Tuner (2025)

In theaters, limited. Opens wide May 29.

High/low. Movies can tug a character, and the audience, in both directions. Up or down. Which direction wins out? We may pull for a person while fate has other designs on him.

When we first meet Niki (Leo Woodall, Nuremberg, The White Lotus), an amiable but profoundly closed-off look lies across his face.

He looks as though something is tying him in knots and he hasn’t freed himself yet. It doesn’t seem as if relief will be coming any time soon.

Our worry about Niki is well-founded. He works as a piano tuner with Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman, as puckishly charming as ever). Harry is an old friend of Niki’s late father and has become a father-substitute to Niki.

Harry owns a piano tuning business that, now that he’s older and growing forgetful, he’s no longer able to operate. He can’t summon the concentration required for delicate piano tuning.

Niki, gifted with perfect pitch, has the ears for it. He was a piano child prodigy and once dreamed of a musical career.

But while still young he developed hyperacusis, an acute hearing sensitivity. Loud noise causes him excruciating pain. To ward it off he wears ear plugs and when surrounding sound gets too loud, he adds noise-canceling headphones.

The condition has kept him isolated and lonely, and Harry and his wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh) make up all he has to call a family.

In a van Niki and Harry tool around New York City fixing grand pianos of the elite, most of whom rarely even play their Steinways and Yamahas. But a neglected instrument still needs tuning.

And, the script makes clear, a stifled life could use shaking up. On one late night job Niki goes alone to a wealthy residence where noise from upstairs prevents him from working. He goes up one floor to find Uri (Lior Raz) and two companions trying to open a safe.

They explain they’re the owner’s “security” team and they’ve mislaid the combination. By any chance could Niki help them out?

As it happens, Niki can. A few days earlier Harry had forgotten the combination to his safe. Niki hauled it home and, guided by a YouTube video, opened it by placing his sensitive ears next to it to hear the tumblers click into place.

Believing Uri’s story that he and his friends are on the premises legitimately, Niki opens the safe. A grateful Uri gives Niki cash and his phone number. Call me, kid, if you ever need some quick money.

We’re at a classic movie high/low crossroad. Writer-director Daniel Roher, an Oscar-winning documentarian making his first feature, confronts Niki with dicey, dangerous choices.

Harry falls seriously ill and Marla desperately informs Niki that Harry has let his health insurance coverage lapse. Medical bills are mounting and both Harry and the tuning business are in jeopardy.

A deeply reluctant Niki joins Uri and his team, by now fully understanding that they’re thieves. But Niki needs the money.

Along with this dark turn, the double-edged script, co-written with Robert Ramsey, gives Niki a high road to follow, too.

While tuning a piano at a music conservatory he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), also a piano prodigy, who’s on her way to a career breakthrough.

All this could seem formulaic: a guy in deeper trouble than he realizes meets a girl who may provide a romantic, and musical, alternate path for him. But events aren’t quite so tidy.

High and low collide. Niki becomes so entangled with Uri and his gang of thugs they won’t let him stop doing jobs for them.

And besides being a highly skilled pianist Ruthie is an ambitious composer. She has an upcoming recital that could secure her an internship with world-renowned composer Marius Maissner (Jean Reno).

Little does Niki know that his thievery will be tied to that very composer and to Ruthie’s possible future.

The suspense and thrilling music kept me thoroughly engrossed. Will Bates deploys a jazzy score that has the bounce and flair of a jangling New York City, risky and promising all at once.

In Bates’ layering of recorded songs, when he needle-dropped Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”, I knew I was in the hands of a cool cat. Hancock himself makes a lovely cameo appearance.

But the sound design by Johnnie Burns is what propels the action. Burns won an Oscar for his sound design of The Zone of Interest, and he also did the piquant period sound for Hamnet.

His work here is breathtaking as he takes us inside Niki’s head tuning piano keys with pinpoint precision – high. And as Niki listens to a safe’s tumblers click into place to spring doors open on about-to-be-stolen jewelry and cash – low.

In crucial ways, the sound here is the story.

Woodall scores a major career breakthrough as Niki. It’s a recessive, held-in leading role that has to keep us engaged. With his luminous, still eyes, seemingly always on the verge of tears, Niki aches with a disturbing quietude.

The actor draws us into a man who’s keeping everyone away. The buoyant romance with Ruthie ripens only because Niki, swooning, conceals from her what he’s criminally tied to.

And neither of them is prepared when her drive for success and his for survival intersect. It helps that Liu can play both wary and smitten, that Ruthie wants to believe in Niki but at the same time refuses to set her career prospects aside.

Their seesawing tension keeps the story grounded in recognizably human stakes, not simply musical wizardry or dastardly criminal doings.

With bright immersive cinematography from Lowell A. Meyer and dazzling split-second editing by Greg O’Bryant, Roher as director shows he knows how to marshal and steer a crack team.

Roher won his Oscar for the documentary Navalny and makes a formidable debut as a feature director who can keep visuals, sound and lived-in performances in exquisite balance.

He’s a meticulous craftsman and sensitive writer who we can expect to go high, low and lots of places in between in the future.

TV: Legends (2026)

Streaming on Netflix

Legends is set in early 1990s Britain, but from the opening scenes it crackles with a frightening 21st-century urgency.

One night a 15-year-old boy leaves his family’s apartment in a working-class Liverpool “estate” (called “housing project” in the U.S.). To throbbing music in a dark disco, drug dealers sell him heroin, inject him with it, and laughingly fail to notice that only minutes later lying in a corner their young customer has died.

After a posh graduation party at Oxford, the daughter of a cabinet minister is encouraged to “relax” with a heroin hit. She suddenly falls silent, and when her friends try to revive her they realize she’s dead.

The plague clearly has no class barriers and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher declares it must be stamped out. The economy is cratering, her hold on power is slipping away and she needs a decisive win.

But Angus Blake (Douglas Hodge), Director of Customs Investigations, knows there’s hardly any money for an all-out anti-drug government push.

He turns to seasoned Customs Officer Don Clark (Steve Coogan), who’s spent years fighting drug dealers and knows the nutty kind of courage it takes to infiltrate armed and dangerous drug gangs.

With virtually no budget, he has to recruit from within Customs. He posts a notice saying “Can You Offer More” hoping to lure from the ranks people with enough grit to take on an undercover, life-threatening job.

Most volunteers simply don’t have the chops.

He narrows his search to four who are utterly bored with their Customs jobs riffling through luggage at airports or “interrogating” readers of international porn – or are burning out doing stifling paperwork. Significantly, all are past 30 and staring down lives that still aren’t on course.

Not fully grasping what they’ve let themselves in for, they’re barreling into a life-and-death showdown. Clark has garnered enough information to bust two drug enterprises, one in London, the other in Liverpool. Their operations are going to converge to import the largest heroin stash in British history.

Guy Stanton (Tom Burke), an ex-boxer with a short fuse, has a wife and daughter as well as a desire to give his life a meaning he hasn’t yet found. Kate (Hayley Squires) is a loner with frayed family ties and not a single lasting relationship in her past.

Bailey (Aml Ameen) is highly educated but doesn’t fit in Britain’s stuffy, class-conscious professional world. Erin (Jasmine Blackborow) is a tech whiz with a head for figures, who hasn’t been able to maximize her talents in Customs. As the team’s researcher, she holds down the fort, feeding the others rapid answers on the fly.

So far, it would seem, so standard: a team-to-the-rescue, “action” adventure. But here’s where this series takes on its unique flavor and focus.

Don cautions his volunteers that to work undercover you have to become – to create – a “legend” for yourself. Not a heroic persona. It’s the tough person you need to seem to be to the criminals you’re trying to bring down.

Don’s done it himself, and he knows the hazards. If the mask drops, you’re dead. It has to convince. There’s no pretending or seeming.

The danger: you’ll believe it so profoundly that you’ll become your hard, heartless legend and lose track of who you are.

This happens most searingly with Guy. He barges into a drug operation – camouflaged as a dry cleaners – run by Turkish dealers in London, pretending to be a “transporter” who can bring drugs into Britain from abroad. But the wily gang leader Hakan (Numan Acar) doesn’t trust him.

Guy needs an in, and Don springs from prison Mylonas (Gerald Kyd), a government informer who knows all the moves of both Customs and drug dealers. Mylonas’ reputation precedes him in the criminal underworld. He’s been in and out of prison a lot.

When he vouches for Guy, the pair are slowly woven into the center of the operation, where Guy’s fake identity, and their covert partnership, will be sorely tested. (In keeping Guy and us on edge, Kyd gives an exceptionally ripe, earthy, funny/treacherous performance.)

Meanwhile in Liverpool, Kate and Bailey are closing in on drug-dealing Carter (Tom Hughes) who claims to “own” the city where his deceased father once tried and failed to rule as a feared gangster. Carter is determined to beat the odds his father couldn’t.

But he has a government snitch in his midst, and Bailey and Kate work to exploit a weakness Carter isn’t even aware of.

The personal stakes here are scary enough. If any of the three neophyte undercover operators reveal their true identities, they’ll be killed and the operation will be lost. And if any of their frantic phone calls to Erin are discovered, that, too, would expose what they’re actually doing.

Don has been told by the Home Secretary that this is his last chance before Thatcher’s imminent departure.

Yet Legends wants to show us more than cat-and-mouse crooks-vs.-government spy-craft and deceit.

For their drug-selling operations to succeed, London and Liverpool drug gangs must merge – they are after all in the same business, and one big haul would be more readily managed than two separate competing ones. Profits can always be split.

To make the merger happen, they all – drug dealers as well as the three undercover agents – must venture to Pakistan, and the arduous journey there and back, full of hair-trigger risks of exposure, makes for a riveting watch.

As well as a profound cultural lesson. The desert once again proves as bewitching to Western eyes as it did in Lawrence of Arabia.

Britain and other Western powers have sought power and influence along Turkish, Pakistani and Afghan trade routes for centuries.

Drug dealing in the sinister, murderous manner presented here can almost be seen as exploited and invaded peoples’ striking back, feeding the fading empire drugs to poison it from within.

It’s a harsh awakening, and the rich visual backdrop the filmmakers give this corrupt sojourn provides its own sobering historical subtext.

Drugs are evil. But Western invasion preceded the current hour’s conflicts. Let’s see, the drug dealers seem to be asking, how Mrs. Thatcher will deal with the importation of two tons of heroin with a street value of £1 billion.

That’s a lot of historical resentment and turning it into a thriller soaked with tension makes for daring, gritty drama.

The cast is superb. The cinematography is piercing in the British cities and hypnotic in the vastness of the Silk Road nations. The score peppered with ’90s British pop hits pounds, screeches and soars. It’s nerve-wracking in the most illuminating way. This transcontinental menace and ugliness are supposed to get under your skin.

Often when I enjoy a series and would be willing to go on another adventure with its engaging characters, I like imagining another season.

The fine actors portraying Don and his four team members don’t just embody dedicated civil servants. We barely scratch the surface of their “legends”, their inner lives which are now far more open to change and growth than they could have imagined when they took on this dangerous mission.

Their raw, re-opened futures were what most tantalized me at the series’ close. I sensed that Don sees more possibilities for the team, too. Their country could surely make further good use of them in rapidly changing 1990s Britain.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 (2026)

In theaters

Twenty years is a long time. Or is it? That’s the question this sequel to the 2006 original invites us to tease out. We’re back at glossy Runway magazine, the once powerful publication that ruled the world of fashion.

Its imperious editor in chief Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) still runs the place like an empress who in days gone by could send a fashion trend up in smoke with the lift of an eyebrow.

But times have changed. Those hefty fashion magazines one once picked up at newsstands that were packed with shimmering ads and photos of slinky models are almost entirely a thing of the past.

Virtually every publication is now online, and Runway is in that competitive scramble for clicks. Worldwide internet visibility also means that missteps can go viral in seconds, and Miranda has stumbled into a potentially ruinous one.

The magazine has featured a fashion line that creates garments in third-world sweatshops. The scandal is seriously threatening the magazine’s sway and influence.

Enter Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway), the one-time Runway editorial assistant who idolized Miranda. The editor in chief nonetheless fired her 20 years ago for not quite understanding fashion’s allure.

Indeed, Andy has gone in a different direction. She’s become a distinguished globe-trotting investigative journalist.

But as the movie opens, we see her accepting a prestigious award, only to have her phone light up with a text message that she and her colleagues at the magazine where she works have all been fired.

Media consolidation has struck. Fortunately for Andy, Irv (Tibor Feldman), the head of Runway’s conglomerate holding company, admires her chutzpa. Without Miranda’s knowledge, Irv hires Andy to help stem the magazine’s bleeding.

Andy needs a job. Miranda grudgingly admits she could use help. Their alliance resumes, shakily. Miranda is betting Andy won’t be needed for long.

Miranda the survivor still has cards to play. Irv has promised he’ll soon promote her to global overseer of all the company’s publications, not just Runway.

But at this critical juncture Miranda has to pivot carefully. More than 20% of Runway’s ad revenue comes from that fashion temple Dior, and who now heads it but Emily (Emily Blunt), another former assistant Miranda underestimated.

And the screenwriter, Aline McKenna, who also wrote the original, isn’t done with media-driven twists.

Maneuvering and double crosses ensue, and the plot contrivances threaten to overwhelm the “human interest”, which I’ll admit feels like a quaint notion to introduce into a story propelled by backbiting and blind ambition.

Yet is the fashion industry consumed by cutthroat careerism? Not entirely, which is why the movie surprised and delighted me. This is a reunion aimed at commercial success, of course. The main players have returned, but, coolly strategic as they all remain, cattiness and vindictiveness don’t predominate.

The action moves to Milan and a splashy fashion show, and when Miranda is confronted with what could be a fatal challenge there, even she confesses that she may be tiring of the rat race.

Not that she doesn’t want to come out on top. This is still Miranda the high priestess of fashion’s future. From the pinnacle of steering Runway, she’s been so powerful as to seem the industry’s guarantor, and that’s a stronghold she isn’t ready to surrender.

But now she’s got to drop back down to bare-knuckle infighting in order to survive, and to do that, she admits she needs comrades in a way she hasn’t before.

Streep plays Miranda this time not simply as the regal boss lady we remember who’s not to be trifled with. That’s still true. But the petty snappishness, the offhand rudeness of tossing her coat down to be picked up by underlings, is gone.

And when, under the new regime’s belt-tightening, she has to fly to Milan in a middle seat in coach (!) Streep seizes the comic moment. This is Miranda down but not out, with a flexibility, a rolling with the punches, the first movie never let us even imagine.

Similarly, Andy is beyond proving herself, so we know she has options, and she sticks by Miranda out of a carefully won respect. Both women see Runway under possibly fatal attack and believe there’s more at stake for them than just brand supremacy.

The magazine is now the place where they’re almost equals. Andy no longer truckles to Miranda. Can they now genuinely admire each other? That’s a question the first movie only flirted with.

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Stanley Tucci’s Nigel is the same steadfast co-conspirator to Miranda he was in the first movie. But it’s long past time Miranda acknowledged him as the soul of Runway. She runs the show, but he’s the one who keeps the magazine on course, true to the mission Miranda believes only she sets out.

He’s a real wizard behind the curtain, not a fake one. He’s Miranda’s friend and protector, and Tucci both softens and strengthens his standing as the indispensable force in Miranda’s life.

It’s also intriguing to see Emily return as a very smart woman who lacks something she can’t quite put her finger on that both Miranda and Andy possess.

They thrive on the game itself even more than winning, the zest of power playing more than the ups and down. That’s a satisfaction, a Zenlike tranquility, Emily has yet to step into.

Director David Frankel is also back, and he reprises the high gloss of the original. This is a supremely pretty movie, with clothes so fierce the women seem not just to wear them but to live up to them.

Costumer Molly Rogers keeps the looks power-packed but sleekly wearable; not a stitch feels out of place, yet no one looks unprepared to aim a cutting remark.

Frankel lets these clothing warriors move in a measured, unhurried strut. The thrill in watching them comes from a don’t-mess-with-me force that soothes the eye with silky-to-the-touch glamor.

Beauty here is the honey trap any woman can deploy, and the movie makes these high-powered women feel not just relatable but somehow indestructible.

They’re not doing actual harm nearly as much as they’re striving for – just imagine! – “integrity” in a world apparently with nothing on its mind but shiny surfaces.

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Florian Ballhaus returns as cinematographer, and he makes the swishing beauty of gowns feel like gauntlets thrown down. Tell me I’m not beautiful, I dare you, woman after woman here suggests, not just with her clothes but with her attitude.

This swirling sense of beauty as both lure and strategy is what keeps the movie watchable. It’s always an eyeful.

Miranda in her corner office, and her quietly but firmly uttering a dismissive Go, once she’s issued a command, lets us know that behind true glamor she has an indefatigable will.

For such women, authority is beauty. They devote their lives to making sure the two are never separated.

By the end of the movie, I was just a bit scared of the women in it. I can’t recall a movie that’s left me with exactly that sort of bracing afterglow. I was bedeviled one more time.

Michael (2026)

In theaters

I’ve never forgiven Michael Jackson. From the moment I learned of his sickening sexual abuse of young boys, I cut him off from all my charity.

I believe we all have a choice to bestow benevolence, but violators of children get no mercy from me.

So how do I deal with this new biopic covering Michael’s early years up to 1988, when he was 30? As I sat down in the theater, by gritting my teeth.

The movie starts at the Jackson family home in Gary, Indiana in 1966, when Michael was 8 years old. I couldn’t help remembering that Michael’s pattern of child abuse started a bit more than 20 years later, at the end of the 1980s.

Would the movie get near there, dare to show us the poison kiss, the flowering of evil?

Apparently, the filmmakers tried. Some scenes were shot – and then cut – allegedly because of a legal snafu involving Michael Jackson’s estate and one of his accusers.

Even knowing that, I kept my teeth gritted, ready to brush off the movie as a “nostalgic” whitewashing cash grab.

But five minutes in, my jaw stopped clenching and my mind started warming up. One reason: I was raised in a Chicago suburb only 40 miles west of Gary, so the struggles of a working-class Black family pulled me in.

The director, Antoine Fuqua, is best known for blazing action sequences (Training Day, The Equalizer Trio), but here his touch for intimate family scenes is deft enough for us to understand the Jackson family’s strained finances and its determination to move up.

Yet for all the esprit Fuqua quietly reveals among the five Jackson brothers under the eye of their watchful mother Katherine (Nia Long), John Logan’s rather conventional script can’t kick in without a “villain”.

That’s the sullen, angry patriarch Joseph Jackson (Colman Domingo), a steel mill worker bent on lifting his family out of the financial dregs.

He’s molded his five musically talented sons into a quintet, with Michael, the youngest, providing shimmering lead vocals.

We see Joseph arduously rehearse the boys, who are still schoolchildren, late into the night. He brooks no resistance and savagely wields his belt on the fragile Michael when the boy pleads that he’s tired.

Joe’s pitiless driving of his sons has by now become sad Jackson family lore, and it needed to be shown here.

But Logan overstresses its impact. The struggle between the uniquely gifted Michael – with an uncannily piercing, soulful voice at such a young age – and his tyrannical father drives the entire movie. (The child Michael is movingly acted by Juliano Valdi.)

The family dynamics were actually more complicated. Joseph’s cruelty haunted his offspring for decades. They’ve said as much.

But ironically, Joseph also provided his children with a professional ballast, a gravity about what they were attempting. That sense of mission pushed the group to polish their act and evince a soft-spoken dignity. In television interviews, these poor but poised kids came across as sober and solidly committed.

That matters. In 1967, when Motown’s major talent scout Suzanne de Passe (Laura Harrier) “discovers” the Jackson 5 and the phenomenal young singer Michael in Chicago’s Regal Theatre, the boys from Gary are more than a cute package.

We’ve seen them craftily cover songs by the funkily rhythmic Sly and the Family Stone on small stages and at county fairs. And we’ve seen Michael and his brothers carefully watch on television to master the fleet, gliding footwork of James Brown.

All of which signals that when de Passe brings the Jackson 5 to Motown headquarters in Los Angeles in 1969, she presents the label’s fabled founder, Barry Gordy (Larenz Tate), with a tested ensemble. At that point Gordy’s task was to build them up for wide commercial consumption.

Joseph had done a lot of the musical groundwork. But in Domingo’s undeniably skillful, glowering, Svengali-like performance, we mostly see an oily, violent manipulator.

We have no trouble guessing where the script is headed: How will Michael escape the clutches of his harsh parent and manager?

Fortunately, portraying the teenage and young adult Michael is the singer’s nephew Jaafar Jackson (son of Jermaine Jackson). In his first movie role, he has a screen luminescence that draws us into this weirdly isolated young man’s psyche.

Bright-eyed, naively childlike in his curiosity, Jaafar’s Michael seems too inward-turning to become a huge star, a paradox we in the public picked up on, without exactly knowing what to make of it.

Soft spoken Michael was so diffident and shy, his singing and dancing seemed to erupt from a secret source; as a performer, he was powerful yet oddly unassuming, almost modest.

He didn’t have Mick Jagger’s prancing swagger or Prince’s prowling omni-sexual voraciousness.

Instead, he had a boyish exuberance and a sensual playfulness that could be enticing but was never manipulative; he could be seductive but, bottom line, he was sweet.

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We see here what we’ve read about and stared at, dumbstruck – Michael consumed by affection for his pets, which he insisted were his “friends”: a snake, a rat, a llama, a giraffe and, most often photographed, Bubbles the chimpanzee.

These were Michael’s true companions, along with the toys, games and children’s books he surrounded himself with. He reads aloud to Bubbles from his favorite children’s book, the story of Peter Pan, illustrated with a menacing Captain Hook (labeled by Michael with a magic-marker, “Joseph”).

These scenes are meticulously shot in lavish detail, and for that reason feel disturbingly creepy. The filmmakers deserve credit for showing us Michael’s extreme isolation, which his family abetted and did little to correct.

We may not get to see Michael the incipient molester, but its genesis is here, and we can intuit a connection, even if the movie doesn’t pursue it.

So, what do we get instead? Michael the businessman and pop superstar. And here’s where the movie becomes an exhilarating piece of entertainment.

Fuqua has decided to saturate us with Michael pulling off some of the most electrifying singing and dancing anyone had ever seen. Not only does Michael have the moves, the director and his cinematographer, Dion Beebe, do, too.

First, the Jackson 5 come off as sleek musical pros across decades. During the years after Michael’s meteoric rise, when Joseph forces the brothers to join Michael in the Victory Tour, their performing glistens.

On stage at least, it seems the Jackson family never lost its cohesion and luster. The movie clearly aims to make sure we don’t overlook that.

I doubt many think of Fuqua as an actor’s director, but he shows some real finesse with Jaafar here.

The nephew is the most startling kind of prodigy. At age 29, he’s no kid, but in his first movie mostly what he’s got going for him — and draws on for his power — is his sheer zeal to play Michael.

Michael is a familiar cultural presence by now, deeply ingrained, 17 years after his death. But no one, lovers or haters, has let him die even for a moment.

Jaafar’s openness to what might be – his uninhibited willingness to go wherever a troubled character’s situation might lead — marks him as a performer to watch.

Our cynical or repelled views of Michael can’t pierce or derail Jaafar’s eagerness to re-state the case for the dazzling singer and dancer Michael disciplined himself to be.

In the music performance scenes, Jaafar isn’t pushed or propelled by the movie’s agenda. He takes it over. Fuqua and Beebe are wise enough to frame him and let him soar.

In the first selection from Michael’s solo career, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough”, from Off the Wall (1979), character and song fuse, as in a Broadway musical.

It’s Michael who won’t stop until he gets the satisfaction his music can bring. It’s not just a song, it’s a seizure of power. We hear it even if Joseph refused to.

But mostly it’s so eerie because it announces that Jaafar the performer doesn’t want to stop digging into Michael’s drive for stardom.

It’s Jaafar we’re watching score a breakthrough, not just Michael. Most won’t draw a comparison to Streisand’s Fanny Brice on the “I’m the Greatest Star” number in Funny Girl, but I passionately do.

This musical arc, far more than Joseph’s efforts to co-opt Michael’s career, propels the movie forward.

In “Beat It” we see re-enacted real events, when Michael worked with L.A. street dancers, including some gang members, to shape the rhythm of the number’s dancing, its “flow,” with dancers moving together like a school of fish, as Michael describes it.

That fluid blend of bodies weaving vertically across the floor is the signature look of the classic “Beat It” video, which went viral on MTV.

Here we see it born, and watch Michael not just as dancer but as dance captain, inspiring the desire to dance not just in his LA. onscreen collaborators but, as it turned out, almost anyone who watched the video.

The night the macabre “Thriller” video was shot outdoors is brought to throbbing life, with the music crackling on the soundtrack.

Then there’s the legendary night when he performed “Billie Jean”, solo, across an enormous stage, danced on his toes and moon walked into history.

What took my breath away was an inspired, surprisingly hushed, melodic, almost dreamlike performance of “Human Nature” on another large stage with beams of light on both sides of Michael seeming almost to lift him up.

His ballad-pace delivery and slow dancing made the song bigger and more erotic than the lilting record. I understood all over again why when Miles Davis first heard Michael sing the song, the jazz trumpeter immediately decided to record it. There’s no doubt that Michael could reach across genres.

These performances, including the final, swift, pounding rendition of “Bad”, lift this halting semi-biopic onto a higher level of performance art.

And introduce Jaafar Jackson to the worlds of music and dance as a fresh face with instincts bred in the bone, impossible to fake. He’s a Jackson all right. And just may be opening up the franchise to a whole new chapter.

TV: Trevor Noah: Joy in the Trenches (2026)

Streaming on Netflix

How do you like your comedy? Bombastic? Outrageous? Mind-bending? You’re in the wrong spot.

You’ll need to settle into an exploratory mindset to appreciate Trevor Noah’s quietly devastating 68-minute stand-up special before a live audience at Washington, D.C.’s Warner Theatre.

You can be woke as you watch. Or not. Either way, Trevor will provoke you. But if, understandably, during the distressing times we’re living through your more or less steady state is absolutely livid, then Trevor’s not entirely on your wavelength.

He means that word “joy” in the subtitle. And he may be right to suggest that we all need to be reminded of it.

However, the stance of “worried citizen” he adopts from the start controls most of the narratives he spins, so you’ll need to strap on a political mindset.

Contemporary Washington seems to breathe through the theater’s walls as Noah cracks wise, tickling us and trying to shake us up at the same time.

It feels as if we’re being told a tale from within a bunker when he begins by recounting what happened on his arrival in Boston after hosting the 2025 Grammy Awards.

As he walked through the airport, he was puzzled as fans gave him fervid thumbs up and boosted him with words of support: Trevor, fight! You’ve got this, man! You’ve got this! His phone buzzed violently. Friends frantically messaged: Trevor, are you okay?

What was going on? He shortly learned why so many were alarmed. They’d seen right after the Grammy ceremony that Trump had posted on Truth Social a furious response to a joke Trevor made to the Grammy audience.

It was an offhand jibe the president completely misunderstood. An enraged POTUS vowed to sue the “poor, pathetic, talentless dope Noah”.

The comedian admits that Trump’s vitriol feels more serious when you’re the target. But in mocking an out-of-control authoritarian, Noah recreates with hilarious accuracy the vocal timbre and loony “thinking” of the man we all know can turn on anyone at any moment.

Undaunted, the comedian declares he’s not afraid of Trump. He’s been on a lifelong journey that shaped his faith in America long before he knew anything about Trump.

During his seven years hosting The Daily Show he’d sometimes invoked his South African roots. He does it again here with warmth and explosive comic timing.

He recalls how as a young boy he’d loved watching alien invasion movies alongside his beloved mother, who made a big bowl of popcorn they shared as they pondered the mystery of aliens landing on Earth.

Why did they never land in Africa, 10-year-old Trevor wondered. Because, he came to believe, they felt sorry for Africans, seeing that their homes and property had already been devastated by — Europe.

Noah gives colonialism a swift kick with childish wonder and giggles. He makes a telling historical point but does it from his perspective as a young boy, deftly, not meanly, making sure the critique stings.

He ends his laughing tirade with: “Take that, Great Britain. #NeverForget.” He won’t back away from history, but he doesn’t let it permanently depress him, either.

His recreation of spaceships landing and their inhabitants speaking to terrified Earthlings makes for high comedy. Noah’s vocal skills are impeccable.

He transforms the microphone into a wide-spectrum sound board, wrapping it in his fist, making his voice “spacey”, sending otherworldly vibrations booming across the theater.

These showy theatrics are tied to a coolly calibrated stage presence. He’s alone for the entire set, uses no props besides the mic and only stops now and again to sip from a bottle of water.

We’re never confused when he twists and pivots his body for laughs. He’s agile, but his every subtle move is bought and paid for. There’s no blurring of his intentions to elicit whichever chuckle or gasp he wants to draw from us.

As he slowly strides back and forth, or darts like a dervish, he seems to issue an unspoken plea: Are you up for this? I’m going places and I need you to come along with me.

And we increasingly realize he does indeed mean “come along”, not just “laugh along”.

This collaboration with the audience takes its riskiest, funniest form when the comedian recounts a visit, one of many he’s made in the last few years, to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in D.C.

He’s transfixed yet again by the site’s vast panoply of Black history, from 17th century slavery all the way to — this gets a big laugh — Oprah. He stops to meet up with Harriet Tubman in the antebellum South and acknowledges that had he been a slave he would have been afraid to follow Harriet onto the Underground Railroad.

Noah sets himself up for the butt of his own jokes — the truckling slave too cowardly to flee. As Trevor artfully adopts her voice, a disgusted Harriet repudiates him: “You light skins is all alike.”

Somehow, while recounting the horrors of enslavement he gets us to laugh and thereby directly face its pain. It’s a comic paradox — ghastliness salted with humor — that only a thoughtful observer of moral ambiguity could pull off.

And he isn’t done with Black overcoming. He deliciously invokes the precise Black pastoral vocal cadences of Martin Luther King, Jr. Again, he’s awed by and respectful of the heroic Dr. King but not above poking kindhearted fun at the man.

Noah is fully aware here of how the ways we view and use historical figures can mutate over time.

And he’s so secure in this understanding that he can mock the stentorian solemnity of King’s I have a dream speech more than 60 years later while completely preserving and cherishing the martyr who spoke those inspiring words.

King’s time in jail, the beatings he underwent, as well as the character assassination waged against him by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI get a full airing. Yet we end up laughing because not all civil rights gains — like finally getting to eat tasteless white food — seem quite worth the sacrifices King asked of his followers.

Noah here implicitly invokes W.E.B. DuBois’s famous “double consciousness”, that is, the survival mechanisms Blacks had to deploy to preserve their human complexity as whites so assiduously tried to strip them of it.

The comic has thoughtfully absorbed the dregs of a painful history, and that frees him, and us — even with a bitter aftertaste in our mouths — to laugh about it.

He moves away from the fateful and consequential to end the set on a shockingly funny, and revealing, personal note.

It’s a rollicking monologue on his luckless efforts to find a stable relationship. I won’t spoil it but simply say it kept me on the edge of my seat gasping and laughing.

It’s so swiftly, merrily delivered, with a head-snapping, achingly funny final twist, that it has to be heard and witnessed to be appreciated.

I can’t recall seeing a comedian talk about sex with absolutely no coarse language yet in such piercing, uproarious detail.

Who will you be when history calls? Noah returns to that nagging question throughout his set and lets it linger in the audience’s mind.

For all the laughs he gets, he’s speaking here not just as a comic but a man of his time.

He’ll leave you laughing, but you’ll know you’ve been somewhere, that is, to places and moments we dare not look away from within this, our common roiling national moment.

The Drama (2026)

In theaters

You’ve been there. Sitting with friends, everyone letting their hair down, everyone confessing to “bad” stories from their pasts. Gross! Weird! Insane! Come the reactions.

Here, in an American home around a dining table, among four 30-something professionals, Emma (Zendaya) comes up with a doozy. (Vital spoilers ahead.)

In her mid-teens she’d contemplated carrying off a school shooting. The bloody, headline-grabbing kind, meticulously planned, conducted with a powerful rifle sure to leave some students and faculty dead.

She never actually did it, but there it was: she kind of, sort of, maybe actually meant to.

Charlie (Robert Pattinson), who’s British, is taken aback but puts Emma’s fantasy down to America’s wildly obsessive gun culture.

Their married friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim) react with more alarm. Mike thinks that whatever brought such bloody imagining into Emma’s upbringing could use a hard look from a psychiatrist.

Rachel is utterly horrified. She believes Emma continues to harbor dangerous impulses that even now could wreak havoc. Such tendencies, Rachel angrily charges, never truly die.

This wine-fueled nighttime conversation can’t easily be set aside. As it happens Emma and Charlie are to be married within the week. Mike is Best Man; Rachel is Matron of Honor.

All four are suddenly on guard, with the “happy” ceremony only days away.

This glossy, beautifully shot urban fantasia claims to probe the underbelly of contemporary societal angst but ends up only scratching a vague itch.

It tries to scare us with dark flashbacks into Emma’s teenage past. A nerd, she was bullied by schoolmates. And her father, a military veteran, trained her in handling powerful weapons.

His guidance erred a bit once when Emma fired a rifle holding it too close to her face. She permanently lost hearing in one ear.

That partially crippling malady still haunts her. We’re shown a gun-toting young Emma filming videos of herself spewing murderous, hateful rhetoric.

But how authentic is the “hatred” across her face? Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli blurs the impression in his highly selective script. And his rapid-fire editing doesn’t let us get a grip on the actual intentions behind the young Emma’s simmering rage.

Are we seeing how the troubled young girl actually spoke and behaved, or only cruel fantasies she concocted at the time — or in the years since? — to make herself seem poised to commit deadly violence?

This uncertainty feels real enough to Charlie to infect his mind, filling him with an expanding dread. He grows suspicious of Emma’s slightest shifts in mood. Could she still be capable of violence?

Her apparently innocent behavior is suddenly loaded with malicious portent. Is she holding a kitchen knife simply to chop fruit — or wielding it to possibly stab him?

The air of menace deepens. Warily circling one another, the pair consider calling off the marriage.

There may be an intriguing notion here about how the mind can play tricks when our intentions are good, even loving.

But there’s not much actual suspense here — the undercurrent is too wispy. And while the writing has some sharp exchanges, it’s not revelatory. These people have stories but don’t seem to have full-fledged lives.

I never caught what Emma or Charlie do for a living. They share a handsome duplex apartment with a spiral staircase, but how do they pay for it?

Crucially, they don’t seem to have any passions, beliefs or aspirations that would mitigate all this churned up anxiety about long-ago potential violence.

Borgli pumps up the spookiness, but it suggests a lurking doom that’s hard to believe in. Tight shots and jarring camera angles keep us locked on Emma and Charlie’s panic.

But we never find out what made them commit to one another in the first place. Or why they want to share the rest of their lives.

Is Emma actually a menace waiting to strike or simply a young woman uneasy about her impending marriage to a man she may genuinely care for?

Is Charlie’s love for her — he expresses it convincingly — strong enough to get them past this unwelcome revelation about a piece of Emma’s past?

And it’s only a piece. The movie never tells us what Emma wants from the life ahead of her, or if she’s capable of putting the past in perspective and free herself from its shackles.

This is a stage in everyone’s growing up. But ensnaring the characters in adolescent anxieties is Borgli’s notion of “drama”.

Indeed, that’s the word he lets the four main characters repeatedly use to turn a sudden revelation into an impasse.

There’s meticulous performing here that deserves praise. I call it “performing”, though, rather than simply “acting” because Zendaya and Pattinson in particular fall prey to Borgli’s sensationalism.

They both do “fine” work here, by which I mean their speech and gestures are unfailingly sharp and specific.

By now they’re both secure professionals in front of the camera, and they’re never the least bit awkward.

Emma and Charlie, however, don’t ring true enough. They meet cute and never seem to grow a bond deep enough for us to genuinely worry over.

Their future, as the wedding arrives and friends and family begin to wonder if they can survive as a couple, teeters on the brink.

That’s not drama. It’s manipulation. When impressively packaged as it is here, it’s meant to pass for a searching examination of souls in torment.

But it substitutes shock for insight, calls on us to feel sorry for people who may not have done anything so terribly wrong at all.

Nevertheless, stick around for the final scene. Zendaya and Pattinson with minimal gestures and only a few lines suddenly put before us a couple who just might have the courage to reach out to one another.

Both are virtually friendless by then, and both astonished by their raw, naked vulnerability.

It’s a thrilling moment that I doubted the movie could get to. But there we had it, at last. Two people trembling at the terror simmering just below the surface of their lives.

Hamlet (2025)

In theaters (limited); opens wide April 10

In Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, when the Ghost of Hamlet’s father first appears in the inky middle of the night on Elsinore’s castle battlement, he’s not just stealthy. He remains eerily silent.

The apparition refuses to speak not just to the castle’s night watchmen but to young Hamlet’s dear friend Horatio, who demands the ghost identify himself.

To no avail. Without a word, the wraith fretfully slinks away. Horatio declares: [I]t started like a guilty thing/Upon a fearful summons.

Those two words – guilty thing – kept coming back to me as I watched this tumultuous, rageful modern treatment of Shakespeare’s classic. Despite the fact that those two loaded words aren’t heard here, and Horatio is missing entirely.

Director Aneil Karia (The Long Goodbye, 2020) and screenwriter Michael Lesslie have taken a radical approach, setting the story within contemporary Britain’s South Asian community. But they’ve kept the play’s dramatic kernel intact and ravaging.

We first see Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) and other mourners at his father’s cremation. As the casket is enveloped in flames, melancholy seizes the young prince and never leaves him.

But why is he a prince and what is he now heir to? His late father and his uncle Claudius (Art Malik) have presided together over a vast real estate empire. The enormous, tastefully sumptuous white mansion Claudius and Hamlet’s mother Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha) live in is grand enough to suggest royalty.

Somehow calling Claudius “King”, now that he’s assumed the “throne”, and Gertrude, his new wife, “Queen”, doesn’t sound odd. Nor does it feel out of place when assembled well-wishers address both Claudius and Hamlet as “My lord.”

The polished, effortlessly dignified way the actors carry themselves easily transports us into an aura, an atmosphere, where entitlement and legacy loom large.

This is forcefully underscored by the costumer (Nirage Mirage), production designer (Chris Oddy) and the art and set decorators (Adam Marshall, James Turner and Hannah Spice).

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Their work is both culturally specific and transfixing. Resplendent Indian coats and saris suggest refinement and unabashed ethnic pride. We enter into these troubled characters’ lives gracefully, if uneasily.

Claudius gets a grand entrance accompanied by a powerful drum and instrument ensemble that performs with ringing Indian flair. They march with stately decorum through London toward the mansion, where Claudius’s consolidation of power after his brother’s death is being officially celebrated.

It’s a kind of coronation. Of course, Claudius is not just assuming the “throne”, he’s poisonously reveling in his marriage to his brother’s widow. The screenplay boldly enfolds these dangerous contradictions within vibrant Hindu culture – traditional Indian weddings are lavish affairs spanning several days.

In this adaptation, the wedding of Claudius and Gertrude isn’t exactly complete yet. It’s ongoing, and the overflowing food, drink, dance and music intensify to a maddening sybaritic pitch.

Which viscerally taunts and galls young Hamlet. When for a moment he steps away from the festivities, he’s drawn by a strange noise to a rooftop.

Hamlet (Riz Ahmed) and Claudius (Art Malik) remembering Hamlet’s father differently

There, in the scene we’ve been waiting for, he beholds the ghost of his father (Avijit Dutt). Terrified, the grieving son wonders what this thrilling, ominous presence could want from him.

In a sepulchral voice, delivered (with subtitles) in an Indian regional dialect, Hamlet’s father reveals how Claudius murdered him and demands that young Hamlet avenge the crime.

Here’s where that phrase guilty thing first came back to me. The Ghost is guilty, that is, burdened, by his message and the task he demands of his son (he was also, as his son reminds us, an imperfect man).

Young Hamlet, in turn, is now “guilty”, also burdened with the charge to commit a murder to avenge a prior murder, to become too much like the very man, Claudius, he despises.

The burning light in Ahmed’s eyes for the rest of the relentless tragedy never leaves him. It grows more piercing as his determination intensifies and his mind zeroes in on what he must do.

During the crucial scene when the Player King and his troupe re-enact the royal murder as the guests and a petrified Claudius look on, Ahmed goes full bore.

The action is staged in full Indian ceremonial grandeur, with whirling dancers, multicolored strobe lighting and gorgeously seductive costumes. It’s the movie’s visual highpoint and Maxwell Sterling’s score, pungent and pulsing throughout, reaches its peak here.

As Shakespeare has indicated, and Hamlet has warned, the grieving prince will put on “an antic disposition” and, covering his head with a splendidly colorful scarf, Ahmed’s Hamlet mocks the whole gathering, threatening in a nasty singsong voice to topple a kingdom.

The actor grows scarier, more openly bloodthirsty, from here on, overtaken by a full, wounding Shakespearean fever.

As in the original, his Hamlet is both cowardly, since he hesitates to kill a King (the very transgression his uncle has committed) and at the same time licentiously, bloodily wicked, when he all but offhandedly murders the obsequious Polonius (Timothy Spall).

The production makes doom feel unstoppable. We fully absorb Gertrude coming unhinged as she realizes what her new marriage has unleashed in her grieving son.

Sheeba Chaddha gives a mournful and a sensuously ripe performance. She reacts to Hamlet’s “madness” and his flailing violence with both terror and what looks like genuine maternal astonishment.

Sheeba Chaddha’s Gertrude is slowly pulled apart as a troubled mother, widow and Queen

Malik as Claudius is both suave and menacing, every inch the manipulator desperately counting on not being exposed.

His Claudius looks like he’s committed an outrage and wonders, deep in his wretched psyche, if he’s going to get away with it. Malik, fittingly stately and haughty, makes it clear Claudius knows young Hamlet is closing in on him.

The telescoping of the action sometimes pushes credulity. But it doesn’t feel as though any major tropes have been left behind. The gathering demise of six people takes on a fully realized power; vital lives are overthrown by a kind of cruelly intertwined fate.

Still, there are regrettable truncations. No Alas, poor Yorick speech. Also, I badly missed Horatio, especially his moving lines at the close.

Some of his lines are given to Ophelia (Marfydd Clark), which is jarring at first, but since they both love Hamlet, the trade-off doesn’t feel entirely mismanaged. Clark offers a lovely rendition of the callously ill-used Ophelia.

I wish her descent into madness had been laid out more fully. And her deeply affectionate bond to her loyal brother Laertes (a fine Joe Alwyn) isn’t quite as explicit at it needs to be.

These slight misjudgments aside, Ahmed as Hamlet pulls us through. He keeps the whole careening action rigidly within the prince’s focus, pinned and revealed by his searching mind and eye.

Ingeniously, Lesslie in his script makes the crucial decision to keep the story told entirely from Hamlet’s point of view. No Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, no grave digger. The artfully foreshortened plot keeps us locked into Hamlet’s feverish mind. The runtime is two hours, and the action never lags.

Which means Ahmed is able to take command, and he never cedes it. You feel you really don’t know what this deeply despondent, driven young man is capable of until each shattering confrontation — with his mother, Ophelia, Laertes and finally the murderer Claudius — shows us how profoundly shaken he is.

Irretrievably so. We can see he’s not going to come back from the haunted bloodied space he’s carved – blasted – out for himself.

Ahmed does major work here, first-rate from the opening to the devastating, dark, haunting final scene.

His acting has the thrust and command of Kenneth Branagh’s blazing performance as the prince in Hamlet (1996), a massive production which unfolded in Czarist Russia. Branagh also directed, and that was another Hamlet set outside a Renaissance time frame. He notably used the play’s full text.

But the elisions here don’t put his and Ahmed’s performances on different levels. Both actors reach the furious pitch that makes calamity feel both dreadful and unstoppable.

This exhilarating production may give audiences the kind of jolt of unadulterated passion we rarely see on screen these days. Contemporary times feel increasingly out of joint, though we hesitate to utter Shakespeare’s exact words.

This movie will bring them back to you. Ahmed and his collaborators, in their attempt to rattle our sleeping consciences, have scored a hit, a palpable hit!

Project Hail Mary (2026)

In theaters

We’re not alone. That spooky/tantalizing premise is what most science fiction turns on. Even real-world astrophysicists have asked if the universe isn’t too vast and complex to have spawned only our puny species on a tiny planet circling a remote star.

They also wonder how we earthlings might measure up if called on to match wits – or join forces – with an alien species.

This movie bets heavily, and a little too sweetly, that we humans have it in us. Based on a novel of the same name by Andy Weir (who also wrote the novel The Martian), it puts inter-species cooperation to a dire test.

The script by Drew Goddard (who also adapted The Martian to the screen for director Ridley Scott) throws earthlings and an alien species into co-equal jeopardy. Can humans make nice with aliens when we face a common threat?

The problem facing us humans is ominous. Multiple worried astrobiologists warn that alien microbes called Astrophage (ancient Greek for “star eater”) are colonizing our sun and travelling from there to Venus to breed.

As Astrophage metastasizes, the microbes dim the sun’s light, which over a mere decade or two will inexorably, irreversibly, freeze vast portions of Earth.

The noxious microbes come from Tau Ceti, a star 12 light-years from Earth. Tasked with traveling there on a mammoth spaceship to disable the microbes at their source is a team of three astronauts.

One of them is Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), who holds a PhD in molecular biology but teaches in middle school since he was banished from academia for his unorthodox views. We gradually piece together how he tumbled, or was shoved, into this galactic crisis.

When the movie opens, we meet him already in the middle of the space venture, or is it actually nearing its catastrophic end? Thickly bearded with long hair, he awakens from a cryogenic sleep as the spaceship approaches Tau Ceti. Baffled and terrified, he doesn’t know at first where he is or why he’s on the ship.

As he slowly grasps the mission he’s bound on, he makes the sad discovery that his two astronaut colleagues have died during the voyage.

He’s alone, and it takes him a while to sort matters out (also to shave and get a boyish, neatly trimmed haircut).

Little does he suspect that a human-to-alien hookup looms. Suddenly enveloping Grace’s ship, benignly but decisively, is a massive, much larger space vehicle made of long, spear-like gold lattices.

There’s a cabin at its center and inside it sits, like Grace, a lone survivor. It’s a creature made of rocks who’s mobile with flexible “arms and legs” that let him scamper about and mimic Grace’s movements.

Grace names him Rocky and brings him on board his ship. Before long, the new crewmates rig up a computerized device to speak to one another (Rocky is voiced by the production’s lead puppeteer, James Ortiz).

They grapple with their shared plight. Rocky comes from a star system 16 light-years from Earth. His planet, too, is threatened by the Astrophage, so they both need to ice those lethal microbes.

Grace’s scientific smarts and lucky guesses sync nicely with Rocky’s boundless curiosity and childlike, unrelenting questions.

They’re different life forms yet they somehow “think” alike. And begin to feel alike. They fondle, caress and excitedly rub up against one another. Before long, we’re in a buddy comedy, watching two forlorn, imperiled beings — cuddle.

I grew curmudgeonly in my seat. Scientific rigor and mortal danger began to be obscured by waves of moist-eyed “bonding”.

Get a grip, I silently pleaded with the screenwriter. I needed practical information to understand how Grace got dragooned into this suicidal one-way mission – his ship can’t return to Earth.

We find out in multiple flashbacks that an international task force of scientists, pulled together to save an Earth in peril, first gently, then forcefully, urged Grace to take on the assignment.

The persuader-in-chief is German project manager Eva Stratt (expertly played by Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall), who slyly coaxes Grace into accepting the noble challenge of saving our planet.

He’s too naive to outsmart the task force’s masters of realpolitik and thus seems the perfect patsy to take on a fateful mission. Isn’t scientific bravado enough to convince him? Never mind the irksome detail that he’ll never return home. History will crown him a world savior.

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This tortured, highly improbable “logic” is what passes here for a story arc, but I didn’t for a moment believe that nations of the world would smoothly unite to save our species. (Have the moviemakers noticed, for instance, how unevenly climate change is being addressed around the world today?)

This far-from-credible premise shifts – yanks – the movie’s tone into a cloying cuteness and its central relationship into a sappy bromance.

We can’t actually believe that world-saving goodwill would be effortlessly summoned. So, to pull us past that nagging doubt we’re immersed in “heartwarming” buddy-buddy smarm.

Gosling makes that easy enough to accept. He’s a watchable and likable performer, and so studiedly inoffensive an actor that it almost becomes believable that Grace has no family or other human connections.

He’s the story’s ideal candidate to sacrifice himself for humanity. Any religious parallels — shudder — don’t bear thinking about; it won’t do to dwell on his last name.

It turns out Grace’s decidedly secular adventure doesn’t rely on our being transfixed by the scientific method, even though the script crams in interstellar travel and microbiological “evidence”.

Grace becomes less a man out to prove himself than a master of ceremonies bringing on, in eye-popping procession, one visual flourish after another.

And they indeed dazzle. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller put on a laser-lit fairytale-like extravaganza. The outer space panoramas glisten and frighten at the same time. Cinematographer Greig Fraser combines piercing beauty with shivery unease, like the Brothers Grimm digitized.

I sometimes felt even more peril than Grace seemed to, so commanding is the movie’s vision of an unpredictable universe that can beckon one moment and terrify the next.

Production designer Charles Wood has created spacecraft and earthly command centers that give off an ominous sense of transgression. What do we humans imagine we’re doing in outer space, anyway? Visually, at least, the movie enticingly proposes that some form interstellar life is surely worth musing over.

But ultimately, a mind-expanding blend of beauty and terror, as in grand space epics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 2001: A Space Odyssey or Interstellar, is out of Lord and Miller’s range.

Finally, their movie is a gigantic, gorgeous knickknack. For all its technical proficiency, I felt more toyed with than spellbound. And at two and a half hours, it fiddled with my sense of wonder more than it intensified it.

Gosling, who’s game and charming throughout, is most credible as that middle school teacher we meet early on, delighted with introducing his students to the transformative power of sheer, startling, unlooked for discovery. I wanted to feel more of that.

Happy viewing!

Best Picture

WILL WIN: One Battle After Another

SHOULD WIN: One Battle After Another

Should Have Been a Contender: A House of Dynamite

Best Director

WILL WIN: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

SHOULD WIN: Paul Thomas Anderson, One Battle After Another

Should Have Been Contenders: Clint Bentley, Train Dreams; Kathryn Bigelow, A House of Dynamite

Best Actor

WILL WIN: Michael B. Jordan, Sinners

SHOULD WIN: Ethan Hawke, Blue Moon

Should Have Been Contenders: Joel Edgerton, Train Dreams; Russell Crowe, Nuremberg

Best Actress

WILL WIN: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

SHOULD WIN: Jessie Buckley, Hamnet

Should Have Been a Contender: Rebecca Ferguson, A House of Dynamite

Best Supporting Actor

WILL WIN: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

SHOULD WIN: Sean Penn, One Battle After Another

Should Have Been Contenders: William H. Macy, Train Dreams; A$AP Rocky, Highest 2 Lowest

Best Supporting Actress

WILL WIN: Amy Madigan, Weapons

SHOULD WIN: Teyana Taylor, One Battle After Another

Should Have Been Contenders: Chase Infiniti, One Battle After Another; Tânia Maria, The Secret Agent

Best Original Screenplay

WILL WIN: Sinners

SHOULD WIN: Blue Moon

Should Have Been a Contender: Eddington

Best Adapted Screenplay

WILL WIN: One Battle After Another

SHOULD WIN: One Battle After Another

Should Have Been a Contender: The Life of Chuck

Best Cinematography

WILL WIN: Sinners

SHOULD WIN: Train Dreams

Should Have Been a Contender: The History of Sound

Best Film Editing

WILL WIN: One Battle After Another

SHOULD WIN: One Battle After Another

Should Have Been a Contender: A House of Dynamite

Best Production Design

WILL WIN: Frankenstein

SHOULD WIN: Frankenstein

Should Have Been a Contender: A House of Dynamite

Best Costume Design

WILL WIN: Frankenstein

SHOULD WIN: Frankenstein

Should Have Been a Contender: Wicked: For Good

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

WILL WIN: Sinners

SHOULD WIN: Frankenstein

Should Have Been a Contender: Wicked: For Good

Best Casting

WILL WIN: Sinners

SHOULD WIN: Hamnet

Should Have Been a Contender: A House of Dynamite

Below, I’m only predicting what will win, not expressing any preference:

Best International Feature: The Secret Agent

Best Animated Feature: KPop Demon Hunters

Best Score: Sinners

Best Song: “I Lied to You” from Sinners

Best Sound: F1: The Movie

Best Visual Effects: Avatar: Fire and Ash

Hoppers (2026)

In theaters

Pixar has been creating distinctive, if not always successful, animated movies since 1995.

The studio’s stories, like all fantasies, force the audience to adopt an off-kilter world view, even when they originate in real places like Paris (Ratatouille) or a U.S. military post (Elio). Also, special ways of communicating take hold, so I was ready for a multi-sensory trip.

But a deep dive into the eco-system? In a kids’ movie? Could Pixar pull that off?

The answer is a heartening yes. The movie hooked me and the children in the audience where I saw it by keeping its central character, however much she’s transformed, relatable. And the animals she loves aren’t just cuddly; they’re also scrappy enough to root for.

Mabel Tanaka (voiced by Piper Curda) is a 19-year-old environmentalist in the fictional city of Beaverton. She’s determined to halt the construction, already underway, of a new super-highway, the brainchild of megalomaniac Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm).

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He’s betting that completion of the massive roadway will win him re-election. What does he care if leafy glades are being leveled and animals bulldozed out of their habitats?

We learn in flashback that Mabel’s fondness for all creatures great and small began in her youth when she beheld nature and absorbed its secrets under the guidance of her late beloved Grandma Tanaka (Karen Huie).

Today, years later, the pond where they contemplated shimmering greenery and becalmed creatures has inexplicably lost its animal life.

Why have all the creatures left? She tries to lure beavers back to re-build the causeway they fashioned from sticks and mud, but none of them return. Those enormous noisy land-moving vehicles must have scared them off.

Mabel may have a way to fix the problem, even though it’s spookily fantastical. Her college professor, Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy), has devised a system that can shift – or “hop” – human consciousness into animal-like robots.

Entering into a beaver robot, Mabel finds and hooks up with the nearby wildlife. Since she’s now an animal, too, they can talk to each other.

Mabel persuades their leader, Beaver King George (Bobby Moynihan), to fight to end the advancing construction of the highway. When Mayor Jerry gets wind of the revolt, he sets out to crush it.

King George summons the animal council to mobilize all the threatened creatures to band together to stop the superhighway’s advance and recover control of the pond.

This seemingly conventional notion of a populist struggle against raw power takes on a surprising urgency under director and co-writer Daniel Chong’s fleet pacing. He cranks up the action with an animal cry for justice.

Desperate to win votes, Jerry turns nasty. And with time running out, the animals risk splintering their united front by bickering over tactics.

But for all the roiling plot, we can’t miss the visual luster. The Pixar design team crafts Beaver Mabel and her animal comrades in stunning, nearly “realistic” detail. The animals’ coats have a texture that feels as if you could run your hand across them. The creatures move with the naturalistic rhythms of animals.

They speak, but the script by Chong and Jesse Andrews doesn’t anthropomorphize them. We feel their desire to regain safety, but also their demand that their domain be respected. The last thing they’re seeking is to become more like us.

The animal sentience we see stresses protecting their world, even if it means turning against humans, as humanity has so often trampled on them.

The Insect Queen is a lustrous ruby-red monarch coolly voiced by Meryl Streep (in her first movie since 2021’s Don’t Look Up).

Her Majesty isn’t the least bit inclined to show humans any mercy. On the contrary. “Squish them,” she and her insect cohort propose, aiming their sharpest venom at mean-spirited Mayor Jerry.

The movie gives animals cantankerous moods and a bitter rage that we can’t entirely grasp or sympathize with. Maybe, the script quietly suggests, without preaching, we’d do well to give them some space – and due deference.

Faced with colossal construction machinery and towering pillars of concrete, Mabel and her animal creature friends can look like a rather ragtag army.

But Pixar’s exquisite animation is filigreed and elegant in the least fretful way. Its creatures move with a distinctly animal grace. Birds and butterflies soar not just in patterned flocks but with a majestic, we-belong-here dignity.

Humans, including the “good” ones, are shown with twisted, anxious faces, hatching panicked, devious schemes. How can they possibly be trusted?

Even the sympathetic Mabel, inhabiting a beaver, registers shock in her eyes, showing she’s not quite on her animal friends’ wavelength. She can help them, but this is their fight to win on their own terms.

In other words, we human animals need to re-establish our connection with “wild” nature. Are we and the other animals actually so far apart? Don’t our habitats co-exist right next to each other?

Hoppers has a lot of fun bridging what at first seems an impossible chasm. Nature is our guiding hand, the first and most enduring key to what we’re made of. Let’s get hopping and move in sync, this delightful movie suggests, and not bite the timeless hand that feeds us all.

Pillion (2025)

In theaters

A “pillion” is the passenger seat of a motorcycle, and most viewers of this alarmingly unconventional movie will need to assume something like that position.

The movie features explicit gay sex in a dominant/submissive relationship, so some won’t climb on in the first place.

I found myself, as I think many gay or straight viewers will, not exactly watching writer-director Harry Lighton’s debut feature but, eventually, submitting to it. My choice of the word “submitting” isn’t coy. The picture is kind of new in my moviegoing experience. Lighton’s fearless but delicate touch roped me in.

Femme (2023), written and directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, brilliantly explored a comparable gay balance-of-power relationship, but both of its sexual combatants were tough and battle-ready.

That’s not true of Colin (Harry Melling), a painfully shy gay man who works as a parking ticket officer and lives with his parents in Bromley, south London.

Colin is 30ish yet still hasn’t settled on a future for himself. By the end of the movie, you’ll be left to decide how much fun it was to see Colin bloom as Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), the smooth, cool dominant biker, lays expert hands on him.

I was intrigued and moved. But everyone’s tolerance will vary.

Lighton, working from his own script, based on Adam Mars-Jones’ novella “Box Hill”, deepens the sexual and emotional stakes for Colin gradually. The director sometimes shocks, but he’s always aiming to enlighten.

The gay leather biker collective that Ray belongs to brooks no deviation when it comes to sex and the dynamics of tightly constricted relationships. You control, or you’re controlled. For Ray and his band of fellow bikers, “versatile” isn’t remotely a thing.

Which is music to Colin’s ears. He wants to expand his “aptitude for devotion”, though he hasn’t put that gift to any severe test yet.

He and Ray meet at a pub on Christmas Eve, where Colin is singing in a barbershop quartet, complete with straw boaters.

A leather biker group is part of the crowd, and Ray, zeroing in on Colin’s shy glances and melting, obviously fascinated eyes, leaves him a note telling him when and where they’re to meet the next night, never mind that it’s Christmas.

He isn’t asking. His note is an order. Be there. Ray (6’4”) is gym fit, lithe, and handsome. The instantly smitten Colin (5’9”) simply can’t refuse.

Domination paired with submission is a particular orientation within gay culture, and Colin yearns to dive in. He came out years ago. His parents support him, arrange dates for him (though none have gone in the direction Colin hoped for), and fully accept his identity.

When he tells them about his new relationship with the kind of dominant man he’s dreamed of, his dad Harry (Douglas Hodge) and mother Peggy (Lesley Sharp) are pleased and curious about Ray. But Colin needs to get the relationship on course before introductions are possible.

Ray imposes strict rules. Colin isn’t permitted to share his bed and is ordered to sleep on the floor. Colin delightedly complies. He happily shaves his head, cooks on command, and proudly wears in public a chain around his neck fastened with a padlock to which only Ray holds the key.

He keeps his job, but all his other hours are spent taking Ray’s every wish as a command. And no kissing allowed.

It’s close to nirvana. Falling asleep at night on a rug at the foot of Ray’s bed, Colin beams up at the moonlight streaming in the window and hugs himself in newfound bliss. Ray doesn’t woo: he dictates. He doesn’t promise affection: he provides unshakeable structure.

And with precisely the same mindset, the members of Ray’s biker cohort form a jolly, close-knit community. Doms and subs know their roles and, cheerfully, never deviate from them. The subs are available for the use and pleasure of any Dom, any time, from doing chores to performing whatever submissive sexual acts are on order.

At first Colin is a bit dismayed at being sexually “shared” — but when he sees that being used by another Dom is just how the community operates, he gladly submits.

At a group picnic, when Ray favors another sub, Colin is at first jealous and hurt, though he quickly hides those feelings. They shouldn’t matter. He’s at Ray’s mercy. Ray owes him no loyalty whatsoever.

This is uncomfortable territory that’s rarely depicted in movies, including in gay contexts. Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) and the Nicole Kidman-starrer Babygirl (2024) showed dominant/submissive dynamics in the straight world that gave audiences a kick that could be taken in stride. Kinky, but okay if that’s your thing.

Pillion is attempting something different. It isn’t turning rigid sex roles into lurid spectacle. It’s attempting something more challenging. It’s deploying explicit consensual sex as a route – unsurprisingly, it becomes a fraught one – to trust, affection, and maybe even tenderness.

It’s a step forward to see a movie where coming out isn’t the main event.

Colin’s mother Peggy is battling terminal cancer, and, facing an end to her life, she doesn’t hesitate to tell Ray she doesn’t like the way he talks to her son. She tells him to his face he’s a “creep”. Ray coldly retorts that his tie to Colin “isn’t for you to like,” and he doesn’t care what she thinks of him.

But Peggy’s pushback is surely what some watching are feeling, too. Ray is so locked into his dominant role that we can’t help wondering if this unyielding man is, in fact, Colin’s dream come true. Does this guy have any vulnerabilities?

Colin seems to stay silent on that question. It certainly appears he’s totally fine with the demands Ray imposes and the control he exerts.

But with all that “satisfaction”, maybe the greatest turn-on is still deciding who you want to be.

Harry Melling (who was Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter movies) astounded me in his first major adult role in The Pale Blue Eye (2022), playing the preternaturally sharp Edgar Allan Poe during his time as a West Point cadet in 1830.

Alongside Christian Bale’s jaded detective, he unraveled a spooky mystery with brisk, marvelous intuition. Melling was charmingly vain and winning as a hugely self-assured, still-to-be-discovered literary genius.

Nervous, fragile, guileless Colin is the exact opposite. He waits for every instruction, puts all his instincts on hold, and relies on someone else to give his life zest and meaning.

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The yearning Melling displays in his eyes captivates us even more than the bending and giving in he does for Ray. We see the person understanding himself more profoundly as he surrenders his will. Being under the boot of another is a viewpoint after all.

Indeed, we spot small cracks in Ray’s hyper-masculine “authority”. It seems a delightful inside joke that Lighton has Ray reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s massive novel My Struggle. Ray wants Colin to believe that he never struggles, can’t even conceive of it.

Trying desperately hard to please is what Colin is there to act out for Ray, so he can watch his sub pine for his master’s approval and never totally grant it. But we can’t help wondering exactly how much control is enough for Ray.

Lighton has pulled off something rare in a movie about sex, any sort of sex. The erotic encounters here are graphic but never drift into exploitation.

Power and submission remain choices. And the person who settles on which role they want to play, Dom or sub, still has responsibility for seizing what life, not just a lifestyle, may hold in store.

When does play become coercive and demeaning? Is there only so much ceding of control anyone can willingly do?

I love these questions the movie leaves us with. Lighton doesn’t offer definitive answers. The contradictions are never resolved. We see dominance insisted on, but consent is never off the table. Colin is nobody’s victim. Ray, the master role player, is nobody’s idol.

I was thrilled by Pillion’s openness. I admired the way it didn’t count on me to respect anyone in it, their choices, evasions, or failures of nerve. It’s explicit but with an undertow of romantic hope and readiness. Risks and rewards take different shapes for all of us. Live and let live. What a concept.

Midwinter Break (2026)

In theaters

Slivers from a marriage. That’s what I felt myself grasping in this portrait of a long-wed pair whose bond is quietly unraveling.

Scenes from a marriage would be an all-encompassing description. You have to look closely and listen carefully to spot the cracks in the weary union of Stella (Lesley Manville) and Gerry (Ciarán Hinds).

And learn how slivers can cut and sting. The Gilmores are a retired Irish couple who, some 40 years ago, as the Troubles convulsed Ireland, left their home in Belfast and moved to Glasgow with their newborn son.

They fled after a violent incident almost cost Stella and her unborn baby their lives. In an opening flashback, we see the wild gunplay only partially, from an angle, as Stella explains in voiceover, “A single day can change the course of any life.”

That’s a caution we’ll hold onto as we meet Stella and Gerry in their mid-60s, after their grown son has moved away with his wife and child, and they’ve become empty nesters.

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Stella is a devout Catholic who leans hard on her spiritual practice. Gerry is religiously indifferent and favors a nip of whiskey and a nod-off in his recliner when Stella goes to church one Christmas Eve. This isn’t the first time he’s let the bottle win out over deeper life questions.

As a surprise Christmas gift, Stella has bought a pair of tickets to Amsterdam, and Gerry thinks the idea is “fantastic”. He doesn’t know that Stella has more in mind than a simple golden-years getaway.

Stella’s hidden agenda won’t stay suppressed. She takes Gerry to a cathedral that in the 16^th century was a beacon for oppressed Catholics who couldn’t celebrate their faith in that building. Amsterdam’s Protestant powers banned Catholic services, and the faithful could only practice in their homes.

Gerry, at best a lapsed Catholic, doesn’t quite see the point and wonders aloud why Stella takes her faith “so seriously”. Bristling, Stella stays silent, stifling her fury.

Back in those oppressed 16th-century decades, Catholic women founded an underground religious order whose remnants still exist in today’s Amsterdam in the Begijnhof, a medieval complex of historic buildings.

On her own, calmly asking Gerry not to join her, Stella returns to the Begijnhof, wondering what the order might offer her today.

She has a pressing need, because 40 years ago in Belfast, when she and her unborn infant were suspended, bleeding, between life and death, she made a sacred vow to live a life of solemn purpose.

Is it too late to keep that promise? Early in their visit, they happened upon Kathy (a marvelously subtle Naimh Cusack), an Irish woman and a former teacher (like Stella) who’s lived happily in Amsterdam for years.

Crucially, Kathy is also Catholic and knows the history of the Begijnhof and the sacred order, called the Sisterhood. Stella begins pleading her case to Kathy with a frank admission: “I’m married. Although I’m not sure how much marriage we have left in us.”

Kathy’s patient listening opens up in Stella a piercing truth she’s never expressed before, not to Gerry or anyone.

Manville’s monologue in this scene unearthed me, forced me onto the spiritual plane where Stella is wrestling with those questions that never go away: What is my life worth? Is there still time for me to live it more truthfully? Is there anything noble in me that I can resurrect?

You don’t have to be religious to hear that cry, and I held my breath as Manville poured forth her anguished plea. It’s the finest acting I’ve ever seen her do.

And she’s impeccable throughout the movie, so this searing moment felt like revelation. I could hardly bear to watch Stella dig so deep searching for hope with only the sparsest chance of finding it.

This is the first great performance I’ve seen this year. There isn’t a wasted second in anything Manville does here.

Some years ago, I was fortunate enough to see Manville on stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as Mary Tyrone in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Mary was another profoundly committed Catholic wife bewildered by a husband who couldn’t see into her pain. Opposite Jeremy Irons as the flinty James Tyrone, Sr., Manville showed with burning fervor one woman pitting her faith against stubborn male indifference.

She was superb in the role, but she plumbs depths here, in a 90-minute script, that I found even more shattering to watch. Gerry isn’t blind to Stella’s suffering, but he can’t look it square in the face long enough to help her outlast it. Here we’re forced to look, and it’s one of the greatest movie monologues I know of.

Hinds is magnificent as Gerry, a man who truly loves his wife but, not unlike O’Neill’s towering, haunted alcoholics, can’t summon the strength to forgive and love himself.

Gerry’s inadequacy is as moving in its way as Stella’s aching need. They’ve helped each other get this far. Can they stay joined to face the uncertainties ahead?

By the end, we see that Stella has cracked open more than she bargained for. Gerry is suffering, too, down in his alcoholic haze. Has Stella considered the anguish he underwent 40 years ago when she endured her trial during her first – and last – pregnancy?

What did he, as a husband and father, suffer? The movie reminds us of a long-realized but still often barely understood truth, that spouses don’t always look as deeply as they might into one another’s compromises, disappointments and self-doubt.

That’s not “gut-wrenching” drama, it’s human-scale forlornness, the kind movies all too rarely tackle.

Which means director Polly Findlay – remarkably, in her first feature – has drawn on her extensive theater experience to elicit two sterling performances.

Yet she accomplishes more. She fleshes out the tight, adroit screenplay by Nick Payne and Bernard MacLaverty (from the latter’s novel of the same name) with tiny details that drive the story forward. The actors’ moves are pinpoint specific; the location shooting and production design are vivid but never overbearing.

Scene by scene, Stella and Gerry are never at precisely the same emotional place. Advantage teeters back and forth, resentments simmer and eventually boil over.

And Finlay deploys her behind-the-camera colleagues with elegant simplicity. Hannah Peel’s gentle score and Lucia Zucchetti’s unshowy editing keep the action emotionally involving.

Laurie Rose’s cinematography is transfixing but never distracting. She sees to it that the northern European winter light of both Glasgow and Amsterdam, with unexpected bursts of sunlight, cusps Stella and Gerry within a revelatory glow, snowfall and ice be damned.

Here’s a movie to fall into, headfirst. It takes you to the depths but looks up to see if there might still be light overhead. Too often, I feel something like that sort of quandary about the motion picture industry itself.

This exhilarating movie has helped restore some of my faith.

Crime 101 (2026)

In theaters

Movies don’t live – or survive over time – on their own. Not only do they draw from the movie past, but they also take a place in the world around them.

Crime 101 hits the beats of movies we’ve seen before: speeding cars, amoral criminals, doggedly honest cops alongside less than honorable members of the thin blue line.

But it stood out for me because I didn’t know how starved I was for an atmospheric caper that felt as fraught and morally rickety as the times we’re now living through.

Writer-director Bart Layton, working from a 2020 novella of the same name by Don Winslow, drops us into a landscape where right and wrong simply won’t sit still. To signal us with a kind of visual SOS, he turns the image of streaming nighttime traffic in Los Angeles a full 180 degrees — upside down.

Nobody in the story is where they want to be, and as soon as we meet them, we feel sweaty desperation pouring off them. Where are they going to land? We’re assuredly in 2026 America.

Specifically, in L.A., where the city’s bright allure can turn into a steel trap. Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth) is doing rather well as a jewel thief, mostly because he works immaculately.

He wields a gun threateningly but never actually fires it or commits any violence. He keeps his face masked and his eyes covered with blue contact lenses.

But he now wants to bring in the big score that would get him enough “walk away money” to put larceny permanently behind him.

After a chance meeting with Maya (Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown), he hesitantly begins a relationship with her, giving him even clearer reason to clean up his act and move on to a settled life.

He’s scoped out a jewelry store up the California coast along U.S. Route 101 in Santa Barbara but tells his fence Money (a scarily gravel-voiced Nick Nolte) he’s decided it’s too risky.

Actually, he’s been shaken by a miscalculation he made. Uncharacteristically, he didn’t spot a hidden gun held by a courier he robbed, and the bullet the courier fired grazed him. He’s shaken by that mistake.

Money concludes Mike has lost his nerve and brings in the glassy-eyed psychopath Ormon (Barry Keoghan) to take on the Santa Barbara job and let it be as bloody as it needs to be.

Ormon welcomes the chance to win Money’s favor and also live up to his murderous father’s legacy. Bottle blond, riding a powerful, high-speed motorcycle, his face behind a plastic-covered helmet, Ormon trips on his freaky bad-guy image.

Bloody and messy the Santa Barbara holdup turns out to be, and precisely because it’s a jewel heist that’s definitely not committed in Mike’s style, by standing out it could shine a revealing light on the careful non-violent steps Mike’s repeated in multiple robberies along Highway 101.

Mike doesn’t know he has abundant reason to be nervous because rumpled, dogged LAPD detective Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo) has spotted his pattern.

While Lubesnick’s police colleagues think the robberies are the work of multiple thieves, Lou believes he’s ferreted out the M.O. of one man, a cagey thief who can be sure of a rapid 101 escape route that weaves back into LA’s maze of freeways.

Both Mike and Lou will make contact with Sharon Coombs (Halle Berry), an agent for a high-end insurance company with super rich clients. Sharon’s 11 years with the firm still haven’t landed her a partnership, and when she finally realizes that promotion is never going to happen, she teams up with Mike.

Mocked and belittled by her boss for being 53 years old, she’s ready to score some illicit “walk away money”, too. And she knows about a mega-rich client who’ll be celebrating his wedding at the exclusive Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

He’s paying cash for all the wedding costs, plus giving gifts of diamonds and pricey watches to guests. There’ll be $11 million in luxury items and cash stashed in his hotel room. Here’s the grand score Mike and Sharon are looking to pull off.

What awaits them isn’t what either of them expects, and the twists that ensue lead to a riveting climax.

All four lead performances strike precisely the right note. The handsome Hemsworth, moving with catlike grace, captures Mike’s held-in tremor with surprising conviction.

Mike tells Maya he can’t talk about his past, has no photos of family in his spartan apartment and of course lies about how he earns his living.

To see the fierce Thor and Mad Max: Furiosa actor so crestfallen when he can’t open up makes for some surprisingly tender acting, depending on a vulnerability Hemsworth pulls off without a false move.

Ruffalo remains a master of understatement. Lou has the lowest closure rate in his team of detectives because he so meticulously looks for the who – the character imprint – of the criminals he’s hunting.

His colleagues don’t grasp that the slowest route to catching a crook may be the surest. And by the end Lubesnick knows his man. Ruffalo’s stubborn confidence under his character’s pressure makes for an intensely watchable performance.

The biggest surprise here may be Halle Berry, since Sharon is further out on a limb than she realizes. Berry has a fierce scene where she tells off her sexist, ageist boss with blistering fervor.

But she also shows us the weary side of this woman who’s crashed against the glass ceiling one time too many, and whose spirit just may have taken a permanent hit. This is surely one of Berry’s most resonant performances.

Keoghan is truly scary as Ormon, an unhinged brute who doesn’t even know what he’s in the criminal world for. The cruelty itself turns him on so much you get the sense he’s not robbing mainly for money.

It’s for some kind of warped recognition from the cold-blooded Money, the nearest thing to a father figure Ormon can imagine. Keoghan doesn’t hold back in showing us a wildly depraved man.

But none of these people are entirely fueled by their backstories. What also drives them is what’s tempting or tormenting them right now.

That’s how we can read their faces so clearly. And what faces! Layton shoots them all in daring, raw close-ups that don’t remotely rely on glamor. Surrender, compromise, panic, fear, and a simmering anger fill their eyes.

This heist movie is so trim and tight, yet so overflowing with energy, it can make you long to see all sorts of other movies, too, crafted just as neatly. So far Layton has directed a documentary and a documentary drama, so this is his first feature. He comes on with talent blazing.

To be sure, his work suggests earlier movies. The script even turns in on itself. Characters mention Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968) and Norman Jewison’s The Thomas Crown Affair (also 1968), both featuring Steve McQueen with his unruffled cool.

I also got an early ’70s vibe. What sprang to my mind were Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971), Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972, also with McQueen) and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973).

Siegel is both sleek and rough-and-tumble. So is Layton. Peckinpah cuts better than anyone except Hitchcock, and Layton’s editors, Julian Hart and Jacob Schulsinger, reminded me of those two masters.

And the hallucinogenic swirl of Southern California captured by Altman’s darting camera seems a match for Erik Alexander Wilson’s hypnotic cinematography here.

The movie’s visual pull is transfixing. Layton, in only his third movie, already shoots like a veteran with grizzly, tragic facts of life pressing on his mind. Badness oozes nearly everywhere. The few “warm” moments startle because they’re so infrequent.

That’s the intractable moral riddle embedded in what will seem to many just another heist movie. I think Layton is more ambitious than that. There’s a plea to look out for wild swings of danger in the way he works. It’s in the pounding, unforgiving score by Blanck Mass.

And it’s in Layton’s bedazzlement at the coiling sense of evil the characters don’t seem able to escape.

Time and again the camera cuts to a high overhead shot of the immense, long nighttime rush of Highway 101’s surging, packed flow of traffic. Four lanes of vehicles head toward us lit by piercing bright headlights. While next to them four lanes of vehicles stream away from us with eerie glowing red taillights.

Like a pair of snakes slithering across a grand doomed garden.

This bold actor appeared in no less than four releases this year. He’s clearly eager to expand his range and willing to take himself by surprise – his work vibrates with risk. Here he portrayed David, a gifted musician in 1920s New England who finds a soul mate in fellow-musician Lionel (played by Paul Mescal in ardent collaboration). Their love of music leads, without their understanding where it will take them, to a love for each other. David marries and stays closeted in New England. Lionel spends years as a musical prodigy in Europe. But David, the awakener, haunts the apparently more open Lionel for the rest of his life. David’s hesitation and hiding mask a bravery we fully understand only by the movie’s end. O’Connor turns concealment into courage, endows an abject man with a fraught survivor’s surprising grace.

Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke has played a variety of characters, many of them quirky outsiders. His stunning work here inhabited the brilliant, painfully awkward Broadway lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart. Hawke opened up for us not just an outsider, but a man almost beyond human touch, sorrowfully outside the possibility of love itself. On top of that, the actor makes the closeted, lonely tunesmith achingly funny. The movie is set in the legendary Broadway bar and restaurant Sardis. It’s the night of March 31, 1943, when the now-classic Broadway musical Oklahoma! opened. And Hart’s partnership with composer Richard Rogers – they wrote more than 600 songs together – began to unravel. Rodgers will team with Oscar Hammerstein II and make Broadway history. Hart within a year of this fateful night will die booze-soaked and alone. Hawke captures the final gasp of an artist who needed love but seems never to have gotten it. But Hawke takes care to plumb his tormented soul and eviscerating wit. We get to hear Hart’s inner melodies, unbroken, still syncopating, swinging, soaring.

Jessie Buckley in Hamnet

In the role of Agnes, wife to the young, ambitious William Shakespeare, Buckley transcends the common biopic trope – wife to the Great Man. We all know he wielded a mighty pen. But she, we come to see, kept the man’s feet on the ground. Her fiercely independent Agnes was goad, challenger and powerful sexual equal to the gifted Will off to make a name for himself in the turbulent world of 16^th century London theater. While he’s in the city, back in Stratford-on-Avon Agnes patiently rears their three children, Susanna and the twins Judith and Hamnet. The boy’s death from an unknown disease at age 11 is thought by scholars to have inspired the writing of Hamlet. Buckley shows us what lay behind the couple’s tragic loss, how she bore the pain more immediately than Will. Buckley’s passionate portrayal insists that Agnes’ strength helped the great playwright finally realize his own anguish. To watch her lose a son and later venture to London to learn what the father has made of himself is a double revelation. Both actress and wife show us how genius has a cost.

Rebecca Ferguson in A House of Dynamite

Settling into a movie about possible world annihilation we’re bound to feel daunted. Idiotically unleashed nuclear weapons get our attention. A believable person can help us imagine looming disaster. Ferguson’s precise, subtly shaded work takes us from normal daily life to worldwide insanity in carefully judged steps. As Captain Olivia Walker she’s head of the military watchdog team that fills the vast White House Situation Room. Seeing the room’s array of giant video screens fill up with images of nuclear missiles aimed at the U.S., she’s got to keep a cool head. As she takes in the impending global catastrophe, we cling to her more than any of the other frantic participants, from generals to national security advisors to POTUS. We’ve seen her at home with her loving husband and toddler son. As doomsday approaches, Ferguson gradually lets the unimaginable creep across her face and body. It takes meticulous acting to get us to believe the world’s about to lose a wife and mother who’s not unlike us. In the midst of madness, Ferguson puts human vulnerability fully on screen.

Chiwetel Ejiofor in The Life of Chuck

As a middle-school teacher in a placid middle American town, Ejiofor showed an acute concern for the welfare of his students, as the windows outside their school revealed emergency vehicles racing toward disasters. The extraordinary empathy the actor showed in the classroom only grew more poignant and troubled as he ventured into town and saw his community cower in end-of-the-universe panic. Finally arriving at the backyard of his ex-wife Felicia, the two hold hands as they look up into the nighttime sky and watch star after star disappear, like candles blown out. His tender “I love you” as the universe vanishes seemed to sweep up all humanity. His bewilderment stands in for our longing to be understood when all is lost. It’s what we, looking on, find in this hypnotic actor’s eyes.

But for 2025 nearly every 10 Best List I’ve seen includes excellent movies alongside bloated, sensational, poorly thought-out productions that appeal to base, crude emotions. It took a crowbar to separate quietly worthwhile movies from gaudy pretentiousness or noisy crud.

My despair isn’t new. For the last several years the overarching reason I praise the movies I do has become because I think we need them so badly.

Whether they’re ambitious on a large scale, like One Battle After Another, or hauntingly introspective, like Train Dreams, the truly vital movies from the past year had to fight through a miasma of mediocrity.

Too many movies around them simply weren’t worth a lot of time. Or so I felt as I stayed away — teeth gritted — from one ballyhooed extravaganza after another.

That 12-month internal fracas has reduced me to compiling a Don’t Miss Movies List. It’s made up of experiences that stretched or delightfully exemplified how directors could probe underexplored themes or pull me in with dazzling moviemaking or, in the happiest configurations, do both.

Maybe I should have ruled myself out of list-making since I missed a lot of movies in 2025. Not that all of them got by me, exactly. On the contrary, I stayed away from many because I sensed a cynical, rote staleness at their core. I wasn’t bamboozled by glossy ads or drumbeats from critics.

Those questionable releases included widely praised movies that, judging only by their breathless rave reviews, seemed to me to offer nothing much new, and for now aren’t going to get my precious time.

It’s also undeniably true that good movies came out this past year that I’ll be catching up with later. When I do, I’ll let you know.

Do the movies I highlight below form an Eleven Best list? Not in my mind. It’s a list of movies that I believe challenged – instead of stroking – audiences. I call it a Hang in There List. We need more movies like these:

One Battle After Another
The History of Sound
Train Dreams
Blue Moon
The Secret Agent
Hamnet
A House of Dynamite
Eddington
The Life of Chuck
One of Them Days
Cover-Up (a documentary)

Is This Thing On? (2025)

In theaters

“Dad, you’ve got to have goals!” So says 10-year-old Felix Novak (Blake Kane), earnestly admonishing his father, Alex (Will Arnett); Felix’s brother Jude (Calvin Knegten), also 10, fervently endorses his brother’s pointed advice.

These sharp-as-a-tack Irish twins, born less than a year apart, have both sensed that Alex, in his mid-40s, is falling apart.

The sheer bewilderment we see on Alex’s face with the mere mention of the word “goals” tells us that he’s a trembling mess, even though he works in finance and is apparently successful at it. (We never get to see him on the job.)

What Alex is not telling the boys is that his more than 20-year marriage to their mother, Tess (Laura Dern), is coming apart. She was an Olympic medal-winning volleyball player who gave up a career in sports to be a stay-at-home mom. But is she content?

Forgoing that professional career, Tess has discovered, still rankles. One reason is she’s feeling unfulfilled in her marriage. She and Alex have lost the magic, and she announces to him that it’s over.

Alex, more confused than angry, reluctantly agrees to a divorce. As the separation begins, Tess and the boys stay in the family’s spacious suburban home while Alex moves into a cramped apartment in Greenwich Village.

Aimless one night, he wanders into a Village nightclub. It’s The Comedy Cellar, famous in showbiz as a tryout venue for comics, but Alex has never heard of it.

Confused by the club’s door policy, he writes his name on a sign-in sheet – not knowing it’s open mic night and supplying his name means he’ll be called to perform on stage.

When his name is called, he hustles on stage and stumbles through a two-minute “set” about his crumbling marriage. He’s awkward and clumsy, but he gets laughs and warm applause. Astonished, he’s hooked.

He returns to perform on several other nights, getting franker and looser in front of increasingly welcoming audiences. After his sets, down in the club’s basement, he soaks up stories from more experienced comics who tell him their trials by fire weren’t unlike his.

They also tell him the hard truth: each night, a comic has to dare himself to get up on that small stage under unforgiving bright lights and wing it. You work for laughs. With time, if you’re lucky, the laughs begin to come to you.

Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born, Maestro) directs with a disarmingly light touch, letting the characters blunder and stumble without clear “goals” for the entire picture.

The script, which Cooper co-wrote with Arnett and sitcom writer Mark Chappell, is loosely based on the true story of John Bishop, a British pharmaceutical salesman who fell into standup while trying to save his marriage.

Alex’s wild ride is fun to watch. He’s intoxicated by the comedy club’s ambience but hasn’t told Tess about his newfound passion.

He doesn’t know that one of Tess’s former volleyball colleagues, Laird (Peyton Manning), has resumed contact with her, and after a dinner, he takes her to, of all places, The Comedy Cellar.

Alex, not knowing his wife is in the audience, performs an electrifying set, peppered with cutting jokes about his vanishing marriage.

The range of emotions across Dern’s face is acting-class perfect. The actress shows us both Tess’s shock and her bone-deep understanding of her flailing husband. And her smarts by eventually deciding to leave the club with Laird.

But Alex spots them on the way out and races to catch up to Tess. Bidding Laird goodnight, she admits she found Alex’s performing persona “hot”. They go back to his place and have utterly surprising, restorative sex.

They begin a kind of “affair” that still doesn’t put their troubles to rest. Laird tells Tess there’s a coaching spot open for the next U.S. Olympic Volleyball Team. Tess grits her teeth and determines to go for it.

So, are these two breaking up or what? The script keeps us unsure, just as Alex and Tess don’t know who they’re changing into, and whether variation – growth – means they have to sever their bond.

Looking on patiently are Alex’s father Jan (Ciarán Hinds) and mother Marilyn (Christine Ebersole). He advises Alex that to remain fair to Tess he needs to tone down the vitriol in his nightclub persona and ramp up the jokes.

Marilyn demands that her son see Tess’s behavior as the plea that it is. She’s been the good wife and mother. Now’s her time to step out on her own, just as Alex has.

Listening warily but with a consuming affection is Alex’s pal Balls (played with loopy gentleness by Cooper), a C-list actor who’s always high and a bit out of it but is no fool when it comes to marriage versus career.

He and his sharp-tongued but philosophic wife Christine (Andra Day) keep their differences out front, loudly expressed, the better to work on moving beyond them.

They may seem on the verge of breaking up, but we come to see that underneath their barbed repartee is affection. Could Alex and Tess maybe take a hint?

It falls to Arnett to keep us worried about and rooting for Alex, and the comedian/actor is smooth and transparent in showing us a discombobulated, groping man.

Cooper as co-writer and director has the daring to be not just sympathetic to these decent, dazed people but to let them vent about their regrets. He’s no cynic, at least not here. He knows how to show people not just hurting but healing.

There’s a scene near the end where Christine is slowly setting the table for dinner guests and bringing food to it.

She starts humming and gently lifts her voice to richly, imploringly sing “Amazing Grace”.

In this dazzling moment Andra Day reminded me of her mesmerizing Oscar-nominated performance in The United States vs. Billie Holiday (2021).

For a moment Holiday’s hurt, that can also heal, shows up in this movie, too, alive on screen. As the rest of the cast slowly joins in to back up Day, we’re taken to the deeper stuff that actually underlies this frolic of a story.

On a small, intimate scale, Cooper shows himself a director who’s mastered music’s power to dig out truth from the rubble. It’s a brief yet exalted moment of purity in a charming, unpretentious comedy. Cooper’s feel for the sublime is definitely on.

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Cover-Up (2025)

In theaters and streaming on Netflix

There are two sides to the truth. Telling it and hearing it. We keep being tossed from one pole to the other in this scorching documentary about Seymour Hersh (b. 1937), a fiercely independent investigative reporter.

My head kept swiveling. I took in its harsh revelations, from the Vietnam war all the way up to today’s conflicts in Gaza.

At the same time, I was moved by revelations from unknown political actors or witnesses who broke down and told Hersh what they knew about craftily obscured, tragic events.

I watched them tell the truth and couldn’t help asking myself if I was fully hearing them. Truly, deeply listening to faintly remembered or deliberately buried truths is what this powerful documentary demands viewers do.

Sometimes here we watch these witnesses, ordinary folks, testify in old TV interviews. Other confidences we learn about in conversations Hersh reconstructs for us, when they testify to unburden themselves. They don’t take much urging. They’ve often been waiting for years.

Hersh candidly admits he doesn’t always know why sources talk to him, but for decades they have, and in his recounting, we listen, too, poking at the underbelly of American military dominance, as well as some uber-capitalist chicanery.

Hersh worked for long stretches at The New York Times and The New Yorker. But he’s never let himself be entirely bound by the editorial restrictions – or timidities – of any publication. He’s freelanced voluminously and published eleven books.

Here, as he sits for the camera at age 88 recalling his long career, the directors, Laura Poitras (who was behind the 2014 Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour) and Mark Obenhaus, give us a close-up look at a gruff, deeply principled, passionately opinionated man.

In straightforward fashion, they insert background footage from his years of dogged shoe-leather reporting, wittily and incisively contextualized by Hersh in voiceover and to the camera.

We also get excerpts from Hersh’s prior interviews and speeches, interspersed with photo captures from some of the documents he pored over and the notes he feverishly scrawled.

The picture that emerges is of a man driven not just by the search for the truth, daunting and complex as that can be. Hersh also never stopped asking himself why he was seen as such a rebel journalist. Why weren’t other reporters digging just as persistently?

“We suffer in America not so much from censorship as self-censorship by journalists.”

His most infuriating example arose from the Vietnam War. During those years, rather than schmooze with other Pentagon reporters, Hersh would seek out young military officers in the building and over coffee get them to open up.

That’s how he first heard vague talk about U.S. soldiers slaughtering Vietnamese villagers — killing civilians without knowing whether they were part of the enemy Viet Cong.

He got hold of a name, “William Calley”, and promptly flew to Ft. Benning, Georgia to talk to him. The army lieutenant softly but emphatically denied any indiscriminate killing. Hersh didn’t believe him for a moment.

Which kept him digging, until he discovered witnesses to the My Lai massacre. Not only were men, women and children – including babies – murdered, on that same bloody day similar motiveless killing was happening in other villages.

Hersh learned that the horror wasn’t the result of a sudden, random loss of control. It was policy. Hersh points out that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman William Westmoreland “needed numbers” – that is, a high enough body count to justify a deeply divisive war.

Yet no one in the military or the press wanted to talk about the atrocities. Even after Hersh’s reporting found its way into print, most in government and media downplayed it.

It was only when an Army photographer sold color photographs of the killing field to Life magazine that the story seared the national consciousness.

But it had taken Hersh’s original reporting to shake the system – agitate both the government and the press – and impress the story on an American public that was paying for a war going disastrously wrong.

In 1970 Hersh was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his work on My Lai. Where did this guy’s pluck come from?

Recounting his family background, Hersh gives us a sense of what made him a prober and a loner. His taciturn father, a Jewish refugee from Lithuania, never talked about the Holocaust, an obfuscation – a willful blanking out of a painful past – that haunted Seymour.

His father also wanted Seymour to forget about college and settle down to run the family dry cleaning business on Chicago’s South Side.

Hersh did as he was told, joined the Book of the Month Club and read voraciously. “Books,” he recalls, “taught me how to think”. But a junior college professor got him into the University of Chicago, and being on campus there, Hersh recalls, “changed my life.”

That, and newspaper work. He fell into police reporting and “loved it.” Getting to the bottom of shady operations, run by cops or crooks, became instinctive. With that working skepticism under his belt and acknowledging he “had a bit of moxie going on,” he wrote New York Times managing editor Abe Rosenthal to ask for a job.

As it happened, this was auspicious timing. Hersh had wrangled a visa to go to Hanoi, and Rosenthal wanted another reporter on the ground in Viet Nam. Hersh’s exposure of mass murder and Calley followed.

But corrupt power in Washington more and more tantalized Hersh, and, stateside, he leaned into his misgivings about Nixon’s national security advisor Henry Kissinger. Made wary by Hersh’s devastating My Lai reporting, Kissinger met a number of times with Hersh, flattering him to draw him closer.

Hersh wasn’t remotely seduced and secretly kept plying sources around Kissinger. And eventually he revealed what he’d discovered in eye-opening pieces he prepared for publication in the Times.

Yet before these stories about Kissinger’s covert control of national security, national defense and the CIA were published, Times editors first ran them by none other than Kissinger.

Hersh was appalled by “the power Kissinger had at the paper”. The enmity of the two men escalated.

Once Hersh was finally freed to write openly about Kissinger’s deviousness, we hear Nixon on the phone with Kissinger calling Hersh a “son of a bitch and a communist.”

Furious and frightened, Nixon after reading a carefully sourced Hersh expose, declares, “The son of a bitch is a son of a bitch, but he’s also usually right.” Kissinger ruefully, bitterly agrees.

This kind of acidly sharp, emotionally gripping reporting, about ordinary soldiers or the machinations of the powerful, became Hersh’s brand. To fellow journalists Sy, as he was called, became the cowboy reporter who brought home the goods.

When he turned to covering corporations, however, specifically the shenanigans of the giant conglomerate Gulf & Western, the Times balked. They wouldn’t let him go into too much damning detail. Fed up when the newspaper diluted his work, Hersh quit.

He turned out meticulous articles for numerous publications, wrote those eleven books and won a slew of awards.

All the while thinking independently and sometimes testing editors’ calm with his notorious short fuse.

On camera he comes off as immensely knowledgeable and immovably driven. That cryptic aura of the obsessive, testy factfinder is clearly what fascinates Poitras and Obenhaus.

Hersh is shown going after not just the truth but the nasty details that reveal rot festering in the national psyche. That’s the core of Hersh’s worry. Moral torpor can let massacres in Vietnam, the outrages of Watergate, the unspeakable torture at Abu Ghraib or latter-day U.S. involvement in Gaza all go unquestioned for too long.

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That profound disappointment is evident in Hersh’s eyes and voice here. At one point late in the runtime we even see him, on camera, tell Poitras he wants to quit this project. I’ve given you too much, he worries, shown you too much about anonymous sources you might reveal – betraying my trust with them.

Over the years he’s been much criticized by journalists for over-relying on anonymous sources. But they’re the key to his work because in talking to him they summon a courage that those in power, and the journalists who slackly cover them, often lack.

It’s not just the powerful who need watching, it’s also the watchers – Hersh’s fellow journalists – who are failing in their responsibility to let the public know the worst. Which can cause bad behavior to get lost in memory so that those who perpetrate it are never fully held to account.

Hersh was once bamboozled while writing a book about JFK’s presidency. A man offered him letters he claimed were between John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Hersh believed they were genuine. In fact, the man was a forger. Fortunately, their contents didn’t make it into Hersh’s book.

But he admits he felt like “an idiot” for being snookered. “I never said I was perfect”, he punches back. That candor makes his persistent drive to uncover and report uncomfortable truths seem more credible and perhaps explains the impish, provocateur’s look we see in his eyes.

British historian, politician and writer Lord Acton (1834-1902) is far too often misquoted in a fabled declaration. Many inaccurately insist that he said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

His actual words in an 1887 letter to an Anglican bishop were: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That word “tends” is crucial, and I’d suggest that Hersh’s entire career turns on it. There will always be those who accrue power and savor the thrill of wielding it. Nothing on a complex scale is achieved without them.

Society needs pushers, organizers and hardnoses. They get big, important things done while the rest of us pursue our private, individual dreams.

But the adamant always bear watching and need timely replacing. If we don’t constantly scrutinize the Westmorelands and Kissingers, they can perpetrate dark deeds and leave us not only none the wiser but poisonously incurious.

That’s why a relentless digger like Hersh is vital. His sort of indefatigable snooping into what’s actually being done in our names won’t let the powerful sleep easily.

Marty Supreme (2025)

In theaters, limited; opens wide December 25

This is a come-for-your-throat movie. It doesn’t so much hold your attention as get you in its clutches.

The director, Josh Safdie, who co-wrote the script with Ronald Bronstein, piles on mayhem for two-and-a-half hours. I tried and failed to keep up, though Safdie’s hell-for-leather pacing seemed to whisper in my ear, You’ll figure it out later.

No such luck. I still haven’t, but Safdie’s overindulgence at least kept me yearning for some sort of sense, however it might arrive.

The prodigiously talented Timothée Chalamet stars as Marty Mauser, loosely patterned after real-life table-tennis legend Marty Reisman. Reisman was a well-known table-tennis hustler and gifted player who won international championships.

Chalamet’s Marty aces the slick hustler component right from the start. The actor reportedly honed his table tennis skills over six years, and his playing here is electrifying, even elegant.

But in this script, ping-pong mastery isn’t Marty’s endgame. The seasoned 23-year-old (if he’s like Reisman, he started playing when he was 12) is wised up enough to know that sheer talent won’t get him everything he wants.

It’s 1952 and, earning a scant living as a salesman in the shoe store owned by his uncle Murray (Larry Sloman), Marty is a well-known hustler in New York City’s table-tennis underground.

In dark clubs and grubby back rooms, he’s carved out a reputation as a nimble player who consistently wins and takes home (meager) prize money.

This grimy hand-to-mouth scuffling has made him a celebrity (the real-life Reisman won the international table tennis championship in 1949), but it isn’t scratching the itch in his ego.

Mastering and helping dignify a sport derided as mere “ping-pong” isn’t enough. He wants to become its Crown Prince. He’s convinced himself that the game will gain more respect, deepen its international cachet, with his cool confidence driving it.

In his scramble to glory, Marty is anything but loyal. When lifelong friend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) drops by the shop, Marty lures her into the backroom and quickly, nastily, screws her.

She’ll eventually become pregnant, and he’ll abandon her to her abusive husband, claiming the child isn’t his. Rachel insists it is, but what does Marty care about what women think? His prowess is his pride. Yet she, I couldn’t begin to tell you why, sticks by him. Male scriptwriters’ conquest fantasies are boundless.

One night, while competing at a table-tennis tournament in London, Marty seduces Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), an unhappily married movie star whose career is fading; then, while she isn’t looking, he steals jewelry from her.

Why she gives herself to small time Marty I never understood. She’s some 15 years older than he is, so maybe his jejune good looks fake her out?

That could be why the script later contrives a reunion for them back in New York, including nighttime cunnilingus in Central Park. Despite their heavy-breathing sex, he doesn’t end up treating her any better than he did Rachel.

While in London, Marty had bitterly lost the championship to a formidable Japanese adversary, Koto Endo (Koto Kawagichi, a real-life champion). The trounced American vows he’ll avenge his defeat and snag the crown, but he has to finagle airfare to Japan to do it.

That grueling money-raising campaign makes for long-haul competing in tournaments from Scandinavia to Paris to the Middle East with only paltry cash rewards.

Marty realizes he needs a well-financed backer, and finds it in, of all people, Kay Stone’s husband Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary). He owns a hugely profitable company that manufactures deluxe fountain pens, and he finds the brash Marty contemptible but oddly amusing.

He humiliates Marty in front of his laughing business associates, but Marty can’t afford to look a gift-sponsor in the mouth.

They strike a deal. Rockwell will fund Marty’s trip to Japan but only if the young dynamo agrees to play an exhibition match — lavishly promoting Rockwell’s pens — which the mogul will sponsor.

Rockwell’s explanation is simple. His company sells far more fountain pens in Japan and the rest of Asia than in Marty’s stamping grounds, Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

Marty abhors exhibition matches. He’s interested in the real thing, which means his target is the still-reigning champ, Endo.

Ever the slick operator, the broke, desperate Marty hopes that once in Japan he can wangle a real match with the serene, dignified Endo, and win the respect of both the lion of the sport and its rabid Japanese fan base.

If this were the only story arc Safdie’s script conceived, he might have given himself more time to probe Marty’s shifty, conniving instincts, as well as the source of his gifts and dedication.

Marty works hard at the game, and we see he’s a dazzling player (Chalamet’s ping-pong prowess does represent a true-life doggedness; Reisman, who won a world championship at age 69, was the real deal).

But why does Marty love a sport that in his own country is widely belittled? Is enhancing the game’s luster a way of forging a more meaningful life for himself? “I’m uniquely positioned to be the face of the sport in the United States,” he boasts. Apparently, in Safdie’s mind this sort of bluster is the same as conviction.

Marty icily distinguishes himself from the devoted Rachel by saying, “I have a purpose. You don’t.” Are we supposed to cheer on this sort of arrogance?

There’s a rich movie history of unmasking grifters who conceal their vulnerability and pain. One of the most celebrated is Paul Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson in The Hustler (1961) and The Color of Money (1986).

Two other men running from troubled inner lives are Leonardo DiCaprio’s slick, traumatized con artists in Catch Me If You Can (2002) and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).

Those movies peeled back layers of peacocking to reveal the hurting man under the grandstander.

Safdie stays on the surface, rolling with the mayhem Marty detonates. The writer-director is transfixed not by what Marty can control – his admirable competitor’s single-mindedness – but by what he continually loses a grip on.

Until the very end, Safdie never lets Marty pause to ask himself if he’s learning from his mistakes.

Instead, his conscienceless hustling is more than enough to enchant Safdie. He seems to think the havoc around Marty is a sign of the life force unfolding, not to be resisted.

The movie keeps barreling forward not so much on Marty’s chutzpah as Safdie’s. Confusing a protagonist’s drive with one’s own professional ambition is an occupational hazard for a writer-director.

Safdie plunges in headfirst. He’s borrowing Marty Reisman’s bravado, selling the real-life table-tennis pro’s doggedness as a principle to live by.

But what’s here to admire, respect or live up to? He and a friend, Wally (rapper Tyler the Creator), scheme to come up with money, and along the way, for no reason I could fathom, encounter a vicious dog they calm down and steal.

The dog’s owner (Abel Ferrara) hunts them down to a seedy hotel where Marty is taking a bath. The bathtub collapses through the floor, landing in the room below – and all but killing the dog. How does this sort of hijinks matter in Marty’s search for recognition, or for anything else?

Still, there are rewards here of a sort. I’ve seen Chalamet in lots of his previous movies, and here he moves more expressively, more gracefully than in any of those others. He’s become a limber, smoothly assured physical actor as well as a riveting dasher across the screen.

Cinematographer Darius Khondji fully captures the 1950s Lower East Side’s grit and air of striving. He also trains his keen eye on Chalamet’s multiple good angles. The actor’s face has never looked more darkly suave or sweatily desperate.

Gliding from con to con, Chalamet’s Marty is photographed to seem alarmingly, incongruously approachable. I got the sense that I’d never fall for this charlatan’s come-ons, yet I’d feel compelled to hear him out. Chalamet has acquired an indisputable deep-in-his-bones glamor. He keeps the frenzy watchable.

If only he had a character to play. Marty is on nobody’s side, so I don’t know how Safdie expects us to “root” for him. He’s neither a hero nor an anti-hero. He’s just anti. Anybody in his way is to be stepped on, over, or exploited.

Safdie has packed the movie around him with sensory overload, concealing the sad fact that Marty’s stop-at-nothing bravado doesn’t lead him or us to any understanding of who he is.

If I came across the Marty Mauser we see here, I’d head for the nearest exit.

The Secret Agent (2025)

In theaters

It’s not a Jane Austen opening: Our story is set in the Brazil of 1977, a period of great mischief.

Great mischief is sly mockery for conditions under a brutal dictatorship. This text appears onscreen as a canary yellow Volkswagen Beetle pulls into a rural gas station.

It’s Carnaval week. While Brazilians are giddily celebrating, barbarous social control grinds on beside glittering costumes and ecstatic street dancing.

Marcelo (Wagner Moura) is en route to coastal Recife – writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s own hometown.

At the gas station it’s the dead body a few feet from the pump covered with a cardboard leaf that Marcelo notices first. Then the stench. Then the pack of dogs circling to sink in their teeth.

The attendant chases the snarling hounds away, which he’s been doing for three days since another attendant shot the dead man for trying to steal tires. The police have been called. They haven’t shown up. Do they have other things to do? Like mischief, perhaps?

Suddenly two officers arrive in a patrol car, barely glancing at the bullet-riddled corpse. Instead, they try to shake down Marcelo for a “contribution” to a police program.

He explains he’s broke and just traveling to attend the local Carnaval celebrations. They let him go, but we can tell they’ve struck a nerve. His unease signals he’s on a mission.

Indeed, he is, and the justice he’s hoping for will be hard to come by. Chaotic violence has the country in its grip.

Filho’s acidic script, the vivid performances and the movie’s brightly saturated color scheme will show us a passionate people struggling to maintain common decency.

We’re at the midpoint of the harsh military dictatorship that benighted Brazil from 1964 to 1985. During those terrifying years the regime “disappeared” hundreds of thousands of people.

Marcelo is an electromagnetism researcher whose future doing government work has turned bleak.

A corrupt bureaucracy has shut down the project he was working on and turned it over to a ruthless private businessman, Ghirotti (Luciano Chirolli), who also wants to appropriate one of Marcelo’s patents.

Fed up, Marcelo has come to Recife to resume custody of his eight-year-old son Fernando (Enzo Nunez) and hopefully move with him out of the country. The boy has been living with Marcelo’s father-in-law Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), a cinema projectionist who’s instilled in his grandson a love of movies.

Fortunately, in Recife Marcelo finds help. He’s been directed to the safe house run by 77-year-old Dona Sebastiana (Tânia Maria in a great serio-comic performance). She’s a guiding light to refugees – though they balk at that word – trying to acquire the papers that will let them leave Brazil.

She shelters ordinary men and women who’ve been labeled communists, anarchists and all-around undesirables. As the “unwanted” they realize they could, with one nighttime knock on the door, suddenly be “disappeared”.

They resist. Which keeps them under suspicion. Dona Sebastiana’s sanctuary is a place of refuge against unpredictable police state terror.

But she has methods to sidestep despots. She pulls strings to get Marcelo a job in an identification office, a kind of clearinghouse for anyone hoping to change their status – i.e., increase their odds of survival – under a government that constantly surveils dissenters.

The job fits in with Marcelo’s main goal before leaving the country, finding the identity of his mother. He’s not sure when she died, and has lost all trace of his father, but he’s certain that a record of the woman who bore him lies in the mountain of paperwork in Recife.

He’s also on the run for more fraught reasons. In flashback we learn how he drew the callous Ghirotti’s rage. During a boozy dinner, Marcelo’s late wife Fátima (Alice Carvalho) heatedly and profanely lashes out at Ghirotti for trying to co-opt and profit from Marcelo’s accomplishments.

We’re never told how Fátima died, but Marcelo sadly confirms for Fernando that the boy’s mother is dead, and now father and son will leave Brazil together. If he can secure passports for both of them. Time is growing short.

Dona Sebastiana again tosses a lifeline. She introduces him to the facilitator Elza (Maria Fernando Cândido), who assures him that she can arrange the passports, possibly within four days.

But Ghirotti wants revenge for the insult he suffered, and for the upstart Marcelo’s challenge to his authority.

The calculating industrialist, not fearing government officials who answer to him, not the other way around, dispatches two hitmen to eliminate Marcelo – “shoot him in the mouth.”

Marcelo has come to accept that Ghirotti in his lust for revenge must have “disappeared” Fátima and has now hired killers to murder the soft-spoken university researcher he hates.

Filho gives this sobering reminder of state oppression and dark score-settling astonishing vigor and a darting, agitated beauty. His Recife thrums with color and a lively, ripely sensual, dancing populace.

A newspaper headline shouts that so far in the 1977 Carnaval 91 people have been shot. A country whose government has lost its moral compass doesn’t even try to quell street violence at the same time it’s abducting and murdering dissenters.

Finho’s achievement here is to make all Brazil during this jittery period feel like a single live, wriggling creature inexplicably turning against and gnashing at itself.

On the teeming streets its decent people, criminals and corrupt officials rub against one another in continual agitation. Just before violence erupts, every face seems to wear the question of who might be next.

There’s no telling, and the director elicits edgy, believably tense performances from a sprawling cast.

Spry, seasoned actress Tânia Maria makes for a comical yet sturdy moral center of gravity as a woman wise in the ways of oppressive governments. Dona Sebastiana lived through WWII in Italy and remains instinctively alert to government secrets and lies.

Cândido as the document procurer Elza has a face that blends measured unease with vibrant resistance.

It’s a memorable performance because the actress doesn’t ever let the moral danger the government poses completely leave her pleading eyes. They seem to warn each refugee, I know, I understand, but there’s only so much I or anyone else can do.

Chirolli makes the violent capitalist Ghirotti more grinningly wicked as we see more of him. Over dinner with Marcelo and Fátima he’s a brutal, condescending corporate bully.

But with his festering rage now deepened, he’s become a monster who can order Marcelo’s killing with a beam of smiling malice in his eyes.

Francisco as Marcelo’s father-in-law Alexandre has the loving eyes of a doting grandfather who also challenges Marcelo to stiffen his spine and save himself and his son. He’s seen Brazil take his daughter Fátima and yearns for the rest of the family’s survival.

Keeping us in thrall in a subtle, masterfully underplayed performance is Moura as Marcelo. The actor burns with simmering torment. Even when he looks lovingly at Fernando, he lets us — but not the boy — see his sorrow about his late wife and his consuming worry about how he’ll provide for his son.

With the minutest gestures, the actor signals that Marcelo is much more than a man on the run. He is himself a cry for the beloved country he fears will betray him and could slay all his dreams.

It’s this tipping of the moral scale, a nerve-shredding rupture to an entire body politic, that Finho is dramatizing.

That he’s set his story in his hometown and made the boy Fernando eight years old in 1977, when in that year the director himself was nine years old, suggests both a cherishing of a troubled past and a rise from the ashes of social disaster.

This movie doesn’t just vibrate onscreen, it speaks to a pulsing worldwide restlessness, a plea for justice, that transcends its country and time period.

It never explains who or what the secret agent of the title is, but I think it’s us in the audience. The movie wants to catch us in the act of possibly betraying our most fragile principles of fairness and freedom from oppression.

It’s an unapologetically bloody, lacerating plea for justice as well as a testament to fighting for a fair shake for everyone. That social contract should never be secret, but we see here how it can sometimes be tragically violated, achingly cast aside.