A snapshot of the most exciting voices working in American and international cinema today––and with a strong focus on newcomers––the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival returns this week, taking place March 12-16. 

As always, the festival brings together a varied, eclectic lineup of cinema from all corners of the world––including a number of films still seeking distribution, making this series perhaps one of your only chances to see these works on the big screen. Check out our top picks below.

100,000,000,000,000 (Virgil Vernier)

Virgil Vernier’s third fiction feature sees him continuing his examination of characters floating through liminal spaces borne out of capital. He follows sex worker Afine (Zakaria Bouti) spending the Christmas holidays alone in Monaco, where he befriends a woman babysitting the daughter of wealthy parents until the new year. Shooting once again on 16mm, Vernier creates a transfixing mood through hazy imagery: Afine and his friend exist in a limbo state, inhabiting areas for the ultra-rich without ever truly being a part of them. What makes Vernier’s work so fascinating is how, with little plot, he conveys the malaise that grows from this hollow form of existence and develops into an apocalyptic dread. – C.J. P.

Bonjour Tristesse (Durga Chew-Bose)

There was slight trepidation going into Bonjour Tristesse. Justifying itself as another “adaptation” of Françoise Sagan’s text rather than remake of Otto Preminger’s masterpiece of mise-en-scène, there’s still some hesitation about the chutzpah that must go into thinking you can top that great craftsman at the height of his power. As directed by writer-turned-filmmaker Durga Chew-Bose with a great deal of formal assurance (you definitely won’t mistake this for something akin to, say, Maximum Overdrive in that career-switch category), this 2024 iteration is a highly respectable effort that’ll speak to countless people the original didn’t. One major difference being that Preminger made the film as a showcase for the muse he was having an affair with, Jean Seberg, casting some leering-male element onto the whole project. Chew-Bose’s project isn’t so much feminist as feminine––that a working-out of neurosis that doesn’t provide completely easy answers. – Ethan V. (full review)

The Fifth Shot of La Jetée (Dominique Cabrera)

While, a few years ago, Bianca Stigter explored a few minutes of footage across an entire documentary in Three Minutes: A Lengthening, Dominique Cabrera’s The Fifth Shot of La Jetée takes an even more narrow scope. As its title suggests, this documentary explores the filmmaker’s excavating of personal history as it relates to a shot from Chris Marker’s masterpiece. Structured as a mystery-of-sorts to put together the many pieces if, indeed, it was Cabrera’s family featured in a “stolen photo,” it’s an inventive, playful work, ranging from complex math calculations of probability if they were there the day of filming to more emotional revelations about the past. While those expecting a more thorough analysis of Marker’s film may leave disappointed, it’s a compelling testament to how many life stories are contained in every frame of cinema. – Jordan R.

Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (Göran Hugo Olsson)

Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary provides an account of the conflict between Israel and Palestine through Sweden’s publi- television broadcaster across more than 30 years. A prologue provides context that the footage should be viewed in: not as any sort of objective take on the subject, but a glimpse into how it was presented to Swedish audiences. Told chronologically in a clinical fashion, with index cards introducing each news segment, the film inevitably serves as both a primer for the ongoing war between the two nations and a look at the evolution of its coverage by the media. Respectable in its disciplined, straightforward presentation that highlights media biases, Olsson correctly frames the film and subject matter for its intended audience, who have mainly engaged with it through screens and an often unquestioned trust in the authorities presenting it. As a title card states in the opening frames, archival material says more about how things are told than how they really happened. – C.J. P.

The Periphery of the Base (Zhou Tao)

Artist Zhou Tao sets his camera on workers in the Gobi desert surrounding an infrastructure project we never see. Zhou observes from afar, panning and zooming in on workers having lunch or making their way through the vast, barren landscape. The camera continues to roam at a deliberate yet restless pace until it enters the realm of abstraction. With a pan or zoom, a defined image of a workers’ camp can suddenly change into something unrecognizable, form into an entirely different image, and then reframe and redefine itself again, all within seconds in the same shot. It’s impossible to identify whether or not The Periphery of the Base achieves this effect in-camera or through some sort of manipulation, but the results are exhilarating. – C.J. P.

When the Phone Rang (Iva Radivojevic)

Premiering at the Locarno Film Festival last year (where it picked up a special mention prize), Iva Radivojevic’s sensitive, enigmatic second feature When the Phone Rang centers on a phone call received by the protagonist Lana informing her a grandparent has passed, the foundation of which evolves into a memory piece exploring the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Radivojevic’s editing background (on such features as King Coal, Ma, and this year’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office) is beautifully articulated here, fragments of tender loss for both family and identity pieced together in compellingly unconventional yet affecting ways. – Jordan R.

Zodiac Killer Project (Charlie Shackleton)

What would a feature-length director commentary look like when the film was never made? This is the slippery, fascinating conceit of Charlie Shackleton’s rather brilliant Zodiac Killer Project, which finds the director walking through his failed attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge into the first major documentary on the unsolved case. What emerges, one could argue, is even more intellectually stimulating than the original intentions: a sui generis, often humorous stream-of-consciousness journey highlighting the ever-mounting mass of repeated cliches of various true-crime documentaries and series. Instead of a simple hit piece, however, Shackleton investigates why such familiarity often works on the viewer while ensuring you’ll never watch such a program the same way again. – Jordan R. (full review)

First Look 2025 takes place March 12-16 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Learn more here.

The Oscars have ended, and the nominees and winners should garner some interest both in theaters and at home––viewership was marginally up from last year and we can assume many hadn’t heard of the films until now. That means less time for getting eyeballs on new releases, and it seems the studios are aware considering Snow White (March 21) and Novocaine (March 14) are the only big mainstream titles opening (unless Warner Bros. surprises with their offerings).

It’s thus a good and bad time to be one of the independent and foreign films listed below. There won’t be as much competition from Hollywood, but there also won’t be as many people buying tickets––the poster game proves crucial to piquing interest and winning over undecided patrons just looking for something new to see.

This time of the year also means a new crop of Oscar sets from poster designers working their creative muscles in the spirit of the season. It’s no longer the “alternative poster” scene, either––many of the usual suspects are now making official one-sheets, too. It’s been a great evolution to watch. Here are my four favorite 2025 pieces with links to each artist’s set:

Credits: Conclave by Matt Needle; Nickel Boys by Haley Turnbull; The Brutalist by Pablo Iranzo Duque; I’m Still Here by Eileen Steinbach.

Superimposition

It’s so simple and so disturbing. Is it an image from the film itself? Or merely an illustration of the themes within? Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor (limited, March 7) is about an unknown refugee seducing every member of an upper-class family before disappearing and leaving them in withdrawal. So maybe we’ll learn he has vagina-like openings on the bottom of his feet or maybe we’ll discover that his victims’ yearning for more will have them surreally manifesting new orifices to be filled.

Either way: an unforgettable image. It’s also probably not going to be gracing the walls of your local multiplex due to the graphic nature of its content––regardless of whether kids understand what that content is. That’s the beauty of the Internet age, though: you are no longer beholden to a single venue for advertising and can put a provocative campaign like this online, letting the viewers share it themselves.

Charlie Hyman’s illustration for The Heirloom (limited, March 21) is nowhere near as controversial as The Visitor, but it’s still odd enough to worm its way into a viewer’s consciousness. What’s actually going on? A couple’s heads are merged into one by their hair, only to also––somehow––become the body of a dog. Add the cuff around the canine’s neck and those faces suddenly become a coat, changing the whole from absurd to metaphoric. Because this, per the synopsis, is a traumatized rescue dog. They, as its owners, become its security blanket.

I have zero clue about that baggie on the bottom right, but I can presume its origins––I’ve had to walk and pick up after a dog myself. The real question about it concerns the coloring. Why yellow like the faces and the title? Is it human in origin? Is it a product of the dog’s relationship with its new owners, perhaps representative of their presence being more harmful than helpful?

I could go on and on with the image’s myriad possibilities, which is precisely the point. Giving audiences a photograph of actors simply cannot manufacture the same desire to find out more and hypothesize your own meaning than a unique work that seeks to build mystery through artistic license. Because we can assume Hyman watched the film, that Hyman’s choices are intentional. More than an advertisement, this poster becomes a puzzle to be solved.

Maks Bereski’s Misericordia (limited, March 21) is perhaps less crazy, but still captivating in its merging of man and nature. It’s another puzzle to solve insofar as who this man is and what the (blood-splashed) leaf represents, but (unlike The Heirloom) we don’t really have anywhere to jump off from as far as figuring out the inherent psychology.

Reading the synopsis doesn’t help, either––at least not beyond the discovery of a murder for that blood. If anything, reading it confuses us even more: there’s so much going on that this minimalist image proves even more indecipherable by not blatantly using any of those events.

We must take it on face value instead. Appreciate its balance and symmetry. The juxtaposition of its playful sans serif and rigid typography. The shapes that come out of its color palette leading our eyes down the page in a giant “I” pattern to maintain focus on this face filtered through the eye-patch brutality of man’s nature.

It’s a stark shift from Misericordia‘s heavily filtered French counterpart. Same font and rigid typography, but the coloring becomes more oppressive in its lack of white. The dynamic between warm and cool hues also creates separation via importance and / or morality. The title does mean “mercy,” after all. Mercy for whom, though? The killer or the killed?

Pairs

I can’t quite shake a feeling of dread when looking at the French poster for Who by Fire (limited, March 14). There’s little going on––two people sitting very close with legs and arms touching––but it’s difficult not to read into the scene as some sort of calm before the storm. Will their hands touch? Is there a shared sense of longing? Is it a power dynamic wherein trust is about to be broken?

By cropping things so both of their faces fall out of frame, we have no expressions with which to infer upon intent. Maybe they are completely unaware of their proximity. Or maybe he’s staring directly at her while she looks offscreen. It’s the kind of seemingly innocuous image that would only be used in such a prominent way if something more was happening. We must thus assume it is.

Regardless, the poster is clean and effective in its formal simplicity. Large photo with textured grain framed so all the text beyond the title can live on a separate island of its own. The title is stacked and centered to bring our eyes down to those hands and the inference of motion. I really like the font selection, too, its idiosyncratic look consisting of sharply indented curves and extremely thin spacing within each letter as well as the kerning between them.

The comic book-esque layout for We’re All Gonna Die (limited, March 7) is conversely very direct in its content and context by presenting multiple scenes we can infer take place during the film’s plot. A couple driving. A plane crashing. A car sinking. A dead fly either smoking upwards or a casualty of a fast descent downwards.

What’s cool about the design is that each of those aspects exist in tandem by way of the windows created from the title being rendered as knockout letters. Starting at the bottom “Die” we see the car roof fading to reveal a sky that transitions into the water and horizon line within the “Gonna” as the aforementioned plane doubles as the counter of the “o.” Then the sky from that section transitions back into the water holding the drowning car within the “All” as the “We’re” connects with it to form one continuous block to house the remainder of its trees’ branches.

I do think the plume of smoke at the center takes something away from the illustration, but I’ll give the artists the benefit of the doubt as far as its meaning to the film itself. And for those too slow to realize the imagery is the title, it’s duplicated at the bottom just in case.

If we started with implied camaraderie and moved to obvious camaraderie, it only makes sense we should finish with undeniable connection via Viêt and Nam (limited, March 28). Here the two characters are joined for a kiss (and more), their shoulders and heads peeking through the left side edge as our bird’s-eye vantage sees them laying upon a dark and glinting surface dirtying their flesh.

Its frame draws away from the edges to give an old-timey photographic border that allows it to fade, warp, and absorb into the white, as though ink moistened by water. The effect gives the whole a duality of past and present––static snap and window onto current action. And by using the angle of their bodies to split the page, designers can fill the gaps in a way that ensures nothing distracts from that kiss. Festival laurels at the end of a hand. Title stacked at the end of a platform of text to mimic the incline of their bodies. Each piece is sized and measured to perfection.

Ensemble

Pedro Bernstein’s poster for You Burn Me (limited, March 7) is like a treasure map. Creased fold. Burnt edge. Faded words rubbed off or disappeared. Hand-painted topographic elements. Here is the place where a poet and nymph meet after being submerged in water.

The text doesn’t feel as real as the watercolor (it’s uniform fidelity and opaqueness scream “digitally superimposed”), but it is still man-made to maintain the uniqueness of the whole as a contrast to its glossy counterparts. I love that this human touch is apparent throughout––even on the logos by way of rough outlines to ensure their machine-like presence doesn’t seem so out-of-place. The decision to put the cast names beneath their figures is nice, too: it lends the work a child-like genesis wherein a young artist tells their viewers where everyone is on the board.

The layers of color washes really do it for me, though. Whether smudges from the process of drawing what we see or remnants of pictures that have been covered and / or eroded away, the canvas is given a history that moves beyond its present use. It’s a sheet that’s been passed around. A document of an impossible scenario. Imagination made real.

Erik Lund’s composition for Eephus (limited, March 7) also possesses a collection of characters (via Kaila Reed’s photography) with names scrawled next to each. Rather than be a product of the storyteller, however, these signatures lend value to the images via their own hand.

When the whole is constructed with the vintage texture and framing of old baseball cards, it only makes sense to go that one step further to render it into a faux collectible too. Because those aren’t the actors’ names––they’re the names of the characters as if one of Bill Belinda’s kids walked around the diamond to complete the set. Sure, these aren’t professional athletes whose autographs possess any resale prospects, but that’s not the point. It’s about showing how the game transcends celebrity. Their love and respect for the sport earns our love and respect in return.

I like the picture format with black-lined circles and full body masks, but it’s the title treatment in the pennant and “est. 2025” layout that really won me over. It harkens back to an era of trading cards that we just don’t see since Upper Deck ushered in their photo-centric designs and artifacts. I think I have a binder of 1980s or 1990s Topps cards in my basement that look just like this. That sense of nostalgia goes a long way.

While there may only be two actors on Irene Lee’s MUBI LAB poster for Grand Tour (limited, March 28), their repetition makes it seem like we’re viewing a larger ensemble. This is especially true considering the chalk-lined waves allow for each of their portraits to exist on a separate plane. We’re seeing six disparate moments––three from each––that are unbeholden to the others. Rain-soaked depression, luggage-bound retreat, shoe-tying intrigue.

It’s a chase, a would-be wife hunting down her cold-footed groom. There’s disguise, mystery, and adventure, a staccato melody of checkpoints and close calls driven by the waves of water (or wind) propelling them forward. That the title is broken up into its letters, bouncing around the same tumultuous path, only augments the playfulness while providing steppingstones on which to jump and travel to the next destination.

You lose that sense of fun in Goodlab’s international counterparts. They do a great job complementing its film-still composition with a passport-like typography and crumpled paper flavor in the first, but we lose the chase. The other omits all personality by going generic with its straight, all-caps sans serif text and Photoshopped characters framing the original image. Neither is bad; they simply lack the creativity and motion of Lee’s American release. The contrast shows how important a studio’s allowance for creativity is compared to a more conservative mandate for the status quo.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

CHAOS: The Manson Murders (Errol Morris)

Over half a century later, what new information can be gleaned from the nights of August 9 and 10, 1969? Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s riveting (if convoluted) book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties––released in June 2019, between the Cannes premiere and theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino’s cathartic rewrite of that history––argues that while all the evidence of the murders has been gleaned, there’s a complex and knotty web of conspiracies for the motivations, some more plausible than others. To pare down the 528-page book to its most overarching theory, it postulates Manson may have been allowed (and perhaps even directed) by the CIA to concoct a reign of terror in accordance with secret government programs created to squash left-wing movements demanding progress for the country. Culling the most vital elements of the book into an easily digestible 96-minute Netflix documentary, Errol Morris’ CHAOS: The Manson Murders is an absorbing, albeit succinct adaptation of various theories that likely will never see a burden of tangible proof. – Jordan R. (full review)

Where to Stream: Netflix

Directed by Lee Chang-dong

Four films from the great Lee Chang-dong recently debuted in new 4K restorations from Film Movement: Green Fish, Peppermint Candy, Oasis, and Poetry. Now available on The Criterion Channel, alongside Secret Sunshine and Burning, be sure to read Shawn Glinis’ interview with the director.

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Directed by Michael Mann

As we await updates on whether or not David Zaslav will pony up the money for Heat 2, the Criterion Channel is paying tribute to the great Michael Mann with a selection of his finest work, including Thief, Manhunter, The Last of the Mohicans, Heat, The Insider, Ali, and Collateral.

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Gene Hackman

As we continue to mourn the loss of the legendary Gene Hackman, we’ve rounded up all his films available to stream. If one is looking for a few starting recommendations outside of his most acclaimed performances, Nicolas Roeg’s rather wild Eureka and the entertaining programmers The Package and No Way Out are all worth a look.

• AMC+: Unforgiven
• The Criterion Channel: The Conversation
• Fubo: Downhill Racer, The Firm, Heist
• Max: Superman, Superman II, Superman IV: The Quest For Peace
• Netflix: Runaway Jury, Under Suspicion
• Paramount+: The Firm, The Mexican, Unforgiven
• Pluto TV: Downhill Racer, The Quick and the Dead, Reds
• Prime Video: Behind Enemy Lines, The Birdcage, Cisco Pike, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, Eureka, The French Connection, French Connection II, Get Shorty, Heartbreakers, Hoosiers, The Hunting Party, March or Die, The Poseidon Adventure, The Royal Tenenbaums, Under Fire, Welcome to Mooseport
• Tubi: Another Woman, A Bridge Too Far, Company Business, The Domino Principle, Get Shorty, The Hunting Party, Loose Cannons, Mad Dog Coll, March or Die, Mississippi Burning, No Way Out, The Package, Postcards from the Edge, Runaway Jury

Heretic (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods)

Missionary work has always fascinated me. Not when it’s performed abroad as a means of indoctrinating people who might otherwise be unaware. I mean here, in America, where anyone fascinated with religion could simply walk up to a church, synagogue, or mosque and ask to learn. Yes, there’s a degree of marketing at play and companies have advertising budgets to spend in ways that also serve their flock by providing them a façade of purpose, but to have a door opened with a resident genuinely saying “you’ve converted me” is insane. It happens, though. People are impressionable. People are lonely. That’s where Scott Beck and Bryan Woods leave us at the start of Heretic. – Jared M. (full review)

Where to Stream: Max

How to Have Sex (Molly Manning Walker)

Touching down in Heraklion, on the Greek island of Crete, marks the beginning of summer holidays for Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake), and Em (Enva Lewis), a trio of best friends who have just taken their A-levels and for whom school is the last thing on their mind. The first thing is… well, the title gives it away. British teens on holiday at a Greek resort means booze, booze, and more booze, but Molly Manning Walker’s debut film has the power to take these prosaic cultural archetypes (teenhood, virginity, youth drinking culture) and use them as tools to tell a poignant story about the ambivalences of growing up, female friendships, and consent. – Savina P. (full review)

Where to Stream: Netflix

Murdering the Devil (Ester Krumbachová)

While best known for her scripting and/or costume design contributions to Věra Chytilová’s Daisies and Fruit of Paradise, Jan Němec’s Diamonds of the Night, Vojtěch Jasný’s All My Compatriots, Zbyněk Brynych’s The Fifth Horseman Is Fear, and more, Czech New Wave legend Ester Krumbachová directed a sole feature. The single-location Murdering the Devil is a immaculately designed, comedic inquiry into male chauvinism, following a bachelorette who invites an old childhood friend over for a date. What follows is a gluttonous journey of surrealistic touches as the tables eventually turn. A feast of feeling and ideas, it’s rather a shame Krumbachová passed in 1996 without ever having the opportunity to take on another directorial effort, but thankfully her debut has now been restored in beautiful 4K. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home

Only the River Flows (Wei Shujun)

Wei Shujun’s detective noir Only the River Flows (based on a story of the same name by Chinese author Yu Hua) is set in a small town along a river in China’s Jiangdong province where it seems the sun never shines. The atmosphere is unrelentingly melancholy: the town’s infrastructure is crumbling, the police have turned the local cinema into their headquarters (no one sees films there anymore), Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” plays frequently, and––yes––there is a murder. – Gabrielle M. (full review)

Where to Stream: The Criterion Channel

Red Rocket (Sean Baker)

Few directors on the planet are making films that feel as lived-in as Sean Baker. Perhaps that is why Tangerine, The Florida Project, and Red Rocket resonate so strongly. More than verisimilitude, though, it is Baker’s understanding of the complexities of human nature that pushes his work to the level of excellence. Simon Rex’s Mikey Saber, an ex-porn star whose eye for a hustle is ever-present, behaves exactly how he should—uncaringly destructive to himself and others, but with a lovable grin. Part of the joy we derive from watching Red Rocket is our realization that Mikey is going to make the selfish move every single damn time. So very, very wrong; so very, very 2021. It cements Baker as one of cinema’s brightest lights, and features a lead performance that remains endearing even when Mikey is at his worst, not to mention a magnificent debut from Suzanna Son. In its final sequence, Rocket reveals Mikey to be something rare: a character completely true to himself. Deluded, but true. Thus Red Rocket is more than a comedy. It is a modern classic exploring the flaws and desires of a man who in his relentless selfishness and overwhelming confidence is a quintessential American. Might sound crazy, but it ain’t no lie. – Chris S.

Where to Stream: Tubi

Transit (Christian Petzold)

If Malick’s latest film provided a new way to look at the era of World War II, Christian Petzold wholly upends our notion of how the time could be depicted with Transit. The drama adapts the setting of Anna Seghers’ novel 1942-set novel–following a German political refugee in limbo in Marseilles–to the present day without changing the dialogue to reflect its modern era. It’s a touch of genius that, coupled with Petzold’s eye for subtlety and movement (when it comes to both his characters and the camera), makes for the best film of last year. In a career of great accomplishments (the majority of which prior to this thematic trilogy, also including Barbara and Phoenix, have yet to be widely discovered), his new film is the immensely rewarding yet thoroughly enigmatic culmination of his fascination with history, romance, and thrills. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: Metrograph at Home

Vermiglio (Maura Delpero)

Vermigilio is a splendid exemplar of “they don’t make ‘em like they used to.” The sprawling, historical, novelistic, Visconti-esque family epic with dozens of characters has been smartly updated to modern sensibilities. Maura Delpero focuses on the working class rather than the wealthy, adopts a tight two-hour runtime rather than some indulgent length, and––most importantly––privileges the female perspective. Delpero shows gratifying ambition, curiosity, and accomplishment in just her second feature to date. – Ankit K.

Where to Stream: VOD

Also New to Streaming

The Criterion Channel

Amadeus
Dogme 95
French Poetic Realism
Pressure
Scene Stealers: Best Supporting Actors
The Tantalizing Tales of Alain Guiraudie
Douglas Sirk Noir

Film Movement+

Oceans Are the Real Continent

Kino Film Collection

Identifying Features
Murina

Metrograph at Home

Directed By Andrew Norman Wilson
Ida
Strawberry Mansion
Wuti Presents: Trailblazing Women Of British Cinema

MUBI (free for 30 days)

100 Yards
The Assassin
Citizenfour
Contemporary Irish Cinema
Ema
The Final Master
El Planeta
Shadow

Netflix

Do the Right Thing
Sicario

Paramount+ with Showtime

Rumours
Strange Darling

Prime Video

Poor Things

Shudder

Starve Acre

Tubi

Marie Antoinette
Pulse
Sunset Song

VOD

Heart Eyes
Rose

Looking for what to see in theaters? Our feature, updated weekly, highlights our top recommendations for films currently in theaters, from new releases to restorations receiving a proper theatrical run.

While we already provide extensive monthly new-release recommendations and weekly streaming recommendations, as distributors’ roll-outs can vary, this is a one-stop list to share the essential films that may be on a screen near you.

Anora (Sean Baker)

Sean Baker’s radiant rom-com / rollicking thriller Anora is one of the most acclaimed films of the year for good reason. The Palme d’Or winner is finally now in theaters, giving audiences a chance to witness Mikey Madison’s captivating performance. Luke Hicks said in his review, “Anora is a devastating, gut-busting beauty––regular cinematographer Drew Daniels lending his brilliance to yet another Baker triumph––the kind that hurts your heart and holds you tight to recover at the same time, tears of laughter streaming down your face.”

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

Certain to be crowned the most ambitious cinematic undertaking in independent filmmaking this year, Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a drama of epic proportions. At 215 minutes, with a 15-minute intermission, shot on VistaVision, and presented on 70mm (if you’re lucky), Venice’s Best Director winner is now in a limited release. As Rory O’Connor said in his review, “In Corbet’s miraculous introduction, a musical overture is disrupted by a dizzying climb: first Brody’s face, enveloped in shadows in the belly of a ship, then a race to the deck with Lol Crawley’s 70mm camera barely keeping pace. For a few dark moments it’s difficult to make out what’s going on––then, all of sudden, the score surges, the men reach clear sky, embracing as the Statue of Liberty breaks into the frame from above them, the New World turned upside-down. Mere moments in, we are already given a taste of what Corbet’s film will ultimately say about the American dream. For the opening act, Tóth moves in with his assimilated cousin (Alessandro Nivola), who already sports a new name and religion, and begins work in his furniture shop but soon gets the feeling that his modernist sensibilities may not be welcome. The relationship with Van Buren (who he meets after being given a chance commission to refurbish his library, producing a light-filled space that makes the pages of Life magazine) offers hope of artistic freedom and upward mobility; but soon ego, envy, and xenophobia rear their ugly heads. Corbet allows this mood to slowly fester away, building to a metaphor that is about as vulgar as it is cruelly effective. It is probably best to leave it there.”

Eephus (Carson Lund)

If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s Eephus. Structured solely around a single round of America’s national pastime, Lund’s debut feature beautifully, humorously articulates the particular nuances, rhythms, and details of an amateur men’s league game. By subverting tropes of the standard sports movie––which often captures peak physical performance in front of legions of adoring fans––Lund has crafted something far more singularly compelling. Rather than grand slams and no-hitters, there are errors aplenty and no shortage of beer guts and weathered muscles amongst the motley crew. Lund is more interested in examining the peculiar set of social codes that only apply when one is on the field, unimpeded by life’s responsibilities and entirely focused on the rules of the game. – Jordan R. (full review)

Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

Any cat owner who saw this year’s A Quiet Place: Day One may recall the stress induced by the image of a cat bobbing underwater and often think of that as our feline hero escapes one sticky situation after another. They’re not alone, though, interacting with an adorable band of animals that include a capybara, golden retriever, lemur, and limp-winged tall bird. The cute buddies all “speak” through meows, barks, squeaks, and grunts, making Flow essentially enough of an “art film” to get festival play, even if it’s pretty simple at heart––while ostensibly a cutesy animated movie for children, I never felt my intelligence insulted. I don’t know if a limited release provided by North American distributors Janus and Sideshow means Flow finds a young audience beyond cultured adults taking their kids, but the film, at heart, recalls some of classic Disney. – Ethan V. (full review)

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

As a Peterloo appreciator, Mike Leigh never left, but it’s certainly nice to have him return to his smaller-scale character study roots with Hard Truths. Unequivocally giving the performance of the year, Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s weathered, worn, troubled Pansy is against the world––this includes her husband, son, friends, and any acquaintance or stranger that gets in her path. Rather than sanding-down the edges of her personality to potentially win audience sympathies, Leigh goes the opposite route, in turn making an even more cathartic portrait of festering anger containing at least a sliver of feeling every human has, particularly relatable when it comes to the seemingly unsolvable frustrations of our present-day world.

I’m Still Here (Walter Salles)

This fall, Walter Salles finally returned with his first feature in 12 twelve years, the moving political / family drama I’m Still Here, led by a powerhouse performance from Fernanda Torres alongside Selton Mello and Fernanda Montenegro. Savina Petkova said in her review, “Torres is stellar, even with such a hermetic character. Eunice is stoic, almost saintly in her devotion to family, the expressions of which never manage to elevate I’m Still Here from visual flatness, its surprisingly deep commitment to conventional shot continuity, and an overblown duration of 135 minutes. Suffering cannot be measured, neither familial nor national, but on this occasion Salles has somehow failed to find the right cinematic framework for this biopic storytelling. The film feels uncalibrated, but not in the free-flowing, depth-exploring, liberated kind of way.”

In the Lost Lands (Paul W.S. Anderson)

Before jumping directly into the action, Paul W.S. Anderson’s In the Lost Lands opens with a framing device we’ll return to only at film’s end. The George R. R. Martin adaptation otherwise gives no context whatsoever, and when the plot elements finally reveal themselves it’s near-fablelike, with a powerful Queen despondent that she hasn’t been able to experience the true mysteries of the world. She requests that the witch Grey Alys (played, of course, by Milla Jovovich) grant her powers to transform into a werewolf. Until then the movie is a set of seemingly unstructured action sequences with no narrative information to grasp and nothing to connect to. Things seem to happen purely mechanically––at one point, portions of a fight scene take place telepathically between two characters. But far from being confusing, the effect is entirely thrilling.  – Neil B. (full review)

No Other Land (Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor)

Despite the horrors shown throughout No Other Land (all prior to October 7), it’s the Israeli bulldozers calmly retreating post-demolitions that I cannot shake. Beyond the secret document proving that “converting” Palestinian villages like Masafer Yatta into army training grounds was to drive inhabitants out, or an Israeli courtroom––devoid of jurisdiction as illegal settlers––ruling to reject Arab permit requests while evicting families with roots going back almost two centuries, all that’s necessary to understand the terrorism at play are those trucks blindly destroying private property before rolling away. Because it’s not about these occupiers “needing the land” or “enforcing the law.” It’s about control. About laughing at Israeli Yuval Abraham and Palestinian Basel Adra, knowing their only recourse is creating devastatingly crucial documents like this. So prove it’s enough by watching, absorbing, and refusing to remain silent––once a distributor finds the courage to let you. – Jared M.

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

There are only a few films this year that truly feel like they are radically advancing the language of cinema; RaMell Ross’ narrative debut Nickel Boys certainly stands among them. After crafting one of the most remarkable documentaries of the last few years with the Apichatpong Weerasethakul-backed, Sundance-winning, Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening, Ross has now adapted Colson Whitehead’s acclaimed, Pulitzer-winning 2019 novel. With cinematography from Jomo Fray, who shot last year’s stunning All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, Nickel Boys sees Ross exude stunning formal power once again, telling this story with a unique, empathetic conceit that makes for a radical adaptation and one of the year’s best films. Jourdain Searles said in her review, “Nickel Boys is a difficult film to define or boil down to constituent pieces. It feels alive like an open, bleeding heart. It’s a tragic story told with hope that doesn’t ring saccharine or overwrought. Sometimes it moves like water, flowing from ugliness to beauty. There are few American films that come close to what it accomplishes, as either film or adaptation. Nickel Boys suggests a miracle, with the makings of a classic.”

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)

One of our favorite titles from last year’s New York Film Festival was Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch follow-up On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes in its Un Certain Regard section (an honor shared with Roberto Minervini’s The Damned), Michael Frank said in his review, “Nyoni’s film becomes a mixture of rage and tackling of Zambian burial rites, a clear-eyed look at the impossibility of these situations for the abused, the affected, the broken. But Shula often doesn’t seem broken. She’s strong, stoic, and often much quieter than those around her. She cares for Nsansa and a young cousin who’s clearly been a victim of her uncle’s horrific actions. Chardy embodies this character with a near-silent anger, a simmering frustration with the systems that push her uncle to the forefront of the community and blame everyone else. Among them are an overwhelmed teenage wife who is constantly compromising, nodding her head to help those who won’t admit her uncle’s wrongdoings, forced to watch while someone who assaulted her be recognized for a local hero. Chardy gives one of the performances of the year in one of the films in a year; I just hope audiences seek it out.”

Universal Language (Matthew Rankin)

Following his Guy Maddin-influenced debut The Twentieth Century, Matthew Rankin has returned five years later. Universal Language, which premiered at Cannes, marks quite an invigorating aesthetic pivot for the director, employing an Abbas-Kiarostami-meets-Wes-Anderson approach in telling a unique, Winnipeg-set tale. Rory O’Connor said in his review of the Oscar-shortlisted film, “Contrary to that exciting bustle of ideas, Universal Language‘s aesthetics are some of the most controlled in Rankin’s work. The film features diorama-like compositions that will call to mind both Wes and Roy Anders(s)on––a nice mix of the Texan’s sweet and the Swede’s dour––but any risk of twee is offset by the film’s naturalism and warmth: for all its surrealism, the world of Universal Language feels lived-in, and those lives feel consequential. It’s like nothing I’ve seen in Cannes this year.”

The Visitor (Bruce LaBruce)

It’s safe to call Canadian artist and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce a Panorama mainstay; it’s been two decades and counting since Hustler White premiered in this Berlinale strand in 1996. Between The Misandrists (Panorama, 2017) and his latest, The Visitor (Panorama 2024), there was the indie feature Saint-Narcisse (TIFF/Venice 2021) and the porn feature The Affairs of Lidia (2022), to prepare us for what was to come––certainly a visit one’d have a hard time forgetting. A reimagining of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s acclaimed 1968 film Teorema wherein a handsome, nameless man infiltrates a bourgeois family to then change their lives forever through sex. Naturally, LaBruce would pay tribute to a film that’s already queer and treats sex as a political tool for change. Even more so, he’d do it much more explicitly (with porn), provocatively (with political critique), and playfully (with campy humor). – Savina P. (full review)

You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro)

In You Burn Me, the Argentinian littérateur-filmmaker Matías Piñeiro uses his vintage Bolex camera like the iOS Notes app. Shooting over the course of a few years, his method involved “collecting” images here and there amidst teaching jobs on two continents, and in real locations referenced in the texts he’s adapting, as well as places imitating them. Whilst his work has always contended with classical literary texts’ relevance in the present day, his latest meditates more urgently on film form, specifically how the 16mm-shot and co-op-made ’60s avant-garde canon can be modernized. Like Sappho’s Ancient Greek poetry––his other principal concern here––his rushes need to be represented as countless, gleaming fragments, with a sprawling file database subbing for the poet’s parchment. – David K. (full review)

More Films Now Playing in Theaters

• The Empire
• Mickey 17
• The Monkey
• Paddington in Peru
• The Rule of Jenny Pen
• Seven Veils
• There’s Still Tomorrow

The Best New Restorations Now Playing in Theaters

The below list features newly restored films receiving a theatrical release run. For NYC-specific repertory round-ups, bookmark NYC Weekend Watch.

• The Annihilation of Fish
• Compensation
• Love & Pop
• Picnic at Hanging Rock
• A Woman Is a Woman

Read all reviews here.

After the relatively barren month of February and the awards season mercifully in the rearview, March finally brings the goods. From some of our favorite festival premieres charting all the way back to a few from Berlinale and Rotterdam last year to new documentaries and thrillers from accomplished directors, check out the batch of eclectic recommendations below.

15. The Empire (Bruno Dumont; March 7)

A year on from its Berlinale debut, where it picked up the Silver Bear Jury Prize, Bruno Dumont’s sci-fi feature The Empire is finally headed stateside. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Playing his signature brand of rural French absurdity in stark counterpoint to the grandiose strains of a space opera, Bruno Dumont returns with The Empire: his Barbarella bourguignon, his dijionnaise Dune. The Empire is the story of two warring factions: one whose mothership resembles the palace of Versailles; the other’s as if someone glued together two Notre Dames, crypt to crypt. It follows their envoys on earth, now in human form and attempting to capture a toddler who they believe to be the Chosen One––whose mere presence makes them bow down like bodies in rigor mortis. There are blasé beheadings with lightsabers, a group of men on Boulonnais horses who call themselves the Knights of Wain, and, for no apparent reason, the commandant (Bernard Pruvost) and lieutenant (Philippe Jore) from P’tit Quinquin.”

14. The Heirloom (Ben Petrie; March 21)

One highlight from last year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam was Ben Petrie’s The Heirloom, a rom-com psychodrama in which he stars alongside Grace Glowicki as a couple who adopt a dog and learn what it means to become a family. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “This is often very funny, even as Eric’s narrativizing threatens to further hinder the relationship. Petrie allows Eric’s new obsession to spill into sequences that feel genuinely Kaufmanesque (an overused word, granted, but a distinction well-earned here). In one example, shot from Eric’s POV, Allie excitedly turns around to inform him that Milly has peed; Eric then begins seeing the moment repeated as if in multiple takes, Allie’s performance straining to hit the desired note. Whether these repeats are real or imagined is never explicated, though it’s fevered enough to appear like a figment of Eric’s lockdown brain. In a later scene, a boom mic operator crosses the shot without disturbing the character’s flow, a jarring intrusion during a moment of real vulnerability––and a sharp directorial choice that both douses the tension and accentuates its source.”

13. The Woman in the Yard (Jaume Collet-Serra; March 28)

After making waves this holiday season with the wildly thrilling Carry-On, marking one of Netflix’s most-watched movies ever, Jaume Collet-Serra is back with two features in 2025. Before his Cliffhanger reboot, he’s returning to his first full-blown horror feature since the 2009 breakout Orphan. The Woman in the Yard, which reteams him with Danielle Deadwyler, hasn’t yet premiered, but here’s hoping Collet-Serra’s post-Dwayne Johnson period continues to bear fruit.

12. Secret Mall Apartment (Jeremy Workman; March 21)

One of our favorite films to premiere at SXSW last year is now rolling out next month. Secret Mall Apartment retells the strange, true tale of a group of friends who created a secret apartment in the busy Providence Place Mall in the early 2000s, bringing back the participants together for the first time in nearly two decades. John Fink said in his review, “Shedding light on a quirky 2007 story that made national headlines, Secret Mall Apartment takes us deep into the bowels of the Providence Place Mall, centerpiece of the renaissance of Rhode Island’s capital city developed under convict mayor Buddy Cianci. (As it happens, a few months before the discovery of the secret mall apartment, I had been right above it seeing Cherry Arnold’s Buddy, an insightful film about the mayor and his transformation of Providence, at the mall’s Showcase Cinemas, but that is another story.) Apartment residents had the advantage of private access to the theater anytime they wished.”

11. Chaos: The Manson Murders (Errol Morris; March 7 on Netflix)

Over half a century later, what new information can be gleaned from the nights of August 9 and 10, 1969 in Los Angeles? Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s riveting (if convoluted) book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties––released in June 2019, between the Cannes premiere and theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino’s cathartic rewrite of that history––argues that while all the evidence of the murders has been gleaned, there’s a complex and knotty web of conspiracies for the motivations, some more plausible than others. To pare down the 528-page book to its most overarching theory, it postulates Manson may have been allowed (and perhaps even directed) by the CIA to concoct a reign of terror in accordance with secret government programs created to squash left-wing movements demanding progress for the country. Culling the most vital elements of the book into an easily digestible, 96-minute Netflix documentary, Errol Morris’ CHAOS: The Manson Murders is an absorbing, albeit succinct adaptation of various theories that likely will never see a burden of tangible proof.

10. You Burn Me (Matías Piñeiro; March 7)

With his latest feature, Matías Piñeiro playfully, gorgeously adapts “Sea Foam,” a chapter in Cesare Pavese’s Dialogues with Leucò. Centered around fictional dialogue between the ancient Greek poet Sappho and the nymph Britomartis, played by Gabi Saidón and María Villar, respectively, Piñeiro’s latest is a feat of effervescent poetic beauty, melding poignant words with stunning images to a dizzying, transcendent effect.

9. The Actor (Duke Johnson; March 14)

Duke Johnson’s long-anticipated The Actor, which comes a decade since he co-directed Anomalisa with Charlie Kaufman, sets André Holland in a moody, shapeshifting noir deconstructing the artifice of performance. The first of a trio of Donald E. Westlake adaptations this year, with Park Chan-wook and Shane Black to follow, this one adapts the author’s posthumously published Memory into a hazy exploration of a picking up the pieces of a life Holland’s Paul Cole can’t remember. With the impressive ensemble portraying multiple roles, Johnson’s live-action debut shines brightest as a slippery, peculiar showcase for Holland’s acting prowess.

8. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni; March 7)

One of my favorite titles from last year’s New York Film Festival was Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not a Witch follow-up On Becoming a Guinea Fowl. Winner of the Best Director prize at Cannes in its Un Certain Regard section (an honor shared with Roberto Minervini’s The Damned), Michael Frank said in his review, “Nyoni’s film becomes a mixture of rage and tackling of Zambian burial rites, a clear-eyed look at the impossibility of these situations for the abused, the affected, the broken. But Shula often doesn’t seem broken. She’s strong, stoic, and often much quieter than those around her. She cares for Nsansa and a young cousin who’s clearly been a victim of her uncle’s horrific actions. Chardy embodies this character with a near-silent anger, a simmering frustration with the systems that push her uncle to the forefront of the community and blame everyone else. Among them are an overwhelmed teenage wife who is constantly compromising, nodding her head to help those who won’t admit her uncle’s wrongdoings, forced to watch while someone who assaulted her be recognized for a local hero. Chardy gives one of the performances of the year in one of the films in a year; I just hope audiences seek it out.”

7. Viet and Nam (Trương Minh Quý; March 28)

A beautiful, haunting romantic drama, Trương Minh Quý’s second feature Việt and Nam was a stand-out at last year’s Cannes and now it’s finally arriving stateside. Luke Hicks said in his NYFF review, “The opening shot of Việt and Nam, writer-director Trương Minh Quý’s sophomore film, is a feat of cinematic restraint. Nearly imperceivable white specs of dust begin to appear, few and far between, drifting from the top of a pitch-black screen to the bottom, where the faintest trace of something can be made out in the swallowing darkness. The sound design is cavernous and close, heaving with breath and trickling with the noise of running water. A boy incrementally appears, walking gradually from one corner of the screen to the other. He has another boy on his back. A dream is gently relayed in voiceover. Then, without the frame ever having truly revealed itself, it’s gone.”

6. Grand Tour (Miguel Gomes; March 28)

Miguel Gomes, the Portuguese filmmaker behind The Tsugua Diaries, Arabian Nights, and Tabu, made his long-awaited return at last year’s Cannes with the mesmerizing odyssey Grand Tour. Rory O’Connor said in his Cannes review, “If Chris Marker and Preston Sturges ever made a film together, it might have looked something like Grand Tour, a sweeping tale that moves from Rangoon to Manila, via Bangkok, Saigon and Osaka, as it weaves the stories of two disparate lovers towards a fateful reunion. The stowaways could scarcely be more Sturgian: he the urbane man on the run, she the intrepid woman trying to track him down. Their scenes are set in 1917 and shot in a classical studio style, yet they’re delivered within a contemporary travelogue––as if we are not only following their epic romance but a director’s own wanderings.”

5. Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh; March 14)

If a James Bond or Mission: Impossible film excised all its action scenes––save a stray explosion and gunshot––while employing a script with a pop John le Carré sensibility, it might resemble something like Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. A hyper-slick, suave spy thriller, it’s mainly relegated to dinner tables and office rooms as stages for rapid-fire, gleefully barbed verbal sparring scripted by David Koepp, returning to the genre after Ethan Hunt’s first outing. Primarily focusing on a trio of couples working in British intelligence, Koepp’s script poses the question: it is possible to have a healthy relationship when there’s no such thing as separating work from life, particularly when your job description is one of a professional liar?

4. Mickey 17 (Bong Joon Ho; March 7)

While Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 isn’t arriving with as much fervor as Parasite––certainly a hard bar to clear––as a fan of the pop delights of Ashton Edward’s source novel, I’m curious to see what the South Korean director does with his biggest budget yet, particularly with as versatile an actor as Robert Pattinson at the center. But our own Leonardo Goi wasn’t too hot on the film at Berlinale, saying in his review, “Like Okja, Mickey 17 ends up pitting an almost cartoonish embodiment of evil against a monstrous Other that slowly takes on a more benign aura. To be clear: I’m not suggesting the ‘creepers,’ as Marshall calls them, are anywhere near as adorable as a certain oversized pig. But the fact remains that Mickey 17’s good-vs-evil scaffolding is just as reductive and unimaginative.”

3. Who by Fire (Philippe Lesage; March 14)

After his revelatory coming-of-age film Genesis, Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage has expanded his canvas with Who by Fire, a lush, intimate, psychologically riveting drama following two families on a secluded getaway in a remote cabin as they contend with career and romantic jealousies. David Katz said in his Berlinale review, “It’s a truly unrequited, anti-love triangle, and like in his previous work, Lesage sensitively reflects on but never sentimentalizes adolescent behavior: what we observe is raw, tentative, sometimes inexplicable, and put before us as if in a clinical setting, under laboratory conditions and stark lights.”

2. Eephus (Carson Lund; March 7)

If the perfect sports movie illuminates the fundamentals that make one fall in love with the game, there may be no better movie about baseball than Carson Lund’s Eephus. Structured solely around a single round of America’s national pastime, Lund’s debut feature beautifully, humorously articulates the particular nuances, rhythms, and details of an amateur men’s league game. By subverting tropes of the standard sports movie––which often captures peak physical performance in front of legions of adoring fans––Lund has crafted something far more singularly compelling. Rather than grand slams and no-hitters, there are errors aplenty and no shortage of beer guts and weathered muscles amongst the motley crew. Lund is more interested in examining the peculiar set of social codes that only apply when one is on the field, unimpeded by life’s responsibilities and entirely focused on the rules of the game. Continue reading my full review.

1. Misericordia (Alain Guiraudie; March 21)

While Alain Guiraudie earned much acclaim for his 2013 erotic thriller Stranger by the Lake, he’s receiving the most attention in his career thus far, for good reason, with Misericordia. A wildly entertaining, subversive tale of desire that would make Pasolini, Chabrol, and Hitchcock blush, Cahiers du cinéma‘s #1 film of 2024 is now arriving this month. Leonardo Goi said in his review, “In a career spanning four decades and eight features, Alain Guiraudie has cemented himself as one of our most astute chroniclers of desire. If there’s any leitmotif to his libidinous body of work, that’s not homosexuality (prevalent as same-sex encounters might be across his films) but a force that transcends all manner of labels and categories. His is a cinema of liberty: of vast, enchanted spaces and solitary wanderers who wrestle with their passions, and in acting them out, change the way they carry themselves into the world. Desire becomes an exercise in self-sovereignty, a way of reasserting one’s independence––a rebirth. It is often said that cinema is an inescapably scopophilic realm, where the act of looking is itself a source of pleasure, but Guiraudie has a way of making that dynamic feel egalitarian, as thrilling for those watching as it is for those being watched.”

More Films to See

• Seven Veils (March 7)
• There’s Still Tomorrow (March 7)
• The Visitor (March 7)
• Direct Action (March 14)
• An Unfinished Film (March 14)
• Pet Shop Days (March 15)
• Ash (March 21)
• Being Maria (March 21)
• Bob Trevino Likes It (March 21)
• The Friend (March 21)
• Magazine Dreams (March 21)
• The Fishbowl (March 21)
• Aum: The Cult At The End Of The World (March 21)
• The Assessment (March 21)
• The Ballad of Wallis Island (March 28)
• Holy Cow (March 28)
• Thank You Very Much (March 28)

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

Christmas, Every Day (Faye Tsakas)

Rising documentarian Faye Tsakas explores the world of preteen influencers in her newest short film. Shot in rural Alabama, her observational documentary shows how much work influencers Peyton and Leyla put into developing their social media presence from an early age. Their parents assist them throughout, hopeful their help will allow their children to develop passive incomes and avoid a life of boring desk-jobs. Tsakas’ compelling visuals of child starlets filming TikTok dances against bucolic backdrops populated with tractors and livestock reveals how pervasive social media has become in modern times.

Where to Stream: Le Cinéma Club

La Cocina (Alonso Ruizpalacios)

Egos are charred and tempers seared in La Cocina, a kitchen nightmare set in the engine rooms of a vast Times Square eatery where the staff have more pressing things to worry about than rising temperatures. Take Pedro (Raúl Briones Carmona, in his third Alonso Ruizpalacios joint), a hardened and still-undocumented line cook whose outbursts of ideology can only mask his resentments and vulnerability for so long. Then there’s Julia (Rooney Mara), who is carrying Pedro’s unborn child, hiding her morning sickness in the staff room and planning to sneak out on break to get an abortion. And then there’s Estela (Anna Diaz), our eyes and ears: fresh off the proverbial boat, with barely a word of English, asking strangers on the subway how to get to 45th street before being unceremoniously tossed into a lunch shift that soon resembles The Raft of the Medusa, adrift on a sea of Cherry Coke. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)

A Complete Unknown often seems lost in its efforts to live up to this motley pedigree. It follows Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) from the moment he hitchhiked into New York City in early 1961 to his landmark, legendarily divisive performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where his decision to bring electric rock music to the institution that had deified him was seen as a betrayal of his solo acoustic roots. This stretch of time, which ends before the now-83-year-old had even turned 25, is not coincidentally the extent of the vast majority of the popular consciousness’ knowledge of Dylan. There are later highlights that many can readily point to: the twin successes of Blood on the Tracks and Desire in the mid-70s, his long-awaited Grammy win for Time Out of Mind; the only one of these specifically mentioned in the requisite final title cards is his shocking win of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which is almost laughed-off in text form. – Ryan S. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Eureka (Lisandro Alonso)

Nine years since that underground epiphany, along comes Eureka, a film that, for large chunks, seems to emerge from the same hallucinatory terrain Jauja opened up. Like all its predecessors, this unfurls as a literal journey dotted with solitary wanderers either searching for or mourning lost relatives. (“All families disappear eventually,” Gunnar was told down the cave, a line that might as well double as the director’s motto.) Old tropes and motifs notwithstanding, Alonso’s latest is his most ambitious: a tripartite film, Eureka sides not with the white strangers in strange lands that had long peopled Alonso’s oeuvre, but with the native communities facing these invaders. Its scope is ecumenical, its geography massive. In barest terms, Eureka’s designed to sponge something of, and locate parallels between, the experience of Indigenous communities stranded in three markedly different milieus: the Old West; South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in the present day; and finally the jungles of early-70s Brazil. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Where to Stream: MUBI (free for 30 days)

Ghostlight (Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson)

Watch an exclusive clip above.

A masterfully crafted work with nearly no false notes, Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s Ghostlight is a tender drama bearing profound moments of humor and small triumphs. The smartly constructed script by O’Sullivan buries the lede, revealing new narrative information with each layer as we watch a nuclear family slowly come apart and, later, find solace in the wake of their son’s suicide. Anchored by a real-life family, the film feels as if it’s been meticulously workshopped with the same intimate collaboration that gave O’Sullivan and Thompson’s last feature, Saint Frances, its authentic nuances. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: Hulu

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

RaMell Ross––the Brown University film professor and writer-director behind 2018’s stunning impressionist portrait of rural Alabama life, Hale County This Morning, This Evening––made a splash with his second film and fiction debut Nickel Boys. This adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is a tender, enchanting movie that quickly develops a mood-defining dread stemming from America’s ugly history with abusive juvenile centers for Black boys. Innovatively shot in first-person to gripping effect, it follows Elwood Curtis, a young man wrongly detained at the Nickel Academy, as he develops a life-changing friendship and navigates the nightmares of Nickel, where the unmarked graves of rule-breaking children haunt the kids who still have to walk its grounds. Bouncing back and forth between Elwood’s days at Nickel and his adult life researching its crimes, Ross submerges us in what feels like a lifetime of beauty and trauma. – Luke H.

Where to Stream: MGM+

Presence (Steven Soderbergh)

For a prolific artist, a surge of creativity can often be synonymous with a dip in quality. Though not if you are Steven Soderbergh. He’s only continued to reinvent himself and forge ahead with new technology, subjects, and structural gambles. His latest film, Presence, is a haunting ghost tale wrapped in a nuanced family drama, and one of his most formally ambitious attempts yet. What if the camera, operated by Peter Andrews (aka Soderbergh), was the ghost? And every single shot in the film was a single take from this perspective? And, to further add to the self-imposed constraints, the ghost never leaves the house? From the very first shot, as we see the presence rapidly move through every room in the yet-to-be-sold empty house, laying the foundation for the horrors to take place, one senses Soderbergh is having a total blast with this concept. Reuniting after Kimi, David Koepp’s rollercoaster of a script is also one that doesn’t forget to flesh out its characters, making for a funny, disturbing, and nimble genre exercise that further proves Soderbergh is one of the most inventive directors to play the game. – Jordan R. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Also New to Streaming

Kino Film Collection

Nowhere in Africa
Sebastian

MUBI (free for 30 days)

Finding Vivian Maier
The Way Back

Netflix

Venom: The Last Dance
Watcher

VOD

#Manhole
Adult Best Friends
DIG! XX
Stockade

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)

Brady Corbet’s long-gestating architecture epic looks and feels as painstakingly crafted as its lead character’s intricate architectonics. For as barren and minimalist as László Tóth’s (a terrific Adrien Brody) designs are, they pack a beautiful, mysterious, occasionally revelatory punch, much like Corbet’s winding three-and-a-half-hour (complete with built-in intermission!) story about a Hungarian architect who immigrated to New York after WWII only to be mentally and emotionally sucked in by the tide of a momentous decades-long project initiated by a ruthless Pennsylvania business tycoon. Its scope is enormous––almost impossible not to get wrapped up in. A sense of impending gravity gives this film the weight of the real, as if we’re witnessing history. Cinematographer Lol Crawley captures sprawling green hillsides, gleaming Italian marble mines, immovable caves, and towering opuses in a dark, richly textured VistaVision that’s like a magnet for your eyes, and composer Daniel Blumberg, in his second score ever, locks you in with galvanizing refrains that keep The Brutalist chugging along at a mean rate, radiant floating pianos disarming you to characters’ sympathies. – Luke H.

Where to Stream: VOD

Companion (Drew Hancock)

Competently aping David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh’s cold, formally precise styles, director Drew Hancock’s mise-en-scène successfully conveys the antiseptic near-future we’re probably already living in, but can’t seem to work around the stakes and thrills being relatively low. To be more specific about the tension of Companion: it isn’t stupid, dull, or badly made per se, but it’s unlikeable, and awfully smug for something not that high on insight or genuine surprise. The multiple instances of Josh spelling out his modern male psychology of entitlement and abandonment issues point to the fact that basically no January New Line Cinema genre movie can just be termite art anymore. – Ethan V. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

The Last Showgirl (Gia Coppola)

Pamela Anderson receives the role of a lifetime in Gia Coppola’s engaging (if simplistic) character study The Last Showgirl, playing a glamorous showgirl who must plan for her future when her show abruptly closes after a 30-year run. Christopher Schobert said in his TIFF review, “’I’m older––I’m not old,’ says Shelley, the longest-term performer in a past-its-prime Las Vegas revue. She is played by Pamela Anderson, the international icon who has never, ever had a role like this. Shelley is 57 years old, living paycheck-to-paycheck, estranged from her daughter, and intensely vulnerable. Clearly we are far from the beaches of Baywatch and action spectacle that was Barb Wire. And Anderson is one of the chief reasons Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl is a noteworthy film. But this is not stunt casting. It’s a real-deal performance, and Shelley is one of the more memorable Vegas denizens in recent cinema.”

Where to Stream: VOD

Love Me (Sam and Andy Zuchero)

A cosmic love story that takes place over 13.7 billion years about a floating buoy and a satellite circling the earth, Love Me might best be described as a domestic drama in lockdown. The light, thoughtful, and occasionally repetitive debut feature from Sam and Andy Zuchero takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where humans have gone extinct. All that remains––that we know of––are two machines bobbing and floating with A.I. operating systems and a virtual database of Internet archives spanning all of human history. Without the opportunity for social interaction and physical contact, the pair tries the best it can to establish some sort of connection––to determine what that might even look and sound like. – Jake K. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)

A sensual, classically gothic reimagining of both Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the 1922 silent film, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu sees the director return to his pure horror roots and fascination with historical verisimilitude. Anchored by an assured, career-best performance from Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgård as a monstrosity that would feel repetitive if not for the gravitas he brings, Nosferatu is grand, operatic, and more than a little bit self-serious. But it also represents another big swing by a director cashing in on his creative capital to beautifully reimagine one of the most adapted texts of our time. – Christian G.

Where to Stream: Peacock

The Quiet Ones (Frederik Louis Hviid)

Premiering at TIFF last fall, Frederik Louis Hviid’s thrilling The Quiet Ones tells of the group that pulled off the largest heist in Danish history back in 2008. Jared Mobarak said in his TIFF review, “Based on the true story of Denmark’s largest-ever heist, The Quiet Ones does well to ensure we know the motivations of each major player from the start. Kasper is the family man interested in legacy––either via the sport he loves or the infamy of criminality. Slimani is a violent, control-driven man who has no qualms taking it by any means necessary. Maria (Amanda Collin) is a much smaller piece than those two, but her devotee of the law and the chase it affords her to pursue bad guys in the name of justice is no less important. Kasper wants to win; Slimani wants to kill; Maria wants to save the day.”

Where to Stream: VOD

The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar)

Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) haven’t seen each other in a lifetime and rekindle friendship through a unique wish: will you be there the day I choose to die? Martha, a former war photographer diagnosed with cancer, and Ingrid, an author whose oeuvre ruminates on death, become dance partners swaying to the unpredictable melody of existence in Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language feature debut––as if Persona morphed into vibrant Technicolor. – Jose S.

Where to Stream: VOD

Squirrels to the Nuts (Peter Bogdanovich)

The late and great Peter Bogdanovich’s final film was She’s Funny That Way, starring Owen Wilson, Imogen Poots, Kathryn Hahn, Rhys Ifans, Jennifer Aniston, Will Forte, Austin Pendleton, George Morfogen, Richard Lewis, and Cybill Shepherd. But wait! That’s only half-true! Before the half-hearted release of She’s Funny That Way, there was another version of the film. Its title? Squirrels to the Nuts. This is the cut that Bogdanovich wanted the world to see. Until the studio made him change it. James Kenney, the man who saved Squirrels to the Nuts, who joined us on The-Bisde back in 2022 to discuss the project, which is now finally available digitally. – Dan M.

Where to Stream: VOD

Sujo (Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez)

A film about growing up in your father’s shadow that mostly (and unexpectedly) examines the role of women as community pillars and violence interrupters, Sujo is the compelling new Sundance award-winning feature from Identifying Features team Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez. The father in question Josue (Juan Jesús Varela Hernández) is a sicario, a brutal gang enforcer killed early in the film by his cartel. The first chapter unfolds as young Sujo (Kevin Uriel Aguilar Luna) watches his father conduct business at a distance, purposefully disorienting passages wherein we overhear conversations. Compounding the confusion, when his father doesn’t return home, we witness a chilling scene in which he’s hidden by his aunt Nemesia (Yadira Perez Esteban) when a member of the cartel comes to exact revenge after Sujo’s father killed his son. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Also New to Streaming

Kino Film Collection

Manuscripts Don’t Burn
Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

MUBI

The Childhood of a Leader
Grand Theft Hamlet
Happening
Paris, 13th District

OVID.tv

Coconut Head Generation
Mambar Pierette

VOD

Dog Man
Millers in Marriage
Mufasa: The Lion King

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

IFC Center
Hideaki Anno’s Love & Pop plays in a new restoration; Herzog’s Nosferatu, Mulholland Dr., Funeral Parade of Roses, The Thing, and Irreversible show late.

Roxy Cinema
Saturday brings Bruce LaBruce introducing Ciao! Manhattan and Melody of Love on 16mm; Claude Chabrol’s Ten Days Wonder shows on 16mm this Sunday alongside the rare Iranian feature Dead End.

Japan Society
Masahiro Shinoda’s Pale Flower shows on 35mm this Friday.

Film at Lincoln Center
The newly restored Compensation begins screening while a career-spanning Frederick Wiseman retrospective continues.

Film Forum
Tales from the New Yorker includes films by Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, and John Huston. Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman continues in a new 4K restoration; Meet Me In St. Louis screens on Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives
Willem Dafoe: Wild at Heart continues.

Museum of the Moving Image
Snubbed Forever continues with Blue Collar and Carmen Jones.

Metrograph
Alien, Love Torn in a Dream, and Rambling Rose play on 35mm; The Divorced Women’s Film Festival and an António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro program starts while Laura Dern, Raise Ravens, Amongst Humans, and 15 Minutes continue.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

The Adamant Girl (P. S. Vinothraj)

While rural stories have become a topic du jour across the many industries within Indian cinema, P.S. Vinothraj has carved a unique place for himself with Koozhangal (Pebbles) and his follow-up Kottukkaali (The Adamant Girl). He structurally breaks down family and community dynamics in rural areas with disquieting observation, his camera constantly tracking and intersecting movements of events. There are explosions of dialogue and emotion wrapped around long sequences of contemplation where just a glance can prove revelatory. Both Soori and Anna Ben, two well-established performers in Tamil cinema, are perfect ciphers for gender dynamics at play. Vinothraj refreshingly eludes sermons or obvious pleas, and The Adamant Girl respects its audience enough to let them unpack what they’re watching on their own time. – Soham G.

Where to Stream: VOD

Black Dog (Guan Hu)

In the derelict, scraggly city in northwest China where Guan Hu’s Black Dog is set, human life has all but disappeared and canines have replaced their masters. The year is 2008, a few weeks before the kick-off to the Beijing Summer Olympics, but the capital feels so distant in time and space that when a mural honoring the event pops up, the paint is so sun-bleached you’d be forgiven for thinking the Games were over by a few decades. Oil was tucked deep under the nearby hills until the reserves dried up and workers left––one of many migration waves that turned this unnamed corner at the edge of the Gobi Desert into an arid ghost town presided by the pets its former residents left behind. Dogs are everywhere you look; from the barren expanses that ring the city down to its maze of abandoned buildings, they roam this place as silent and sinister sentinels, a vision closer to a post-apocalyptic nightmare like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later than a fantasia à la Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Broken Rage (Takeshi Kitano)

Split into two chapters, the film kicks off as a crime thriller before switching tones altogether and revisiting the first part scene-by-scene in a more delirious light. Kitano stars in both as a gun-for-hire. Infallible in the first and hopelessly clumsy in the second, he’s “Mouse,” a hit man whose murderous routine is upended once cops recruit him to infiltrate a drug ring. Tonally distinct as they may be, humor permeates both parts. Even in the ostensibly more “serious” first, Kitano’s script moves with a childlike logic: it only takes Mouse a couple of punches in a staged brawl with another mole to ingratiate himself with the mobsters he’s been asked to spy on. His killing-machine loner is a comic riff on the other unbeatable assassins he played in the past (think of Otomo, the thug of his Outrage saga). But the commitment to poking fun at his onscreen personas is something I hadn’t seen him do since 2005’s Takeshis’, a comedy that nonetheless spiraled into self-indulgent flights of fancy. Nothing farther from Broken Rage’s spirit. This isn’t just a wildly funny film––the kind that sent people around me at the press premiere into convulsed laughter just a few scenes in––but a pointed rebuke to the discourse that saw the director’s two impulses (popular comedy and artful seriousness) as opposite poles in a magnetic field. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Flow (Gints Zilbalodis)

Being a pet owner, depending on your personality, comes with a fair level of anxiety. For example: after leaving my apartment to go see the film I’m writing about, the thought crossed my mind that maybe I hadn’t shut my bathroom door. If so, my two beautiful senior cats could potentially get inside and consume flowers toxic to them. For some people this is just the anxiety they have regarding, I don’t know, leaving the oven on whenever they head out in public, but for a certain kind of animal-loving softie, intrusive thoughts will be bound to hover. After reassuring my anxiety about whether my cats got into the bathroom, it transferred to the pixelated critter at the center of Flow. – Ethan V. (full review)

Where to Stream: Max

From Ground Zero

From Ground Zero is a film that, in an ideal world, would not exist, and cannot be written about as if it were a normal production. This anthology of 22 shorts is Palestine’s submission for the Best International Film Oscar and has deservedly made the 15-title shortlist. Like any anthology film, it suffers from certain pieces being better-realized than others, though it’s difficult to critique this in all good conscience; when making art in a war zone, there’s an inherent urgency that outweighs dramatic shortcomings. As the title reminds us, these are dispatches from a living hell unfathomable to any viewer, and the fact that several filmmakers have been able to keep creating under such circumstances is a miracle––one anybody with a heart would trade for both an end to the bloodshed and these directors being able to create art on their own terms. – Alistair R. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)

The legendary Mike Leigh’s latest stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a woman whose intense anger––at her family, the people she sees during her errands, the world itself––is both hysterically funny and devastatingly sad. Hard Truths might be the first truly great film to deal with the lingering impact of COVID on our collective consciousness. While the pandemic is only mentioned in passing, the air of malaise, discontent, and simmering rage many felt (and still feel) is evident in every frame of Hard Truths. Leigh’s filmography is so strong and so full of masterpieces (Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies, Topsy-Turvy) that ranking Truths is tricky. But that can be pondered down the road. For now, Hard Truths can be acknowledged as one of 2024’s greatest, most-impactful films. – Chris S.

Where to Stream: VOD

Longlegs (Osgood Perkins)

Perkins’ previous films, such as The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, worked because they eschewed the very pretense of a story that would otherwise drag them down. By living and dying on tame procedural, Longlegs fails to evoke any strong emotion. Perhaps that’s partially by design: Perkins seems intent, if not particularly careful, to emulate his protagonist in style and form. Harker is quiet and attentive, and the mise-en-scène invites audiences to follow suit. The issue is the degree to which the script introduces and discards portions of itself. Those Zodiac-type letters? Solved way too quickly, and out of the movie they go. – Matt C. (Hulu

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

RaMell Ross––the Brown University film professor and writer-director behind 2018’s stunning impressionist portrait of rural Alabama life, Hale County This Morning, This Evening––made a splash with his second film and fiction debut Nickel Boys. This adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel is a tender, enchanting movie that quickly develops a mood-defining dread stemming from America’s ugly history with abusive juvenile centers for Black boys. Innovatively shot in first-person to gripping effect, it follows Elwood Curtis, a young man wrongly detained at the Nickel Academy, as he develops a life-changing friendship and navigates the nightmares of Nickel, where the unmarked graves of rule-breaking children haunt the kids who still have to walk its grounds. Bouncing back and forth between Elwood’s days at Nickel and his adult life researching its crimes, Ross submerges us in what feels like a lifetime of beauty and trauma. – Luke H.

Where to Stream: VOD

One of Them Days (Lawrence Lamont)

In today’s Hollywood where comedies, when they are made at all, are mostly shunted to straight-to-streaming, Lawrence Lamont’s One of Them Days is a breath of fresh air. While not rewriting the rules, it rather comfortably settles into a structure affectionately calling back staples of the genres from the 90s and the early aughts. Following Keke Palmer and SZA as friends who have one day to get enough money to cover rent, it’s an eminently likable adventure with sight gags that actually work and, most important of all, a central friendship we actually believe thanks to the charisma of the two leads. With it already making three times its budget theatrically, here’s hoping Hollywood finally learns some lessons that audiences are starving for more in the dormant genre. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: VOD

Rounding (Alex Thompson)

Following Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s deeply moving drama Ghostlight last year, one of Thompson’s prior features, the psychological thriller Rounding––which premiered back at Tribeca Festival in 2022––is now finally getting a release. Following a medical resident who starts a new job at a rural hospital as his anxiety and past trauma start to haunt him, the film is an interesting genre experiment for Thompson. However, it’s the more grounded explorations of his everyday duties, which render harrowing to anyone not in the medical field, that have more impact than the thinly sketched horror elements. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: VOD

The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Mohammad Rasoulof)

Here’s a film that asks, in the vein of another’s title: did you wonder who fired the gun? Yet in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig, which is set concurrently against Iran’s Jina (Women, Life, Freedom) protests, the question’s sarcastic rather than interrogative. This gun is not literal and corporeal, but metaphorical and deadly, its firer the collective will of hundreds of women who cannot abide the country’s theocratic regime and morality police. There’s no doubting the film’s own cogently didactic thrust, either. – David K. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson)

Four after his Oscar-winning documentary Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson returns with another documentary capturing Black music history. This time focusing in on the rapid rise and subsequent decline of one artist, Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) explores Sly Stone’s indelible contributions to the funk genre as frontman of Sly and the Family Stone. While the lineup of talking heads is no doubt impressive, from André 3000 to D’Angelo, one wishes the director probed a bit deeper into the thesis of his title rather than hitting the more conventional notes of the tried-and-true bio-doc form. Nonetheless, he honors Stone’s music in all the right ways and this one deserves to be played as loud as possible. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: Hulu

Timestalker (Alice Lowe)

Nearly a decade after her directorial debut Prevenge, Alice Lowe’s ambitious second feature Timestalker is finally arriving stateside after a festival tour and U.K. release last year. Spanning hundreds of years set across a handful of distinct time periods, the film follows Agnes (Lowe) as she repeatedly falls in love with the “wrong man” and upon doing so dies and becomes reincarnated in a new time period, doomed to repeat her past mistakes. While it’s a compelling idea and entertaining in the various extremes Lowe pushes the deaths and male depravity through the ages, there’s the sense with a proper budget her vision would be better realized––or at least the script needed to have a bit more weight and structure to patch the production holes. – Jordan R.

Where to Stream: VOD

Also New to Streaming

Apple TV+

The Gorge

Hulu

Omni Loop

Kino Film Collection

Keep the Change
Possession

Netflix

Two Lovers

Peacock

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

VOD

Better Man
Flight Risk
God Help the Girl

NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

Roxy Cinema
Vincent Gallo writes, directs, and / or stars in Buffalo ’66, Trouble Every Day, and The Brown Bunny, all playing on 35mm; a print of Twilight screens Sunday.

Museum of Modern Art
Dutchman and We Are Universal play in a two-for-one screening.

Japan Society
A six-film Nobuhiko Obayashi retrospective has two final showings on Friday.

Anthology Film Archives
Willem Dafoe: Wild at Heart features films by Schrader, Lynch, Scorsese, and Kathryn Bigelow.

Film at Lincoln Center
A career-spanning Frederick Wiseman retrospective continues.

Museum of the Moving Image
Snubbed Forever continues.

IFC Center
A new 4K restoration of Picnic at Hanging Rock continues; Fire Walk with Me, Lost Highway, and Mulholland Dr. screen; Fargo, The Thing, Irreversible, and House show late.

Film Forum
Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman begins playing in a new 4K restoration; The Little Mermaid screens on Sunday.

Metrograph
Alien, Cría Cuervos, The Fabulous Stains, and Blow-Up play on 35mm; a Ryan J. Sloan and Ariella Mastroianni curation, Knock Knock, Brigitte Lin, Amongst Humans, and 15 Minutes continue.

Our first roundup of 2025 features some major releases; given the state of things, we should be very thankful for that. Note that our next column will include a lengthy list of new and recent novels and short fiction (one highlight is a short story collection from Burning director Lee Chang-dong) as well as noteworthy Blu-Ray and 4K releases from Criterion and Warner Home Entertainment. In other words, plenty to get lost in––thank goodness for that. 

But before then, we have the following terrific texts, starting with an extraordinary biography of one of our greatest living filmmakers.

The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick by John Bleasdale (University Press of Kentucky)

John Bleasdale’s Magic Hours is, remarkably, the first in-depth biography of Terrence Malick. This in itself makes the book a crucially important release. Indeed, this is an essential book on cinema, one written with intelligence and personality (Bleasdale opens with a visit to Malick’s childhood home and the real Tree of Life), bursting with fascinating details (we finally have the definitive account of the 1995 Thin Red Line table read, and also learn of an early-70s meeting between AFI classmates Malick and David Lynch, and critic Pauline Kael), and deeply probing. We discover how Malick’s complex and difficult relationship with his father, the death of his younger brother, and his love of philosophy (and Texas, for that matter) has influenced every step of his career. Magic Hours ends at our current moment, as the world awaits the debut of The Way of the Wind, Malick’s ambitious “series of scenes from the life of Jesus.” Might this be the director’s boldest move yet? “Heading toward his eighties, Terrence Malick was still outside, being in the world, going on location, moving around with his rock group.” How fitting it is to think of Malick always on the move, always experimenting, always dreaming up something the world has never experienced before. Perhaps the greatest achievement of The Magic Hours is that it reminds us how lucky we are that Terrence Malick is alive, well, and working. 

Louis B. Mayer & Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation by Kenneth Turan (Yale University Press)

With The Whole Equation, venerable former Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan has crafted a hugely enjoyable read centered on two key figures in Hollywood history. The friendship and eventual rift between Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg is the subject of this unique joint biography. While both men are compelling, it is the mercurial Mayer who most intrigues. “Like the high-volume Automat eateries,” Turan writes, “he was aiming for quality but only if it could be mass-produced and scaled up.” His office was enormous (“You need an automobile to reach your desk,” said Samuel Goldwyn), his adoration of the Andy Hardy films off-kilter, and his influence vast. Mayer and Thalberg were giants; Turan vividly captures the period of time in which they walked the earth. 

The Chateau Marmont Hollywood Handbook edited by André Balazs (Rizzoli Universe)

The backstory of this collection of rare writing and behind-the-scenes photos is captivating. Edited by legendary hotelier André Balazs, the book has been published again for the first time since 1996. Inside is text from the likes of Lillian Ross, Budd Schulberg, Dominick Dunne, and Jay McInerney, along with photographs of, well, nearly anyone who was anyone in Hollywood. Favorites must be the Annie Liebovitz shot of a bald, bare-chested Dennis Hopper and long-haired Christopher Waken; a shirtless Humphrey Bogart “tending to the bungalow garden”; and a smiling Björk moving “between rooms,” photographed by Spike Jonze. What joins it all together, of course, is the hotel. The Chateau Marmont is the most important character here. 

Falling in Love at the Movies: Rom-Coms from the Screwball Era to Today (Turner Classic Movies) by Esther Zuckerman (Running Press)

Esther Zuckerman’s writing is consistently delightful. She follows up the entertaining Beyond the Best Dressed and A Field Guide to Internet Boyfriends with the fitting-for-February Falling in Love at the Movies. This easily digestible guide to romantic comedies is divided into categories like “The Meet-Cute,” “The High-Maintenance Woman,” “Not So Happily Ever After,” and “LGBTQ+ Love.” Zuckerman explains in her introduction that the book is “a selective history. It’s by no means comprehensive.” Still, she manages to include such deep cuts as The Watermelon Woman, Palm Springs, and the tremendously underrated Joe Versus the Volcano. I consider Falling in Love at the Movies plenty comprehensive. 

George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director by Joseph McBride (Columbia University Press)

We have reached the point in which film historian Joseph McBride can be considered a titan in his field, just like many of the greats he has covered in print––a list that includes Orson Welles, Frank Capra, John Ford, and now George Cukor. McBride’s latest, George Cukor’s People: Acting for a Master Director, takes a unique approach to the director of The Philadelphia Story and My Fair Lady. The author focuses on Cukor’s actors, and in doing so brings new insight to the work of a man who is “widely admired but little understood.” It’s always a joy to read about Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart. But the section I found most enticing is McBride’s look at Justine, starring Anna Karina and Dirk Bogarde. “I always have a special place in my heart for a film maudit,” writes McBride––an apt word to use for this one. McBride finds that the film tells us much about its creator. “More than any of his other films to date, Justine partakes of both sides of Cukor, the man of worldly elegance and the man acquainted with the secretive, louche side of life.”

Blazing Saddles Meets Young Frankenstein: The 50th Anniversary of the Year of Mel Brooks by Bruce G. Hallenbeck (Applause)

It’s pretty incredible that Mel Brooks released his two greatest films––Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein––in the same year. In Blazing Saddles Meets Young Frankenstein, author Bruce G. Hallenbeck explores the making of each film, grappling with their impact on cinema and pop culture. “One thing is for certain,” Hallenbeck writes. “Blazing Saddles could only have been made in the free-wheeling, anything-goes decade of the 1970s, an era when hard-core porn could be shown in a mainstream theater and political correctness was years in the future. Young Frankenstein’s slightly gentler humor is still very much of its time and, while a similar film could be made today, the fact is, it’s a spoof that has never been bettered.”

Quick hits

With Parasite celebrating its five-year anniversary by screening in IMAX and with Bong Joon Ho’s long-awaited followup, Mickey 17, finally coming to theaters, it’s a good time to ponder the greatness of Korean cinema. Hallyuwood: The Ultimate Guide to Korean Cinema by Bastian Meiresonne (Black Dog & Leventhal) is an impressively comprehensive exploration of the entirety of Korean motion pictures, from 1900 to the present. 

Another impressively researched compendium, this one on a very colorful figure in film and television history, is The Fantasy Worlds of Irwin Allen by Jeff Bond (Titan Books). The “Master of Disaster” produced box-office hits like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno as well as beloved TV series such as Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. This book covers it all––even his epic flop The Swarm. “Allen’s seemingly foolproof formula for successful disaster movies seemed to break down with The Swarm,” Bond explains, but Allen’s career was nevertheless quite impressive.

Critical acclaim came much easier to the team of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Following the recent release of the Merchant-Ivory documentary is Laurence Raw’s Merchant-Ivory: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers Series) (University Press of Mississippi). The book begins with a joint interview featuring Ivory and Merchant in 1968; humorously, Ivory is asked if he would ever adapt A Passage to India––famously filmed in the 1980s by David Lean––and responds, “I would never dream of it.” 

Another enjoyable look at European cinema is Hollywood on the Tiber by Hank Kaufman and Gene Lerner (Sticking Place Books). Originally written in the 1970s, Tiber is a memoir from Kaufman and Lerner, both agents / managers during Rome’s Dolce Vita era. Their memories of Anita Ekberg are particularly moving. 

Hollywood Blackout: The Battle for Inclusion at the Oscars by Ben Arogundade (Cassell) is a timely study of the fight to change the Academy Awards’ long system of exclusion, including the stories of Black, Latino, Asian, South Asian, and indigenous men and women. 

James Dean and his final film, Giant, are the subjects of two new books. Jimmy: The Secret Life of James Dean by Jason Colavito (Applause) is a fine, juicy reassessment of iconic star, while Giant Love by Julie Gilbert (Pantheon) is an engrossing account of how Edna Farber’s novel was made into George Stevens’ 1956 epic. 

Hard to Watch by Matthew Strohl (Applause) is described as a “guide to expanding your horizons,” and the author nicely details the pleasures gained from watching “difficult” cinema. He also reminds us that revisiting movies can be a game-changer: “The last time I watched Jeanne Dielman, I wasn’t bored for a second. That was not at all the case the first time I watched it, two decades ago. The movie hasn’t changed; I have.”

Didion and Babitz by Lili Anolik (Scribner) is a complex but revelatory look at the lives of author Joan Didion and writer-artist Eve Babitz, while Kliph Nesteroff’s Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars by (Abrams) offers an incisive commentary on comedy and controversy. 

Readers interested in how a TV series becomes an international phenomenon will find much to chew on in Believe: The Untold Story Behind Ted Lasso, the Show That Kicked Its Way into Our Hearts by Jeremy Egner (Dutton). There is no question that this is the definitive look at the Jason Sudeikis-starrer. And Kate Winkler Dawson’s The Sinners All Bow: Two Authors, One Murder, and the Real Hester Prynne (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) is an absorbing historical read about the young woman who was the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthrone’s The Scarlet Letter, and whose death inspired America’s first true crime book.

New music books

As a young teenager seeking to understand the explosive power of punk rock, no book hit me harder than Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming. Savage provided the crucial context for what made the punk movement in the U.K. so vital and necessary. England’s Dreaming was a triumphant achievement that Savage has now equaled with The Secret Public (Liveright). The book’s subtitle succinctly captures the theme: “How Music Moved Queer Culture From the Margins to the Mainstream.” As Savage explains, he is “not attempting a definitive survey of gay culture in pop music; rather, I aim to focus on its influence as demonstrated through five particular moments in history.” Starting with Little Richard and Johnny Ray, Savage then moves through the 1960s and 1970s (David Bowie might be the key figure in The Secret Public), culminating with the life and death of disco. The book concludes with the sight of the inimitable Sylvester and the cover of his 1979 album Living Proof. Savage describes the cover as “a mixture of ages, genders and races” with gay men prominent: “They are relaxed, open and confident in who they are, they no longer have to hide.” I will not spoil the final sentence, a line of such haunting beauty that it leaves the reader breathless and near tears. Such is the power of The Secret Public. 

Also powerful is Neko Case’s memoir The Harder I Fight the More I Love You (Grand Central Publishing). This is a sad, witty accounting of childhood poverty, complex relationships, and success. It’s filled with harrowing moments, but ultimately leaves us with great appreciation for what the singer-songwriter has been through and how it’s fueled her music in what she calls the “ever-changing river” of life.  

Long Live: The Definitive Guide to the Folklore and Fandom of Taylor Swift by Nicole Pomarico (Running Press) is a fun addition to the growing library of Taylor Swift tomes. Pomarico brings a light but insightful touch to this career overview that chronicles each era, from Taylor’s self-titled debut through The Tortured Poets Department. Even if you are a Swiftie who missed out on seeing The Eras Tour in person––like me, dammit––you will find lots to enjoy in Long Live. 

David Bowie All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track by Benoît Clerc (Black Dog & Leventhal) is another book about Bowie, but one that’s utterly indispensable. Weighing in at more than 600 pages, All the Songs runs through Bowie’s entire life, song by song and album by album. While his films do not warrant separate entries, most are mentioned in relation to his musical output. (What, no Linguini Incident?) Structured similarly to Black Dog & Leventhal releases on the likes of Elton John and Dolly Parton, this is a book that does not need to be read chronologically. Open to a random entry like “David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf” and dive right in. 

Finally, the latest entry in the 33 ⅓ series of books on significant albums is Kate Bush’s Hounds Of Love (33 ⅓) by Leah Kardos (Bloomsbury Academic). Reading about Bush is always pleasurable and exhilarating, both feelings conjured up by the great Hounds of Love. Kardos goes into detail on the album’s genesis and influences while highlighting the remarkable worldwide success of “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” in 2022 after its use in Stranger Things. “All evidence suggests Hounds of Love will continue to remain relevant, resonant and alive,” Kardos writes. “Its message of love’s triumph over pain, isolation and darkness is something we need to hear, to feel, now more than ever.” Amen to that.

2025 is in full swing and a majority of America is probably looking for a means of escape from the literal and figurative flames engulfing their nation. A new entry in the “Zachary Levi only gets kids movies now” canon that’s from the producer of Wonder but not “A Wonder Story” like White Bird (The Unbreakable Boy opens February 21) and the latest installment in England’s beloved marmalade saga (Paddington in Peru opens February 14) should provide families that reprieve.

Something tells me Marvel’s bid to join the fight with Captain America: Brave New World (opens February 14) might not fit the bill for a vocal minority of our citizenry. Heck, I’m surprised an executive order hasn’t come down preventing it from opening. That’s where it seems we’re headed.

Add a return of some Oscar nominees to cash-in on the exposure and it’s not going to be easy sledding for everything else. Studios will need to plaster the walls and Internet with their posters to secure real estate in the minds of potential ticket buyers. We’ll see if some of the below are up for the task.

Do I know you?

One way to worm into an unsuspecting viewer’s mind is to give them something they might recognize. An echo towards nostalgia or motif or cliché. Let them know what they’re getting. Trick them into thinking they know before pulling the rug. Or maybe complete the assignment as given to make it “look” exactly like that other thing your client loved.

Cleaner (limited, February 21) is pure convention: give us an action image to show our lead means business and our director is going to go all-out on set-pieces. A little bit of Empire Design’s Mechanic: Resurrection, a touch of Ignition and LA’s Abduction, but with a flavor of its own by way of even crazier theatrics.

Here’s the thing: it’s a compelling image. The motion of Daisy Ridley falling at high speed. The shattered glass signifying her leap from a skyscraper window. The helicopter in the distance foreshadowing a continued chase while also balancing the weight of the composition sandwiched between title and cast names. It’s a fun freeze-frame glamour shot that leans onto its artificiality while also setting a scene.

Ex-Husbands (limited, February 19) is less about mimicking something (say, Callan Advertising’s French Exit) than it is solving a problem in a well-worn way. Because you have your photo of your three leads ready to go only to realize it must remain landscape to keep them all in-frame. The only way to leave it that way on a vertical page is to deal with all the empty space you’ll have left.

The simple solution is, of course, to bump up the contrast so the car roof turns pitch-black. Expand that color upward to fill the frame and your purposefully cropped photograph becomes a glimpse into the film’s world. I would have preferred the text to be smaller so that it could breathe more and not act like a visual vice crushing the actors beneath it, but maybe that’s intentional too. None of these men look particularly happy; perhaps that weight above their heads embodies the existential dread ravaging their souls.

As for The Monkey (February 21), the above version is a blatantly intentional homage of Hardcore. I haven’t seen this Stephen King adaptation yet, so I can’t speak to why this decision was made, but I won’t deny the effective nature of evoking another era.

This is especially true when Neon has recently leaned into the marketing strategy of intentionally submitting materials they know will be censored and / or denied simply to use such censorship and denials as the campaign. It’s an old ploy wielding the mantra that “all press is good press” while also whetting genre lovers’ appetites with the presumption that the finished result will be bloodier and more violent than anything you’ve ever seen before (go give that apolitical Damien Leone a run for his money).

Is it too niche for general audiences? You bet. That’s why we also get GrandSon’s tease with the monkey’s face and giant Saul Bass-like typography providing a more modern spin. It’s why we get the in-your-face, I’m-going-to-spell-everything-out-to-you version with a horribly fake image of a bloody knife to counter the novel of text beside it. Neon is covering all their bases.

My big question: when did Osgood Perkins start making “trips” à la Spike Lee “joints”?

Window to the soul

Quite the visual, a monster wearing a full leather face mask with bright glowing hearts where its eye holes should reside. How can you not be intrigued? How can you not want to discover if the result is a serious slasher or comedic parody? I wouldn’t even be surprised to learn they eventually pop out, enlarging and contracting in quick succession, like a Looney Tunes cartoon.

There really wasn’t another direction to go for BLT Communications, LLC when constructing their tease for Heart Eyes (February 7). That mug is the draw. Let it take center stage by confusing and exciting all who walk by in equal measure. Shroud the rest in shadow; add more hearts to the title treatment and “coming soon” text. Ensure that we’ll only know what this movie truly is by buying a ticket.

If you really want to peer inside someone’s soul, however, you must do so with Akiko Stehrenberger’s Armand (limited, February 7; wide, February 14). Those eyes are looking right at us––neither scared by all the hands grabbed at her face nor inviting them. There’s an almost defeated sense of fatigue. Of having been wrung-out with no real path back after accusations, blame, and guilt have been hung around her neck. This is a woman everyone wants a piece of right before they all decide to throw her away.

The scene in the movie that it comes from is an unforgettable one, and probably the most divisive, considering the nature of interpretative dance. It’s no surprise that the best two posters (Midnight Marauder’s version proves an inverse layout to the above Ex-Husbands, except with a much better handle on the negative space) have mined it as a way to portray the work. The latter is more emotional in its depiction of Renate Reinsve’s scream, but those feelings of being used and abused as an object (due to the collective psychology surrounding celebrity) remains intact.

Circling

You could say the two figures surrounding Celeste Dalla Porta on P+A’s poster for Parthenope (limited, February 7) are circling her, but the reality of this siren story is probably more about her drawing them in. We glimpse this truth through an image which seems almost religious in construction. They’ve come to visit her, to worship her. It’s as though she’s holding court and they lack the power to escape.

Beyond the captivating scene is also just a beautifully composed page. It’s a bit off-balance considering Porta must lean forward so her face rests at the center, but the other two actors are such afterthoughts to her gaze that they almost become as empty as the water behind her. They simply serve as a pathway from her eyes down to the title––itself a gorgeous font with curved flourishes in bright yellow to pop off the tan bodies and dark hair below.

There’s a painterly quality to the whole that is somewhat matched by Federico Mauro’s alternate sheet of an underwater city with Porta swimming above to really drive home the mermaid / mythical qualities of her presence. I really like the font here, too––its austere simplicity calls to mind chiseled text in marble.

Aleksander Walijewski’s Rounding (limited, February 14) possesses numerous circles––the most noticeable to my eye being the “O” in the title that practically pushes the other compressed letters away from it. You can then hopscotch your way down from there to Namir Smallwood’s eyes, shadowed cheek, candle-waxed neck, and stethoscope altar. Step by step we move down the center until finding footsteps in the snow below. Are they leading us out? Or are they all that’s left of someone lost to the flame?

It’s the artist’s style through and through. One sees this surrealist scene and painterly aesthetic and automatically assumes Walijewski is responsible. He tells a story with his imagery, distilling each film to its psychological essence. A doctor burning the wick at both ends who may also be shining a beacon for someone to find their way home? The mystery and magic draw you in, but the true meaning only becomes clear once you watch the movie yourself.

A similar thing is happening with Derek Gabryszak and Hannah Christ’s Universal Language (limited, February 14) in that the correlation between these four characters (yes, the turkey too) grows more transparent after you’ve seen the film. That doesn’t, however, mean you can’t get the sense that their connection is formed through place (the concrete overpass of a snowy path traveled upon) and destination (that specific spot they all stand on proving the perfect pot of gold to earn their attention).

Director Matthew Rankin takes us to this setting multiple times throughout the film, characters attempting to solicit the help of others while those others possess an ulterior motive. We can merely watch through the opening, the vantage too shallow to see anything but their figures in the snow. Only when the camera pushes in to look at what’s at their feet do we see what they see and, depending on what’s there, we’ll follow them as they leave to do it all again as this loop repeats.

That’s the beauty of the composition: each of its four quadrants are the same. It’s merely the time that’s changed. We thus click around 90 degrees to see what’s happening and discover which character is that moment’s lead. Then we click another 90, spying upon this utopian melting pot of a fantasy Canadian city where language, culture, and ethnicity co-exist in a way that’s as funny through its juxtapositions as it is natural in its overarching humanity.