‘Die My Love’ (2025)
Lynne Ramsay, the Scottish filmmaker behind such macabre psychological chillers as “We Need to Talk About Kevin” (2011) and “You Were Never Really Here” (2017) – the former, about a youth who commits a mass school shooting, the latter with Joaquin Phoenix as a hammer-wielding sociopath-avenger – may be the most convincing female voice in matters of masculinity onscreen since Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker,” “A House of Dynamite”). And the company in that elite club may just be a crew of two. Here, going to the more feminine side of things doesn’t make anything less messy, violent or bloody. In fact, it’s more unsettling. No human being dies of a violent act, though animals – a horse and a poorly adjusted dog – don’t fare as well. Jennifer Lawrence is Grace, who has a lot pushing and pulling in her head. She’s a writer who’s moved into the old Montana farmhouse of her partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson) with the intent of sinking into creativity and new motherhood. Neither really happens as Grace becomes less and less rooted in reality and waking delusions take hold. Is Jackson having an affair? Is the menacing presence on a motorcycle (LaKeith Stanfield) also Grace’s moonlight lover in the rickety old barn? Or is it all an illusion cast by an unreliable narrator dealing with postpartum delirium, or something more chronic? Ramsay, working from Ariana Harwicz’s 2013 novel, keeps us in the dreamy, demented dark – when Grace crashes through a sliding glass door, opens the car door to jump or bashes her head into a hotel suite mirror and Jackson underreacts, you don’t know if this is par for the course, the man has no idea what to do and is simply silent and agog, if it’s a disjointed distortion of reality or somewhere in between. There are clues, but teasingly few. Lawrence gives a bold, brave performance, emotionally exposed and often naked, oddly like an antithetical companion piece to her 2023 dark comedy, “No Hard Feelings.” In “Mother!” (2017) the madness around Lawrence’s bearer of life was external and a metaphor for the religious patriarchy; here it’s internal, and troubling to the forces who can’t get a handle on or squash it – a forced commitment in an asylum seems to fix things for a moment, but did it really happen? The tension over what is real is the film’s weakness and appeal, but not enough can be said about Lawrence: She switches on and off, or explodes, or recedes, with seamless perfection. It’s stunning. Ramsay and Lawrence are in tune at every turn and we are lucky to be here for their deftly deliberate dissonance.
‘Christy’ (2025)
Sydney Sweeney, best known for her jeans commercials and recurring role in “Euphoria,” gets down and gritty for this biopic about pioneering female boxer Christy Martin. The film’s something new for writer-director David Michôd, whose past successes, “The King” (2019) and “The Rover” (2014), had broader canvases. Michôd does well to let Sweeney sink into the role of Christy, who emerges from a god-fearing family in a podunk West Virginia township. She likes women, which doesn’t sit well with mom (Merritt Weaver), who won’t even tell dad (Ethan Embry) for fear of his reaction, or the other girls on her college basketball team. When they call her a dyke, Christy gives them a two-fisted lesson in manners that leads to the ring and a career in a sport that’s just gaining lift. Aiding that is Jim Martin (Ben Foster, “Leave No Trace”), an avuncular sort with a knowing country drawl who enters as Christy’s trainer, manager and lover. Something of a quiet control freak, Jim won’t let Christy even have a cup of coffee with her ex (Jess Gabor, who delivers an impressively quiet and compassionate performance). They get married and Jim lands her greater fame and opportunity for fortune, but walls her off and becomes manipulative, abusive and violent. The famous names dotting the periphery are fun, such as Laila Ali (Naomi Graham), Mike Tyson (Adrian Lockett) and Don King (Chad Coleman, garnering chuckles as the pompous promoter known for his electro-shocked coif and murder conviction), but the film treads heavily as it reckons with the drama of the small ring and bigger world stage. It’s the dark turns, Christy’s never-say-die resolve and Sweeney’s immersive portrayal that make “Christy” go the distance, though Foster’s cool, simmering work should make him an Oscar contender. “Christy” is a solid companion piece to Rachel Morrison’s punchier “The Fire Inside” (2024), about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the first U.S. woman to win gold in Olympic boxing. Without Martin or Shields, there would be no “Million Dollar Baby” (2004).
‘Nuremberg’ (2025)
Not a remake of the 1961 classic “Judgment at Nuremberg” directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and even a young William Shatner in a fictionalized rendering of the Nazi war criminal tribunal; this is an actual historical distillation in which names are named and faces made clear. Based on the 2013 book by Jack El-Hai, “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Nuremberg” this less epic film directed by James Vanderbilt homes in on the relationship between Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), the chief military psychiatrist assigned to shepherd the sanity of Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), during the curious interim leading to his trial. Crowe stuns in his ability to channel humanity, charm and civility into Göring while being equally reprehensible. Göring projects an air that he’s above the proceedings and will soon find his way out the door into a new life. (History books have documented a much different fate.) The titular location for the tribunal was chosen because it was where the Nazi party enacted the bulk of its race laws that would ultimately send 6 million Jews to their death. Malek, good as Freddy Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody” (2018), feels a bit of a plot broom-push here; it doesn’t help that he has to share screen time with John Slattery, overacting as colonel Andrus, the hard-nosed NCO set on there being no Nazi prisoners offing themselves before trial. At times it’s jerky and heavy-handed, and there’s some messaging that feels straight from the woke now – not that that’s bad, it just feels unnatural and overdone. Michael Shannon and Richard E. Grant are fine adds as the U.S. and British prosecutors that try to pin Göring to the wall, but without Crowe, the judgment here would lack conviction.
‘The Vortex’ (2025)
We all know gambling’s no way to get rich. Quite the opposite – just listen to the end of any sportsbook ad for the number of the gambling help hotline. Cinematic gambling addiction is also nothing new, from “The Gambler” (James Caan, 1974) to “The Gambler” (Mark Wahlberg, 2014). The same loneliness of the addict just one bet from changing their fortune, but never hitting it, is true here in Richard Zelniker’s well-crafted one-act depiction of Pete (Billy Gardell), a Las Vegas comedian deep into the local loansharks. For most of the snazzily jazz-scored film, Pete sits at the slots, dropping in coins as people drop by, the best being his buddy Johnnie B (Jeremy Luke), the casino’s low-end lounge act. Adding a little heat to the wise guy tawk is the revelation that Johnnie’s dancer wife, Shirin B (Azita Ghanizada), has something of a crush of Pete. Others that pop in are Jimmy (Christopher Titus), the guy who holds his marker, and an enigmatic Indigenous woman (Emily Alabi) who metes out proverbs that imply Pete’s luck is going to take a turn. “The Vortex” is a talkie film that hangs on the long, resigned face of Gardell, a comedian best known for his long stint on “Mike & Molly.” It’s a dramatic switch that Gardell pulls off, quietly but effectively conveying his inner dread. The film is set in 1980, against the backdrop of the MGM Grand fire that killed 85 guests, one of the deadliest hotel fires in history.
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