Tag Archives: movies

Reviewed: “Resurrection,” “No Other Choice” and “We Bury the Dead”

9 Jan

“Resurrection”

Bi Gan’s dazzling, cerebral sci-fi phantasm folds memory, myth and cinematic form into a single, dream-logic tapestry. Set in a future in which humanity has traded the ability to dream for immortality, “Resurrection” follows the last remaining “deliriant” (Jackson Yee), a Frankenstein-like being still capable of dreaming, and the woman (Shu Qi) tasked with entering his subconscious to retrieve buried truths. What unfolds is an episodic odyssey through visions shaped by Chinese history, genre homage and shifting perspectives. It’s a visually sensual smorgasbord told in chapters aligning with a different sense and narrative style — we begin with German expressionism and wind up with one of the most stunning long shots ever projected on a screen. It’s bathed ominously in languid red and takes place in a trash-strewn, cyberpunk part of the city that hosts a vampire lair where a young punker (Yee again, who plays five roles — one per sense) has come to profess his love for a mercurial chanteuse (Gengxi Li) This bold, poetic nightmare resonates with humanity and wonder. “Resurrection” should be expressly seen on the big screen to drink in Gan’s riveting dreamscape meander.

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Reviewed: ‘It Was Just An Accident,’ ‘Eden’ and ‘The Great Flood’

4 Jan

“It Was Just An Accident”

The latest from Iranian director and noted dissident Jafar Panahi is something more contrived and ambitious than his normal quietly observant style — de facto cinéma vérité in its oblique shining of the light on the oppressive nature of Iran’s theocracy. Take “Offside” (2006), “This is Not a Film” (2011) — made while under house arrest when Panahi was banned from making films — or his masterwork, “The Circle” (2000), with its zinger of a reveal that women in what seems to be a social setting are in fact in jail for the equivalent of jaywalking or speeding.


In his first film since being released from prison in 2023, Panahi engages a stage-like convention akin to something Martin McDonagh (“In Bruges,” “The Banshees of Inisherin”) might cook up, set in our world but with the players seemingly acting in their own absurdist universe. An auto mechanic, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), recognizes Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), whom he believes tortured him while in prison. Vahid employs the flat of a shovel during a traffic confrontation in the middle of a busy street to render Eghbal pliable and whisk him into his windowless van. The big tell is that the victimizer had a prosthetic leg, as does Eghbal. But Vahid was blindfolded and only know his assailant from the feel and hollowness of the leg. To ensure he has the right man, Vahid enlists the aid of others tortured by “Peg Leg” — all, likewise blindfolded. It’s an existential jurisprudence conundrum as the victims ride around in Vahid’s van bursting into bouts of rage and uncertainty as they debate what to do with their alleged former torturer, bound and gagged and locked in a tool chest in the back of the van.

The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, and it will make many best-of lists (as it should) but it is atypical Panahi, rich in production values and gingerly plotted, something that Panahi’s other films — seeking to skirt government censorship — avoided in their raw, natural, unflinching lens.

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The Best Films of 2025

28 Dec

If 2025 proved anything, it’s that cinema remains most alive when it resists easy definition. This was a year of films that slipped between categories — between art-house and genre (”Sinners,” “Bring Her Back”), intimacy and spectacle (”Resurrection”), sincerity and provocation — often in the same breath. The most compelling work didn’t shout its importance; it lingered, unsettled (”Die My Love,” “Sorry Baby”), and quietly reoriented how we look at the world, and at ourselves (One Battle After Another).

This was a year shaped less by consensus hits (”Fire and Ash” noted) than by films that demanded engagement–”Sinners” per se. Stories of grief (”Hamnet”), obsession, identity, and endurance unfolded in unexpected registers: tender where you expected bombast (”The Life of Chuck”), abrasive where comfort once reigned (”If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”). Even familiar auteurs–Paul Thomas Anderson, Ryan Coogler, Richard Linklater and Chloé Zhao to name a few–arrived with sharpened (or re-honed in the case of Zhao) instincts, pushing past their own signatures to interrogate aging, memory, power, and the quiet violence of love. Meanwhile, emerging voices (Eva Victor, “Sorry Baby”) brought urgency and texture, reminding us that cinema’s future is not only global, but defiantly personal. Female debuts behind the lens resonated in 2025, others being Mary Bronstein (“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You), Kristen Stewart (“Chronology of Water”), Kate Winslet (“Goodbye Jane”), “CSI” icon Mariska Hargitay (“My Mom Jayne”) and kind of (she co-directed a film with “Anora” helmer Sean Baker some 20 years ago), Shih-Ching Tsou (“Left-Handed Girl”).

If there’s a through-line to 2025, it’s an insistence on presence — emotional, political, and sensory. Films that ask us to sit with discomfort, to embrace ambiguity, and to find meaning not in resolution but in reckoning. They linger long after the credits roll, less concerned with tidy conclusions than with the residue they leave behind.

This year’s top 10 isn’t about consensus or cultural dominance. It’s a snapshot of a moment when filmmakers trusted audiences to lean in, to feel deeply, and to meet the work halfway. In a year defined by uncertainty and recalibration, these films reminded us why we keep returning to the dark: not for escape, but for illumination.

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Reviewed ‘Endless Cookie,’ ‘Song Sung Blue’ and ‘Marty Supreme’

26 Dec



‘Endless Cookie’ (2025)

In my side hustle as a social justice film programmer, I’ve learned a lot about how other traditions tell stories. For some Indigenous filmmakers, the concept isn’t so much beginning, middle and end, but the ever-undulating cycles of life, family history and lore – with some culminations, but also always new beginnings. I can’t think of a better crystallization than this uplifting animated documentary by Seth Scriver and half-brother Pete revolving around taped conversations between the two detailing Pete’s struggles with schizophrenia. Seth is white, Pete is biracial (white and Indigenous), fluent in Cree and lives on the Shamattawa First Nation reserve in Manitoba. “Endless Cookie” is something of a mind-blower, gonzo and a bit meta. Among its digressions and side stories is a thread of Seth forever chasing funds to finish his film; indeed, it took more than eight years to make. But the matters at the core are isolation, addiction, colonialism and the harmful impacts on generations of Indigenous people, done in vivid, hand-drawn animation by Seth that makes Adult Swim look tame; the characters are all some freaky cool combination of human, dog and veggies, conceptual neighbors to SpongeBob or the Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The title comes from that cyclical notion of life, but there is a character in the film called Cookie, who, as you might guess, is a sugary confection with legs and plenty of attitude. It’s a kind of anti-Pixar (no offense) adult animated film reminiscent of last year’s Oscar-nominated “Robot Dreams,” and this past weekend “Cookie” won Best Animated Film from the Boston Society of Film Critics.

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‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ is an epic sequel

20 Dec

Bigger, longer and uncut could be the tagline for James Cameron’s latest “Avatar” chapter, “Fire and Ash,” which at three hours and 17 minutes is five minutes longer than 2022’s “Way of Water” and 35 more than the 2009 first film in the series, still the all-time top at the box office at nearly $3 billion in ticket sales. Where the franchise is going seems to be one long continuous saga akin to the J.R.R. Tolkien films (“Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings”).

“Fire and Ash” picks up a year after “Way of Water,” with the nefarious Resources Development Administration still hunting the whalelike tulkun for amrita, a substance in their brains coveted by rich humans back on Earth for its antiaging effects. Unobtainium – such a great and obvious name for a super metal – was the object of corporate greed in the 2009 original, but now seems to be an afterthought. Back then, to gain control of the resource-rich planet Pandora, the RDA sent in the Marines to expel the indigenous Na’vi, the 10-foot tall, blue-skinned humanoids with cool prehensile tails and limpid yellow eyes, who were in the way of the extractive mining. Now beyond pillaging the sea, it feels like Pandora might be a good spot for humans to relocate, as Earth has become dangerously close to depletion (we’re circa 2150). Intergalactic colonization isn’t a new cinematic concept, to be sure, but Pandora has air that is toxic to humans. They must wear oxygen masks to get around.

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The Cambridge woman who gives locals their moment of fame

15 Dec

Angela Peri of the Boston Casting talent firm.

When Hollywood comes to town to make a “Boston movie,” like 2023’s “The Holdovers” starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa, finding the faces in the crowd is often the job of Boston Casting, the biggest such agency in the Boston area.

Boston Casting was founded in 1990 by fifth-generation Cantabrigian Angela Peri. Over a croissant and chai at the Iggy’s Bread cafe in Huron Village, Imagine, Peri walked me through her story.

She’s a Cambridge Rindge and Latin School alum who was bitten by the acting bug. Though her mother discouraged the pursuit, Peri went to Los Angeles and Italy and dabbled in the business as a makeup artist, comedian and bit performer. She brushed elbows with Denis Leary and Ellen DeGeneres on the L.A. comedy scene and, while in Italy, graced the screen ever so briefly in “Cinema Paradiso” (1988), the Academy Award-winning love letter to community movie houses.

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Reviewed: ‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,’ ‘Sisu: Road to Revenge” and ‘Eternity’

5 Dec

‘Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery’ (2025)

The latest “Knives Out Mystery” serves up Josh O’Connor in his fourth feature this year – “The Mastermind,” “The History of Sound” and “Rebuilding” are the others – as a priest seeking to suss out a killer in a reclusive burg. (It was his part in last-year’s amped-up tennis drama “Challengers” that seemed to push the affable British actor to Hollywood’s must-have list.) Director Rian Johnson (“Brick,” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi”) attracts an A-list cast to these “Knives” projects and shoehorns their unique personas into unlikely parts, which is where the magic happens. The main trick is Bond boy Daniel Craig as the Southern-twanged sleuth Benoit Blanc. He’s one part Hercule Poirot and another part Columbo with a splash of fop and Inspector Clouseau goofiness stirred in. Blanc’s the engine for the series, but it’s the casting of that ensemble he must work his way through to find out whodunit that brings joy to each episode. Here we settle in at a quaint upstate New York rectory led by monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin), a fire-and-brimstone kind of preacher with demonstrative Trumpian undertones. Others in the crew of suspects when one goes belly-up are Glenn Close as Martha Delacroix, a devout church lady and the monsignor’s stalwart ally; former bestselling sci-fi author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott); groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church); local attorney and church devotee Vera Draven (Kerry Washington); her adopted kid brother Cy (Daryl McCormack); smarmy doc and something of an Andrew Tate/Joe Rogan alt-right politico, Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner); and concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny, “Civil War’’). O’Connor’s reverend Jud is the fly in the ointment when he shows up to check in on the church. The murderous plot’s already afoot; after the first corpse crops up, Blanc’s called in by the local police chief (Mila Kunis). At two and a half hours, the film folds in on itself too many times for its own good. Many of the characters are too thinly drawn, and there are logical flaws such as footage from Cy’s mounted iPhone that’s problematic because he’s often in the frame holding the camera. O’Connor gets a passing grade as the main focus, but it’s Close and Craig that sell it. Not as tight as the first “Knives Out,” but still a passable “Murder by Death”-lite caper. 

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‘Sentimental Value’: Bad father, great filmmaker

22 Nov

Meta is all the rage these days in films about filmmakers and the filmmaking process. Take Richard Linklater’s ode to the French New Wave, “Nouvelle Vague” (available on Netflix), which follows a young Jean-Luc Godard in 1959 Paris seeking to make his first film (“Breathless”), or “Jay Kelly” from Noah Baumbach (“White Noise,” “Squid and the Whale”), in which George Clooney essentially plays George Clooney. Add to that Joachim Trier’s stirring “Sentimental Value,” about the creative tempest of filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård), an auteur well into his autumn seeking to achieve one last cinematic masterpiece.

There’s not an ounce of fat in the script, the performances are tight and lived-in and Trier, hailed for his edgy, dramatic simmers “The Worst Person in the World” (2021) and “Oslo, August 31st” (2011), again proves masterful in presenting a slow, ever-mounting, emotionalism, a devilish dark humor and a climax of melancholy and rue. The movie gets to you from the inside out.

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Reviewed: ‘Train Dreams’ & ‘Left-Handed Girl’

20 Nov

‘Train Dreams’ (2025)

Films crafted around hermits are often peppered with idyllic framings of their lush surroundings and driven by strong, intense performances by the lead, who must, for the most part, connote much of their character’s inner turmoil via facial expressions and the glance of the eye. That was the case with Ben Foster in Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace” (2018) as well as Daniel Day-Lewis in his recent comeback, “Anemone.” This film, gorgeously shot by Adolpho Veloso, has the trippy, hypnotic aura of a Terrence Malick fever dream, and we get Joel Edgerton in his richest and most robust performance to date. His Robert Grainier, we’re told, never spoke into a phone during a life that ends serenely in 1968. Based on the novella by Denis Johnson and adapted by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar – the Oscar-nominated tandem behind “Sing Sing” – “Train Dreams” is pretty much the telling of Grainier’s life in full; orphaned young, unknowing what befell his parents, and, as a quiet young man when we catch up with him, working as a logger and railway hand in the remote reaches of Idaho. His life as a loner and drifter pretty much has him moving from one lumber camp to the next until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) at a church in Fry. It’s love at first pleasantry, and with Gladys game for the woods, the two wed, build a bungalow atop the crest of a dell and have a daughter. It’s an enchanting “Little House on the Prairie” existence until a wildfire sweeps through the valley while Grainier happens to be off on one of his logging missions. When he returns, Gladys and his daughter are nowhere to be found. For a good part of the film, Grainier, propelled by guilt and grief, searches nearby towns looking for them or any news of their fate. Ultimately he returns to the woods, where he registers a small degree of comfort taking in an abandoned litter of dogs and rebuilding the cabin on the same perch. The power of guilt and grief creeps in and begins to bend reality, and Grainier struggles to make sense of his existence and the world in large. The acting is top tier, reserved and quietly affecting. Others adding heart and humanity in small, meaty parts are William H. Macy as Arn Peeples, a grumpy coot who likes to use explosives to fell his trees, and Kerry Condon as the first woman to work at a U.S. National Forestry outpost.

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Reviewed: ‘One to One: John & Yoko,’ ‘Nouvelle Vague,’ ‘Hedda’ and ‘Lurker’

13 Nov

‘One to One: John & Yoko’ (2024)

The latest from Kevin Macdonald (“Touching the Void,” “Last King of Scotland”), working with Sam Rice-Edwards, delves into the life and times of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York City during the tumultuous Richard Nixon and Vietnam War era. It’s a spry, electric rewind with sharp, well-cut footage of the time and, naturally, the music and idealistic political activism of Lennon and Ono. Leaving their massive estate in London post-Beatles breakup, Lennon and Ono came to America to try to find Kyoko Chan Cox, Ono’s daughter from an earlier marriage to jazz musician Anthony Cox, who defied a court order and hid her from Ono. Lennon and Ono, in alignment with their ideology, opted to live “plainly” in the middle of New York – a decision that would factor into Lennon’s very public murder in 1980. The focus of the film is the “One to One” concert Lennon and Ono put on at Madison Square Garden in 1972 to benefit the children of the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, shut down in 1987 but at the time the largest institution in the country caring for children with Trisomy 21 and other developmental disabilities. The concert was a reaction to an exposé by Geraldo Rivera of the inhumane, overcrowded conditions – there was one caregiver for every 30 children (the concert’s title offers a better ratio), living in squalor on cold cement. What’s shown is horrific (think Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”). Filling out the frame of this conflict-rich time capsule are the shenanigans of Nixon, the bravery of Shirley Chisholm and the kindness she extended to a wounded George Wallace, a jazzed-up Jerry Rubin, poet and defiant pacifist Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan and his controversial “garbologist,” A.J. Weberman. It’s a wild olio that captures the chaotic time with Lennon and Ono at the fore, on point and putting themselves out there in every sense of the word. You have to admire their cool, calm and rapier-sharp responses, especially Ono, fighting to see her daughter and often tagged “an ugly J*#!, who broke up the Beatles.” There’s a bit about Cambridge too, with Ono as a speaker at the First International Feminist Conference held at Harvard University. If you’re not left verklempt by the end sequence, of kids from Willowbrook in daylight, beaming, cross-cut with Lennon and Ono performing classics such as “Imagine” and “Come Together” with Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack, you need to get to the doctor to see if you have a heartbeat.

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