in tone, begun to feel ultra-real,” said Sam Bodrojan in IndieWire. “The film’s climax, which has Maddie confronting her mother about her childhood, is a genuine showstopper, one that can only really work with the trust Early and company have built up with the audience over the preceding hour and a half.” The result is “a film of real kindness” that’s also “one of the boldest American movies I have seen in years.”

‘Rose of Nevada’

Directed by Mark Jenkin (Not rated)

★★★

“In the hands of a conventional filmmaker, this would be a conventional scary movie,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Two strangers in need of money take work on a potentially cursed fishing trawler and discover when they return from two days at sea that it’s 30 years earlier in their village and that the lives they’d known no longer exist. But instead of using that premise to chase scares, British director Mark Jenkin “makes of it something more elusive and complex,” a movie that “feels like a remembered dream” and conjures “the claustrophobia of family and community.”

Co-star Callum Turner brings “an absorbing swagger” to the role of a drifter who suddenly finds himself with a wife and child in his new reality, said Josh Parham in Next Best Picture. George MacKay “makes a much more lasting impression,” though, because he plays a father and husband who loses his family when time mysteriously spins back to 1993. But even though Turner’s Liam and MacKay’s Nick find themselves mistaken for two men lost when the Rose of Nevada vanished in ’93, the story that then unfolds feels more conventional than the filmmaking. Because Jenkin films on grainy 16mm and overdubs his actors’ dialogue, said Tim Grierson in the Los Angeles Times, his movies have a disorienting effect. Fortunately, “everything that the casual moviegoer would consider ‘wrong’ about Jenkin’s approach is what makes his films so transcendently jarring.”

“‘Toy Story 5’ – do we need it?” asked Deborah Ross in The Spectator. It’s been 31 years since the first film came out, and “one worries for the narrative integrity of characters when an IP is thrashed to death like this”.

The latest instalment, however, does at least bring the franchise up to date by addressing one of the “pressing dilemmas of modern childhood”: screen time, and whether it will be the end of toys (“Extinction... Not again!” cries Rex, the dinosaur).

‘Delicious touches’

Our favourite toys still belong to Bonnie, but while Bonnie loves them still, all the other eight-year-olds now play in the digital world. To help her make friends, her parents grudgingly buy her a frog-themed tablet called Lilypad. It does not, however, go to plan: Bonnie not only gets hooked on Lilypad (Greta Lee), she ends up being cyberbullied via it. So the toys contact Woody (Tom Hanks), who left Bonnie’s room at the end of ‘Toy Story 4’, to ask for his help.

The film contains some “delicious” touches – Woody now has a bald spot and a paunch – and it is “superb” to look at – but it does all “feel a little generic”.

‘Loses its nerve’

The plot is “amazingly timely”, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture, and may be a bit “triggering” for some parents: this is the only Pixar cartoon that dwells on a child being “crushingly lonely”. But compared with the “peerless” first three films, it is short on good jokes, and heavy on subplots: one of them, about 50 Buzz Lightyear toys making their way across the country, could have been scrapped altogether.

The film also “loses its nerve with its own big idea”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: the “creepy” tablet turns out to be capable of “self-sacrificial heroism”. “Really? At least Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, the villain from ‘TS3’, had the courage of his evil convictions.”

Horror movies are enjoying a jump-scare moment, as hit films like “Obsession” and “Backrooms” thrill zeitgeist-moving Gen Z audiences. Summer promises to deliver yet another slew of memorable thrills, including these five highly anticipated features.

‘Leviticus’

A movie with already-deafening buzz, director Adrian Chiarella’s queer horror story drops at a time of retrenchment for gender and sexual minorities in many parts of the world, including the United States. Naim (Joe Bird) and his mother, (Mia Wasikowska), move to a small Australian town, where he begins to fall for Ryan (Stacy Clausen). A pastor (Nicholas Hope) then subjects the boys to a cruel form of conversion therapy in which they are both stalked, terrifyingly, by a shape-shifting demon that impersonates the other boy. A “Sundance darling with few quote-unquote recognizable movie stars and no I.P. ties to speak of” that was snapped up by Neon after thrilling audiences at the Sundance Film Festival, it fully deserves to be the “next big summer horror movie,” said Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire. (in theaters now)

‘Evil Dead Burn’

If you’re watching an “Evil Dead” film at this point, it isn’t for the originality but rather for the seemingly endless joys of seeing angry demons lay waste to whatever unfortunates happen to rouse them from their turpitude. Director Sébastien Vanicek (“Infested”) takes over the franchise after the unexpected success of 2023’s “Evil Dead Rise.”

The new story features a grieving widow, Alice (Souheila Yacoub), whose visit to her in-laws’ isolated cabin goes predictably awry when someone decides to open up the Book of the Dead and read it aloud. Have the characters not seen any of these films? The movie “unleashes the franchise’s most savage and terrifying ride to date, blazing onto big screens with an all-new chapter of carnage and demonic mayhem,” said Meagan Navarro at Bloody Disgusting. (in theaters July 10)

‘Ice Cream Man’

Parents who believe sweets turn their kids into raging monsters may sympathize with the plot of this bananas movie from director Eli Roth (“Cabin Fever”). Ari Millen (“Orphan Black”) plays an ice cream man whose wares convert children into demonically possessed killers, who then turn on their parents and teachers in ways that make “Children of the Corn” look like a bedtime story for toddlers.

Roth, who also stars in the film, “looks to slaughter any sense of good taste with his brand new horror movie, delivering a blood-soaked exploitation film,” said John Squires at Bloody Disgusting. Even the trailer is not for the faint of heart. (in theaters Aug. 7)

‘Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma’

Fresh off her career-making turn in the recently concluded HBO Max comedy “Hacks,” Hannah Einbinder stars as a young, queer filmmaker tasked with rebooting a trashy slasher franchise called “Camp Miasma.” When she seeks out Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson), the reclusive star of the original, she finds Preston living in the woods where the film was set and discovers that the movies might not all have been fiction.

The franchise’s villain, Little Death (Jack Haven), is trans, and director Jane Schoenbrun “approaches critiques of transphobia in horror cinema with so much levity and irreverence,” said Samantha Allen and Ana Osorno at Them. But the film lands because it is able to “shed the meta trappings and dive deeper into raw feeling.” (in theaters Aug. 7)

‘Hope’

Rounding out the summer, South Korean director Na Hong-jin returns with his first feature since the wild, justifiably acclaimed 2016 horror movie “The Wailing.” Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is the chief of police in a small town under siege by nightmarish alien creatures. Jung Ho-yeon (“Squid Game”) plays his deputy, who helps him track and hunt the creature, while Beom-seok’s cousin, Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), leads a separate group on the monster’s trail.

Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender and Taylor Russell also star as three of the aliens. The film is “jammed with sharp, semi-parodic meta-commentary” yet remains a “full-on, unapologetic action movie packed with breathtaking and breathless car chases, horse chases, foot chases and monster chases,” said John Bleasdale at Sight and Sound. (in theaters Sept. 9)

‘Toy Story 5’

Directed by Andrew Stanton (PG)

★★★

Toy Story 5 arrives this week as further proof that “there’s no animated franchise that’s ever plumbed the human condition so deftly,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. As “unnecessary and charming” as 2019’s Toy Story 4, it’s “a cute and funny sequel” that once again seamlessly weaves big ideas about the terrors of loss, abandonment, and mortality with suspenseful action, a heart-tugging message, and plenty of “good-natured goofiness.” The best thing about seeing the once-perfect Toy Story catalog expand again is that Jessie, the cowgirl doll voiced by Joan Cusack, “finally gets to take center stage,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone.

Jessie is the favorite toy of 8-year-old Bonnie, so when the shy grade-schooler is given a digital tablet and loses interest in her old playthings, it’s Jessie who leads the fight to expose the pitfalls of socializing online. But while screen technology fully deserves its villainous role, “Toy Story 5 is a screed in search of a story,” and all of the movie’s secondary plotlines—about Buzz Lightyear, Sheriff Woody, and one of Bonnie’s tween neighbors—“somehow feel like filler.” Sadly, “this is what happens when you beat a franchise to death.” The movie, to be sure, “doesn’t take many risks,” said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com. Jessie eventually makes peace with technology, suggesting we all simply find a balance between the online world’s attractions and organic living. “It’s your prototypically beautifully rendered movie tackling a heady subject in the safest possible manner”—which isn’t bad for a fifth outing.

‘The Death of Robin Hood’

Directed by Michael Sarnoski (R)

★★

The title character played by Hugh Jackman in this revisionist drama is “not the Robin Hood of green tights and swashbuckling adventure,” said Tim Grierson in Screen Daily. Disappointingly, he comes across instead in this latest drama from the acclaimed director of 2021’s Pig as “just another flinty antihero manfully attempting to make amends for his bad acts.” Though a gray-bearded Jackman endows the character with “sufficient sorrow” and “a believable ferocity,” the outlaw’s eleventh-hour pursuit of redemption leads to “earnestly executed but fairly predictable twists and turns.”

The movie, to be fair, “holds our attention for the sheer severity of its reinvention,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. This Robin Hood, despite the lore that’s already grown around him, robbed and killed to enrich only himself, and after a bloody opening skirmish he’d hoped would end his life, he awakens in a priory where he’s tended to by an abbess played by Jodie Comer. As he befriends an orphaned girl and a leper, the film proves both “a production of unimpeachable intelligence” and “a slow, steady downer” for most of its run. “For an often ponderously uneventful film, the ending also feels strangely rushed,” said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. “There’s really impressive craft here, though,” as director Michael Sarnoski makes the most of natural sounds and settings to transport us to 13th-century England. While his unconventional latest effort winds up “stuck somewhere between epic and chamber piece,” he remains a filmmaker to watch. “Greatness will one day surely come.”

When the “spine-tingling” trailer for Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” was released, many of us hoped that the great director would be delivering his “career-crowning masterpiece”, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture: a “profound last word” on aliens arriving on Earth, a topic that has obsessed him for years. Instead, we have a “flimsy, outdated car-chase thriller” that contains “no ideas about aliens that we haven’t heard before”.

Josh O’Connor stars as Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity boffin who works for Wardex, a powerful US organisation that has for years been concealing proof of alien contact (yes, on one level it is “Men in Black”, but without the jokes). After stealing classified files, he becomes a fugitive pursued by Wardex’s sinister supremo (Colin Firth, “badly miscast”).

Instrumental to Kellner’s plan to expose Wardex is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a television meteorologist who suddenly finds herself able to speak to aliens. Her scenes are “fantastic”: Spielberg should probably have made the film about her powers and “ditched the rest”.

‘Signature elegance’

There’s plenty of the director’s “signature elegance” to enjoy, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph; some scenes move “with such breathless lucidity it is as if he is beaming excitement directly into your brain”. But the plotting is “woolly and lopsided”, while the tone is “an awkward mix of solemnity and silliness”.

I enjoyed it, said David Sexton in The New Statesman – it’s “as brilliantly filmed as anything Spielberg has ever made”, with a “marvellous” performance from Blunt and a “terrific” score from John Williams (his 30th for Spielberg). It’s a “corker, a proper summer blockbuster” and “a prime example of the genre he originally created with ‘Jaws’”.

‘Disclosure Day’

Directed by Steven Spielberg (PG-13)

★★★

“It’s been a long time since Steven Spielberg directed a film as quintessentially Spielbergian as Disclosure Day,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Like his best work, the beloved filmmaker’s latest alien adventure combines “a propulsive yarn” with human drama, here anchored by “deeply felt” performances from co-stars Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt. O’Connor plays Daniel, a cybersecurity expert on the run after stealing evidence that the U.S. government has been hiding proof of extraterrestrial life for decades. Meanwhile, Blunt’s Margaret, a TV meteorologist, one day develops psychic powers linked to those secrets.

Daniel’s and Margaret’s paths eventually collide in a fantastic speeding-train sequence that proves Spielberg “hasn’t lost the knack,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. But while he’s crafted “an incredibly fast-paced summer thrill ride,” the story doesn’t work, largely because in our age of disinformation and complacency, it’s now naive to think that society would be turned upside down if one man announced proof of alien life. “Disclosure Day would have been a great thriller in the heyday of The X-Files, but in the 2020s, it’s out of touch.” If you seek flaws, “there’s much to roll your eyes at,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone, including the story’s “frustratingly arbitrary” twists and a climax that “should feel showstopping but somehow falls flat.” Even so, “this is a Steven Spielberg film,” and he brings “a baseline of love for filmmaking” that adds vitality to every scene. Better yet, his work still emits a simple faith: “that movies still have the power to blow minds and open hearts.”

‘Carolina Caroline’

Directed by Adam Rehmeier (Not rated)

★★★

“Carolina Caroline is a story we’ve seen play out a million times,” said Natalia Keogan in The A.V. Club. It’s a lovers-on-the-lam picture in the vein of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and True Romance, “but there’s a down-to-earth quality here that eludes so many of these other iconic capers, and that’s what sweeps you up.” Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner are “electric” as Caroline, a Texas gas station clerk, and Oliver, the charismatic con artist who whisks her away into a life of crime.

The absence of surprises in the story once they commence their Carolina-bound bank-robbing road trip “isn’t inherently a bad thing,” said Vikram Murthi in IndieWire. “It can be fun to watch talented people play the hits,” including when law enforcement starts closing in on this pair. Weaving imbues Caroline with “just the right amount of cunning that she never comes across as a simple victim” while Gallner lends the dangerous Oliver “a potent romantic streak.” But even the two stars can only do so much with some scenes in the film’s lumpy middle that “feel like going through the motions.” Throughout, though, there’s “legitimate heat and chemistry between the two lead actors,” said Sheila O’Malley in RogerEbert.com, and director Adam Rehmeier gives them space to connect at a soul level. “When Caroline and Oliver kiss, it’s not just hot or sexy. You can feel their relief. Finally, they are not alone in this weird, sad world.”

Low-budget horror movie “Backrooms” has been generating “considerable buzz”, said Wallpaper. The unsettling directorial debut from 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons is based on a viral web series he made as a teenager. It made $81 million (£60 million) in North America on its opening weekend, a new record for an original horror film.

The inspiration for “Backrooms” came from a discussion on the 4chan message board about slipping through a “crack in reality” and finding yourself in an “infinite maze of identical corridors”. Now, the A24 studio has adapted the chilling series into a film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a furniture salesman who discovers in his showroom basement a “fluorescent-lit threshold opening onto an eerie, labyrinthine office space” that looks like it stretches on for ever.

“Backrooms” is the latest success in the genre of liminal horror, based on the unsettling feeling of “in-between” spaces. “The horror here is not a monster or a ghost, but the Backrooms themselves.”

If that sounds like your kind of scare, here are eight other liminal horror films to lose yourself in.

The Shining, 1980

“One of the great classics of liminal horror,” this iconic film is “arguably one of the scariest” movies of all time, said SlashFilm. Much of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece centres on the “eerie emptiness” of the sprawling hotel Jack (Jack Nicholson) and his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) are looking after for the winter with their son Danny (Danny Lloyd). The long, deserted corridors that lead nowhere helped introduce the idea that emptiness “can, in itself be a character” or unsettling presence that creates a “sense of liminal dread”.

Lost Highway, 1997

“David Lynch can nail the atmosphere of liminality,” said MovieWeb. His surreal, neo-noir thriller follows jazz musician Frank Madison (Bill Pullman), who is accused of murdering his wife (Patricia Arquette). Through a series of haunting “dreamlike” sequences, Lynch builds an “uncanny” world while examining men’s toxic “obsession with women” and the lies people tell themselves to escape the truth.

The Blair Witch Project, 1999

Possibly still the “greatest found-footage horror movie”, this low-budget film is also an “excellent” example of liminal horror, said ScreenRant. The action follows three students who set out into the woods to document the mythical Blair Witch. “It’s a search none of them ever return from.” Space stretches and the “never-ending woods that loop constantly create a suffocating atmosphere”. It’s a must watch.

Pulse (Kairo), 2001

This Japanese techno-horror sees “ghosts invade the world of the living through the internet, terrorising those they encounter along the way”, said ScreenRant. It’s a “testament to the power of liminal horror” how Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s nerve-jangling film steers clear of “blood and gore”, instead exploring the “terror that comes from the corner of a room”.

It Follows, 2015

It “may not seem like it at first glance”, but “the label of liminal horror is a perfect fit” for this supernatural horror, said MovieWeb. The action follows Jay, a young woman who, “after sleeping with her boyfriend, becomes the recipient of a fatal curse” that follows her wherever she goes. “That is, unless she can pass it on.” With the feel of a “dream taking place in a cold landscape not unlike our own”, it’s a frightening watch.

Vivarium, 2019

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots star as a “conflicted couple” who settle down in the suburbs only to find their new home is a “source of sinister stasis”, said Dread Central. Trapped in a disturbing development where “unlimited versions of the same house” line “roads that lead to nowhere”, they soon find themselves in a living nightmare with a baby boy to raise.

Skinamarink, 2022

Based “almost entirely” around “liminal horror scares”, this chilling film follows two young children who wake up in the night to find their father has gone and “the doors and windows of their house have disappeared”, said ScreenRant. As the hours unfold without him, they “encounter frightening visions in the dark recesses of their home”. Director Kyle Edward Ball brings this nightmare vividly to life, plunging viewers into the “unknowable terror” of murky, unlit spaces.

Exit 8, 2025

Genki Kawamura’s liminal horror is based on a Japanese video game of the same name, said Dread Central. Taking the Tokyo subway as its sinister setting, the busy commuter hub is transformed into an “endless purgatory for the film’s perilous protagonist”. Brilliantly immersive and filled with a gnawing sense of dread, Kawamura expertly makes the “innocuous subway tunnel feel like a layer of hell”.

The horror genre occupies the current Hollywood spotlight, and we have YouTube to thank for a bevy of high-grossing indie films directed by popular former users of the video platform. The runaway success of these box office darlings has industry insiders questioning if this crew represents a new filmmaking era or if it’s a passing phase.

Pipeline from YouTube-to-horror filmmaker

The recently released “Backrooms” is “part of a growing wave of breakout films from fledgling directors” who “honed their instincts on YouTube” rather than “inside the Hollywood ecosystem,” said The New York Times. Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old first-time director, signed a deal with distributor A24 to make the film when he was 17. He joined the ranks of two other creators who have “already turned online followings into surprise box-office hits this year.”

The “YouTuber-to-filmmaker boomlet,” said the Times, began in January when YouTube creator Mark Fischbach, known as Markiplier by his fans, self-distributed his horror movie, “Iron Lung.” Though it only cost $3 million to make, it “took in $50 million” in the end. The run of successful YouTube horror directors continued with “Obsession,” a $750,000-budget horror movie directed by Curry Barker. Both Barker’s film and “Backrooms” have surpassed $200 million in earnings each. “It’s not an anomaly,” Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s film school, said to the Times. It is the start of a “gigantic shift.” These are the “cinematic insurgents of our era.”

The YouTube generation has “finally come of age,” horror filmmaker James Wan, who coproduced “Backrooms,” said to Variety. They grew up creating content without money. That spirit has fostered a “new wave of filmmakers and storytellers.” YouTube is the “perfect incubator for emerging voices.”

There is a “whole generation of moviegoers who grew up” with a “very specific taste in horror, the stuff that sits a little outside the mainstream,” Jason Blum, the producer of the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, said to Variety. When one of these filmmakers “makes the jump to a theater, the audience that found them online comes with them.”

Wins with a grain of salt

While they are currently making a splash, these “box office victories come with caveats,” said the Times. All three movies are horror films, the genre that has “long been the most forgiving for first-time filmmakers, in part because horror is relatively cheap to produce.” For some studio executives, “that context is a reason for caution.” The real shift will come when “horror isn’t the only proof of concept.”

With so much emphasis being put on the “YouTube-to-horror movie trend” as the “next frontier of finding talented new voices,” a “difficult, uncomfortable conversation is more necessary than ever,” Slash Film said. Unless you exist as a “cisgender, heterosexual, white man,” the pipeline “doesn’t actually exist.” YouTube is not and has “never been a truly democratized platform,” and we are doing the “next generation of creatives a disservice by pretending it is.”

There are “random people from Discord who are, like, 14-year-olds” who are “not working in the industry at all, but they’re fucking wizards,” Parsons said to The Verge. Still, he refuses to “preach the blind optimism that I hear from a lot of other filmmakers who say, ‘You got a phone; everyone can be a filmmaker now.’”

The best lesson executives could take from the success of Parsons and Barker is “not to throw a zillion dollars at more movies that look just like these,” movie critic Alissa Wilkinson said at The New York Times. It would be to “find more creators like these two” because they’ve “built audiences in an organic way in the places that younger audiences congregate” and to give them “creative freedom to explore what feels right to them.” Remember, too, that “not everything will hit like these two movies.”

‘Backrooms’

Directed by Kane Parsons (R)

★★★

“Might social media, a force often credited with hastening the death of theatrical moviegoing, instead prove to be its salvation?” asked Justin Chang in The New Yorker. As the three-week-old horror film Obsession continues its surprising run, it has now been blocked from topping the box office chart by another made-on-the-cheap hit by a young director whose vision was also shaped by social media. Backrooms, created by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, is “an ingeniously contoured exercise in liminal horror” built around the notion of a nearly endless maze-like expanse of eerily bland office spaces. Though the film “ends on a disappointingly conventional note,” it establishes Parsons as “an undeniable talent.”

Given that his theatrical debut grew out of the huge audience he’d built on YouTube for short videos set in the same world, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, “Backrooms would be one of the year’s most significant releases even if the movie itself was merely fine.” Instead, “it’s a work of honest-to-goodness art,” an “uncannily mature” tale about how the self-serving narratives we tell ourselves block emotional growth. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays an embittered furniture store owner who discovers a passage into the mundane alt-space, eventually drawing two young employees and his therapist, played by fellow Oscar nominee Renate Reinsve, into also braving its potential dangers. Still, Backrooms is less straightforward horror than “a surrealist painting in motion.” It conjures “a deep-in-the-bones unease,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. And while the disappointing screenplay ensures the film isn’t “a fully explained wonder,” it remains “well worth the wander.”

‘Power Ballad’

Directed by John Carney (R)

★★

The latest music-filled comedy drama from the director of Once and Sing Street “should be breezy fun,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Instead, “it left me feeling mildly depressed,” because its happy ending felt unearned after roughly 90 minutes about a nice-guy musician who has a song stolen from him by a pop star. Co-stars Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas “aren’t to blame here; it’s the story that lets them down,” and the wrong turns start with the pain we have to see Rudd’s underdog endure.

Beyond that, “you have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief to meet the film on its own terms,” said Christian Zilko in IndieWire. Rudd plays Rick, the middle-aged American leader of a Dublin-based wedding band who, after meeting a former boy-band member, winds up exchanging song sketches deep into the night. Months later, Rick is shocked, and begins spiraling, when one of his tunes becomes an uncredited global hit for his new celebrity soulmate. But while some key events in the story are “tough sells,” the characters’ actions convey emotional truths, and “the film builds toward the mature realization that sometimes it’s OK to miss out on our material dreams if we replace them with something better,” such as a rich family life. Still, the likable Rudd is “about all that tethers Power Ballad to something like life,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Director John Carney “keeps everything insistently light, gesturing at complexities rather than delving into them.”

‘Masters of the Universe’

Directed by Travis Knight (PG-13)

★★

“The creators of the new Masters of the Universe movie really, really want to let you know that they’re in on the joke,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. The brains behind Mattel Studio’s first movie since Barbie know that only children and over-grown adolescents would care about He-Man and Skeletor, two 1980s toys turned cartoons, so they’ve packed the film with “so much campy, self-referential humor that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” There’s plenty of action, but even that feels “more dutiful than exhilarating, with nothing really seeming at stake.”

When the movie works, it’s “a rollicking under-dog space adventure,” said Clint Worthington in RogerEbert.com. Nicholas Galitzine plays He-Man, aka Prince Adam of Eternia, who, as an adolescent, was sent to Earth after his kingdom was conquered by Skeletor, played by Jared Leto as a purring diva. Fifteen years later, Adam is working a dreary HR job when a chance encounter sends him back home to reclaim the throne. Owing to all the wisecracking, however, the movie too often “feels like it’s ashamed of what it truly wants to be.” It’s “most enjoyable as a fish-out-of-water tale on either side of the planetary divide,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. Once we’re back on Eternia, though, “things get less spry,” and as the movie lurches from one fight scene to the next, it becomes “a nostalgia trip that never quite belongs to the present, and never rouses any cherished memory of the past.”

The authorities in China have banned a prizewinning film because nationalists and the manosphere “resented its portrayal of their country”, said The Economist.

The movie, “Her Heart Beats in its Cage”, is a prison drama based on real killing, centering on Zhao Xiaohong, who may be perceived as a “star in the making”, a “feminist icon”, a “murderer” or “part of a calculated deception”, said The Times.

Deeply conflicted 

Zhao killed her husband with a fruit knife during an argument that “spilt over into a violent altercation” about the wider division of domestic chores. A court found her guilty of intentional killing in 2009 and sentenced her to 15 years in prison.

She was preparing for release from jail when Xiaoyu Qin, a film director, “discovered” her. He visited her prison, and was surprised to find “marginalised individuals full of personality and complexity, intense clashes between notions of good and evil” and “deeply conflicted stories”, he told China Newsweek.

For the film, Qin blended documentary-style footage of Zhao’s time in jail, filmed with the approval of the government, with scripted performances by her and her family, including her husband’s relatives. Critics claimed that Qin had “lured” the grieving family into participating and “feigning forgiveness”, said The Economist.

When the film was shown last year at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, it “caused an immediate stir” and “made headlines back home in China”, said The Times.

It was quickly criticised online for allegedly whitewashing a convicted killer. Some argued that the film was “condoning violence” and “rewarding a criminal”, while others “questioned whether she was a victim of domestic violence at all”, noting that the judge had “rejected” her claim of self-defence.

There were also “the usual claims” on China’s “highly nationalistic internet” that the movie depicted the country in a “bad light”, which is the “sort of issue” on which censors “tend to agree with popular opinion”.

The film’s release in China was hotly anticipated, but as controversy raged, it disappeared from schedules less than a fortnight before its release. No explanation was given.

Meanwhile, the film’s cast and crew are not responding to requests for interviews, so “even finding out their defence to the accusations and counter-accusations” aimed at the film has “become more and more difficult”, as reports and reviews are “ruthlessly scrubbed”. Zhao’s social media accounts have also been blocked, according to reports in state media.

Touchy nationalism 

Chinese “propaganda” is “full of distortion and deception”, said The Economist, but much of the reaction online “reflected a touchy nationalism”, claiming the film was a “Western plot to undermine party rule by spreading liberal, pro-feminist values”.

China is undergoing its own “version” of the “West’s culture wars”, said The Times, with feminists “calling out the patriarchy and sexual harassment”, while men, particularly young men, are “crying foul”.

But “more informed online debate” about the movie has focused on reforms to the justice system. The law has been altered to allow judges assessing a self-defence claim to take into account any previous history of domestic violence.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is under attack for the “unfathomable sin of having a diverse cast,” said Marlow Stern in Variety. Director Nolan has confirmed that Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o is playing Helen of Troy in his upcoming blockbuster film version of Homer’s epic. Critics of Nolan’s casting also claim, without confirmation, that trans actor Elliot Page is playing the warrior Achilles. Leading the anti-Odyssey charge is Elon Musk, the champion of “white-grievance campaigns,” who posted dozens of indignant screeds on X claiming Nolan had “desecrated” Homer’s story. He and other detractors “have not actually seen the film yet, mind you,” nor do they seem to care that Helen and Achilles are “fictional characters navigating a mythological fable” with a giant Cyclops and other monsters. For these “culture warriors,” a diverse Odyssey is an intolerable affront.

These detractors may whine about “accuracy,” said Peter A. Berry in Bloomberg, but they’re actually defending their “fantasy of the past.” Genetically Mediterranean, the ancient Greeks generally had darker hair and skin than the fair, blue-eyed Brad Pitt, who played Achilles in 2004’s Troy—a film that Musk extols. Homer described Helen as beautiful but without much detail, making any portrayal “an educated guess.” Whatever Homer imagined 2,700 years ago, said Rich Lowry in National Review, there’s “nothing inherently wrong with casting actors in roles that don’t match their ethnicity.” Liberals were equally misguided when they criticized Scarlett Johansson for saying she should be “allowed to play anyone” after starring as a traditionally Japanese character in 2017’s Ghost in the Shell. “What’s good for Lupita Nyong’o should be good for Scarlett Johansson, and vice versa.”

With an IPO for SpaceX looming, “you’d think Musk wouldn’t have the time or energy for this nonsense,” said Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. But the world’s richest man spends an “extraordinary” amount of time posting anti-immigrant rhetoric and “white genocide” conspiracies. On 26 of 31 days in January, he shared racially charged posts with his 240 million followers on X. Musk’s “whiny” race panic has become “boring,” said John DeVore in MS.now, and has zero impact beyond his reactionary base. The Odyssey is “already the most buzzed-about movie of the summer,” with brisk advance ticket sales. Musk is “losing the culture war; he just doesn’t know it yet.”

While much has changed about the movie industry in recent years, the presence of a sci-fi blockbuster like director Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” early in the summer season feels like a throwback. The buzzy tentpole will be joined by several other intriguing — if less hyped — films this month in theaters, including a talky dinner party drama and a queer horror fable.

‘Disclosure Day’

Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg will turn 80 this December but seems in no hurry to slow down. “Disclosure Day” looks like his most ambitious science-fiction project since 2005’s “War of the Worlds.”

The plot remains mostly under wraps, but Emily Blunt (“A Quiet Place”) plays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist who works with whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) to blow the lid off of a government conspiracy to conceal the existence of alien life on Earth. It’s a “dense roller-coaster ride blending chase film, love story and mystery, all wrapped in sci-fi wonder” making up “Spielberg’s best film in 20 years,” said Gizmodo’s Germain Lussier on X. (in theaters June 12)

‘O Horizon’

Maria Bakalova (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) is Abby, a neuroscientist who signs up for an experimental new app technology peddled by the delightfully goofy Sam (Adam Pally) to create an AI version of her recently deceased father, Warren (David Strathairn). But her new creation slips out of her control when “Warren” interferes with her budding relationship with Douglas (Avi Nash).

Though it sounds like the premise of a bleak “Black Mirror” episode, the movie has a bigger heart and is less cynical than most cinematic takes on AI. An “instant audience-pleaser,” director Madeleine Rotzler’s movie creates an “effective adult fairy tale, a kind of latter-day ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ in which the main character is sent down her own emotional rabbit hole,” said Greg Archer at MovieWeb. (in theaters June 19)

‘Maddie’s Secret’

Comedian John Early (“Search Party”) directs himself as Maddie, a chef who descends into eating-disordered hell after her husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), releases a video of her cooking that goes viral. It’s been a long time since a man played a woman like this in a mainstream feature, and it remains to be seen how audiences will react, but “Maddie’s Secret” boasts an impressive roster of comedic talent, including Kate Berlant (“A League of Their Own”) as Maddie’s close friend Deena. A “tricky, one-of-a-kind stunt” that’s “sure to be divisive,” Early’s film succeeds as a “tongue-in-cheek critique of influencer culture crossed with a sincere homage to the heyday of disease-of-the-week TV movies,” said Peter Debruge at Variety. (in theaters June 19)

‘Leviticus’

Director Adrian Chiarella’s first feature is an unusually poignant horror story set in rural Australia, where teenagers Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) begin a halting romance. Then a local preacher (Nicholas Hope) curses the boys with a demon that visits them every night and takes the shape of whoever they desire the most.

The result most closely resembles a queer version of “It Follows” and feels perfectly timed as a critique of the authoritarian turn against kids struggling with their gender identities in the U.S. In a film that “takes a more restrained approach to horror tropes,” the demon turns their “love into a weapon against them” and “vividly visualizes” the church’s project of “converting desire into shame,” said Marshall Shaffer at Slant magazine. (in theaters June 19)

‘The Invite’

In director Olivia Wilde’s first feature since the divisive “Don’t Worry Darling,” Joe (Seth Rogen) is a down-on-himself music teacher whose moribund marriage to Angela (Olivia Wilde) is stress-tested when the pair invites their glamorous and seemingly blissful upstairs neighbors, Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penélope Cruz), over for dinner. The tense subtext is that Joe and Angela have been listening uncomfortably to their neighbors’ loud sex. Turns out Hawk and Pína may have accepted the invitation with more than a nice dinner in mind. “The Invite” intentionally recalls classic spiraling-marriage movies like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” while the characters’ “interplay yields an entertaining, at times crackling evening that tries for a bittersweet note,” said Nicolas Rapold at Sight and Sound. (in theaters June 26)

‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’

Directed by Jon Favreau (PG-13)

★★

“It’s time to ask for more,” said Kate Erbland in IndieWire. While this first new Star Wars movie in seven years is “charming enough in the moment,” it’s “almost instantly forgettable,” a spin-off of a Star Wars TV series that’s little more than “three good-enough TV episodes smushed together.” Pedro Pascal is back as the masked bounty hunter who is the title character of Disney+’s The Mandalorian. Mando, as usual, is accompanied by the “still very cute” Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. But shouldn’t a Star Wars movie reach for more?

To me, “the film’s relative modesty comes as something of a relief,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. “Freed from the burden of canonical responsibility,” it’s nothing but “flighty fun,” a “Western-y” space adventure in which Mando has been enlisted to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta, from captors as part of a larger mission to take out a baddie who’d been allied with the recently fallen Empire. Sigourney Weaver even makes an appearance. Granted, none of the many action sequences match the scale of those in the 2015–19 Star Wars movie trilogy. But the action scenes are exciting in their own right, helping to make this film “a likable-enough one-off.” Still, the Star Wars franchise “once led the culture with its imagery, swagger, and style,” said Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press. This entry feels merely formulaic, with little on the line except the outcome of a stray assignment for one bounty hunter. “You used to leave a new Star Wars movie on a cloud. Here, that galaxy is far, far away.”

‘I Love Boosters’

Directed by Boots Riley (R)

★★★

“If you’re wondering whether Boots Riley has toned down his brash satirical style, have no fear,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The rapper turned director’s first film since 2018’s acclaimed Sorry to Bother You is “every bit as out there, maybe more so.” Keke Palmer plays Corvette, the leader of a three-woman gang of shoplifters who resell stolen high-end clothes and have targeted a billionaire designer played with comic flair by Demi Moore. But Riley unleashes wild departures from reality, and “you either go with it or you don’t.”

In the movie’s second half, “Riley turns the volume up on the surreal meter way past 11,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. After Corvette’s cause is taken up by a fourth booster who can teleport, this energetic send-up of fashion, capitalist exploitation, and cultural appropriation “goes to so many impossible, ridiculous places that Riley sometimes feels like he loses a grip on the messaging.” Still, “there’s something invigorating about seeing an artist like Riley given the freedom to just go for it.” Largely thanks to Palmer, the movie never fully falls apart, said Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap. “As always,” the One of Them Days star is “a captivating, comedic jolt of energy,” and she also provides “the emotional heft the film needs at key moments.” Riley, for all his comic flourishes, clearly roots for everybody who’s trying to survive in our cutthroat world and is helping others do the same. Though he traffics in spiky cynicism, “it’s a cynicism that is cut with a more earnest belief in people.”

‘Obsession’

Directed by Curry Barker (R)

★★★

This hit theatrical debut from 26-year-old Curry Barker is “the best kind of nightmare,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. “Knotty, amusing, and absolutely unhinged,” Barker’s low-budget horror breakthrough uses a simple be-careful-what-you-wish-for premise to dramatize the destructive selfishness of a certain breed of male desire for female attention. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a meek young man who makes a wish using a novelty store item that turns Nikki, his longtime crush, into an obsessively devoted girlfriend—so devoted that she’s ready to kill to keep anyone from coming between her and her man.

In Act 3, “Barker puts the pedal to the metal, dishing out gore with the glee of a genre purist.” A fully satisfying exploration of the themes Barker raises “would take a far more gifted filmmaker,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “Still, Obsession carries us along,” primarily because Inde Navarrette, playing Nikki, “so beautifully switches between sickly sweet devotion and wailing, tormented lovesickness.” Barker, who got his start as a YouTube prankster, also sprinkles in weird humor, and he clears the bar that any horror flick must: “We wish we could leave the theater, but we feel we must see what happens next.” Navarrette, previously known mostly for TV roles, “delivers the kind of instant classic horror performance that will surely traumatize Gen Z for years,” said Katie Walsh in the Chicago Tribune. At least it’ll traumatize Gen Z men, who apparently find nothing more terrifying than an unpredictable woman.

In Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy, Ian McKellen turns in one of his finest performances, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. He plays Julian Sklar, a once-brilliant painter who hasn’t produced anything for years. A “vain, irascible wreck of a man”, he lives in adjacent townhouses in Bloomsbury, and fills his time by appearing as a “sarcastic” judge on a brutal TV talent show and selling appearances on Cameo.

His artistic reputation relies on a series of portraits of his former male lover, “The Christophers”, that he produced 30 years ago, and which are now highly sought after. At home, he has some unfinished Christopher canvases: he hasn’t looked at them for years, yet they’re on the minds of his “grasping, despised children” (James Corden and Jessica Gunning). They bribe former art forger Lori (the “formidable” Michaela Coel) to become his assistant. The plan is that Lori – who turns out to have a painful backstory of her own with Julian – will finish the paintings, so that the children can sell them for millions after his death.

Soderbergh is “a big name”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, but with this “deliciously sly” take on the art world, he has “gone small”. In what is effectively a two-hander, we follow Lori and Julian around his cluttered house as they “joust and the power shifts. Who was Christopher? Why does Lori hate Julian? Can fake art be true? It all comes out.” It’s an intimate, talky film and, if the plot doesn’t quite stack up, it hardly matters when the acting is this good. The script isn’t as sharp as it should be, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times, and the film is surprisingly muted, visually. Still, the performances are good enough to keep you watching.