“Mabel” became much, much more than a hobby for Helen Macdonald, and H Is for Hawk adapts their award-winning memoir with nearly equal amounts of the magical and the mundane.
Claire Foy is understated and touching as Helen, who was teaching English at a university in Cambridge when their beloved father Alisdair (Brendan Gleeson, characteristically splendid) suddenly collapsed and died in 2007.
Leaning on memories of exploring nature and birding with their father, and their years of experience in falconry, Helen channelled feelings of grief into the adoption and training of a Eurasian goshawk.
Just the fact that the emotional vessel here is a notoriously stubborn bird of prey instead of a dog, a horse, or a wayward teen is enough to stir your interest. Director and co-writer Philippa Lowthorpe rewards it early. Foy and Gleeson shine in some bittersweet flashbacks, and Helen’s cautious bonding with Mabel is in turns emotional and educational.
As Mabel hones her hunting instincts, the wildlife framing from cinematographers Charlotte Bruus Christiansen and Mark Payne-Gill can be beautifully majestic. Eventually, though, the lack of firmer hands from Lowthorpe and editor Nico Leunen begins to take a toll.
The pace of the film becomes laborious and plodding, enough to even overshadow the introspective and touching work from Foy. There is never a doubt we believe the healing journey Helen and Mabel are sharing, but the excessive documentary-ready wildlife footage eventually increases our detachment while it bloats the run time.
Despite the similarities with 1969’s Kes, Lowthorpe isn’t trying for a Ken Loach-style social critique. At the heart of this film is an intensely personal story of “an honest encounter with death.” It is a unique and well-crafted film, but the honesty of H Is for Hawk is just spread too thin for a truly memorable flight.
On this week’s Screening Room podcast, Hope & George review 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, The Rip, No Other Choice, Dead Man’s Wire, The Choral, Night Patrol, Maldoror, Resurrection and Obex! PLUS! News & Notes from Daniel Baldwin, ada The Schlocketeer!
In case you need a reminder about the versatility of Ralph Fiennes, here it is. In the same week we find him trying to outsmart a psychotic gang leader while working to cure a rage virus in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, he’s also looking to assemble a suitable group of singers in the midst of WW1 for The Choral.
The man has range, and he’s wonderful as Dr. Henry Guthrie, who has returned to Yorkshire in 1919 after a career in Germany. Those ties draw suspicious catcalls of “Fritz!’ from the locals, but with many of the best male voices leaving for the army, the choral committee feels he’s the best choice to move the group forward as chorus master.
The blunt and uncompromising Dr. Guthrie isn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect, which is evident right from the auditions. Fiennes gives him some delightfully pained expressions when notes are mangled, but glorious looks of enlightenment when true talent hits his ears.
Director Nicholas Hytner and writer Alan Bennett set a pleasing enough hook, but end up getting bogged down in a marsh of routine subplots and surface-level messaging.
Hytner (The Madness Of King George, The History Boys) gives the wartime period details a sheen that seems too glossy for an effective contrast between the boys who’ll soon go to the front and those coming home. It begins to resemble a more musical riff on Dead Poets Society, but the boys’ wartime bravado and impatience for sexual experience just distract from the more engaging conflict with Dr. Guthrie.
Due to the young age of his best male voice, Dr. Guthrie has to make some story changes to the Choral’s performance piece, “The Dream of Gerontius” by Edward Elgar – without telling Elgar himself.
And then guess who shows up.
If the themes of wartime loss and sacrifice cut deeper, the performance tension would play an understandable supporting role. But little outside of Fiennes’s orbit holds your attention, and The Choral settles into its place as a perfectly generic period drama.
Even without the cameo from Al Pacino, Dead Man’s Wire has the gritty, absurdist vibe of legendary 70s thriller Dog Day Afternoon. Also based on true crime events, the latest from director Gus Van Sant leans on a timely, anti-hero tone and some stellar performances for a look into the desperate edges of the American dream.
Bill Skarsgård is utterly manic and completely magnetic as Tony Kiritsis, who held an Indianapolis mortgage company executive hostage in February of 1977. Kiritsis, who hoped to build a shopping center on his 17 acres of land, became convinced that Meridian Mortgage president M.L. Hall (Pacino) was sabotaging the project. Finding M.L. out of town, Kiritis settled on son Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things) for his plan of revenge.
Armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a “dead man’s wire” running from the trigger to Richard’s neck, Tony demanded media access, immunity, compensation and a personal apology from M.L. himself.
Tony’s mood swings with wild abandon, but he’s downright starstruck when telling his story to WCYD deejay Fred Temple, the “voice of Indianapolis.” The great Colman Domingo plays Temple with a grounded mix of caution and curiosity, as the confused local celeb is reluctantly pulled into a life-or- death drama where a potential murderer is a gushing fanboy.
Writer Austin Kolodney comes from a comedy background, and Van Sant weaves some darkly comedic layers through terrific period details that only enhance the through line from 1977 to today’s breaking news.
Just two years ago, we saw how a communal feeling of hopelessness can turn a fugitive into a heroic man of the people. Dead Man’s Wire reminds us this feeling of simmering resentment is as old as the art of stacking decks. And while his narrative approach ultimately carries more polish than bite, Van Sant and a terrific ensemble never fail to make this history lesson an engaging high wire act of sadness, surprise and bittersweet delight.
The last decade has seen an explosion in Spanish language horror—so many incredible options that we went fuzzy math for this list and still had to leave off some incredible movies, including Amigo, Veronica, The Platform, Terrified, Luz: The Flower of Evil, La Llorona, Huesera: The Bone Woman, and The Untamed. So, make sure you check every one of those out, but first, you should peruse the films that did make our list.
Thanks as always to a great crowd at Gateway Film Center!
6. El Conde (2023, Chile)
On Netflix Pablo Larraín has a particular gift for poetic historical retellings grounded in a singular woman’s perspective: Spencer, Jackie. But his passion for the political history of his native Chile rings through most of his films, including Naruda and No. But did we see a vampire movie coming?
El Conde reimagines Augusto Pinochet as a vampire weary of his many years on earth and ready to leave his bickering family in squalor and finally die – until the church sends a vampire slayer after him. What follows is a near-slapstick political satire, sort of The Death of Stalin meets What We Do in the Shadows.
Every moment’s a delight, and a late-film reveal is a cynical and biting reward for a gloriously spent couple of hours.
5. Tigers Are Not Afraid (2019, Mexico)
On Shudder, Prime and AMC+
Lopez’s fable of children and war brandishes the same themes as Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, but grounds the magic with a rugged street style.
Tigers follows Estrella, a child studying fairy tales—or, she was until her school is temporarily closed due to the stray bullets that make it unsafe for students. As Estrella and her classmates hide beneath desks to avoid gunfire, her teacher hands her three broken pieces of chalk and tells her these are her three wishes.
But wishes never turn out the way you want them to.
4. Piggy (2022, Spain)
On Hulu, HBO Max, Prime, AMC+
Mean girls are a fixture in cinema, from Mean Girls to Carrie, Heathers to Jawbreaker to Napoleon Dynamite and countless others. Why is that? It’s because we like to see mean girls taken down.
Writer/director Carlota Pereda wants to challenge that base instinct. But first, she is going to make you hate Maca (Claudia Salas), Roci (Camille Aguilar) and Claudia (Irene Ferreiro). In one tiny Spanish town, the three girls make Sara’s (Laura Galán, remarkable) life utterly miserable. Like worse than Carrie White’s.
The filmmaker complicates every trope, all the one-dimensional victim/hero/villain ideas this genre and others feast on. Redemption doesn’t come easily to anyone. Pereda also seamlessly blends themes and ideas from across the genre, upending expectations but never skimping on brutal, visceral horror.
3. The Coffee Table (2022, Spain)
On Shudder, Prime, Tubi, AMC+
A remarkably well written script fleshed out by a stunning ensemble becomes utter torture as you want so badly for some other outcome. Co-writer/director Caye Casas ties threads, builds anxiety, plunges the depths of “what’s the worst that could happen?” and leaves you shaken.
David Pareja and Estefania de los Santos craft indelible, believable, beautifully flawed characters so convincing that their experience becomes painful for you. Casas salts the wounds with dark comedy, but the tenderness and tragedy collaborate toward something far more crushingly human.
2. The Wolf House (2018, Chile)
On Prime, Tubi, Plex, Fawesome
Another Chilean horror, so you’re safe in assuming it has something to do with Pinochet. This breathtaking, incredibly creepy stop motion animated wonder tells of a true cult, Colonia Dignidad. One of its inhabitants escapes into the woods, has a near-miss catastrophe with a wolf, and hides in an abandoned house.
Directors/animators Cristobal León and Joaquín Cociña pull you into Maria’s dreamlike world, as her thoughts and reality blend before your eyes. Sets are painted, built, melted, and destroyed on the screen as Maria’s thoughts and the dangers she faces come and go. It’s an eerily beautiful and unforgettable fairy tale rooted in reality.
1. When Evil Lurks (2023, Argentina)
On Shudder, Hulu, Max, AMC+, Prime
Just when you thought no one could do anything fresh with a possession movie, Terrified filmmaker Demián Rugna surprises you. When Evil Lurks does sometimes feel familiar, its road trip to hell detouring through The Crazies, among others. But Rugna’s take on all the familiar elements feels new, in that you cannot and would not want to predict where he’s headed.
This is a magnificently written piece of horror, and Rugna’s expansive direction gives it an otherworldly yet dirty, earthy presence.
The inexplicable ugliness – this particularly foul presence of evil – is handled with enough distance, enough elegance to make the film almost beautiful, regardless of the truly awful nature of the footage. And Rugna never lets up. Each passing minute is more difficult than the last, to the very last, which is an absolute knife to the heart.
Hope & George review this week’s new releases: Is This Thing On?, Primate, Greenland 2: Migration, Father Mother Sister Brother, The Chronology of Water, All That’s Left Behind, and Sleepwalker.
January is often regarded as a dumping ground for throwaway theater releases, featuring films not good enough to make into the holiday/award season push.
But this month is the perfect time to catch Father Mother Sister Brother, a richly human big screen triptych that explores the type of strained family get- togethers many of us experienced just weeks ago.
Writer/director Jim Jarmusch reportedly began writing the film as a way to cast Tom Waits as Adam Driver’s dad, and the opening “Father” sequence gives us just that. Jeff (Driver) and sister Emily (Mayim Bialik) don’t exactly seemed thrilled about visiting their father (Waits) at his place in very rural New Jersey. As the siblings converse in the car, we learn some things about Dad. But it isn’t long into their strained family reunion that we begin to doubt every one of these things.
The “Mother” chapter takes us to Dublin, Ireland, where Mom (Charlotte Rampling) is awaiting daughters Lilith (Vicky Krieps) and Timothea (Cate Blanchett) for their annual visit. Though life updates are spilled around a beautiful array of tea and cakes, only a few crumbs of truth actually get shared.
And in Paris for the “Sister Brother” finale, twins Skye (Indya Moore) and Billy (Luka Sabbat) meet after the recent plane crash that killed their parents. From a small cafe to an empty apartment, sister and brother sort through mementos and memories as they take a small step toward moving on.
Though Jarmusch films can sometimes be glacially paced (The Limits of Control) or deadpan enough (The Dead Don’t Die) to frustrate the uninitiated, FMSB finds him at perhaps his most tender and warmly funny.
The segments aren’t connected through these characters, but instead via beverages, watches, skateboarders and the old English phrase “Bob’s your uncle.” The camera lingers on old frames, photographs and empty rooms, making a subtle call to all that caused these recent moments to be less worthy of commemorating. Ultimately, what we don’t see happen begins to weigh as heavily as the things we do.
The cast – full of Jarmusch favorites old and new – is uniformly terrific. Each character is weary with obligations and regrets that seem as authentic as they are relatable, and each reacts to breaks of humor in ways that are different yet still feel very much like family.
And those people you were with over the holidays – would you have hung out even if they weren’t your family? Father Mother Sister Brother might make you consider the answer a bit longer.
Just find a screening, and you know, Bob’s your uncle.
2025 was yet another year with an impressive list of great performances from young film actors. Ana Sophia Heger (She Rides Shotgun), Cary Christopher (Weapons), and Nina Ye (Left-Handed Girl) were among those seasoned beyond their years. Now, The Plague‘s Everett Blunck leads a terrific ensemble of youngsters to join this group of standout turns.
Blunck (last year’s Griffin in Summer) is 12 year-old Ben, one of the young athletes spending the summer at a boys’ water polo camp in New England. A bit shy and awkward, Ben still finds a way to be accepted at the cool kids’ table.
And led by the smug, sarcastic Jake (Kayo Martin, also stellar), those kids target Eli (Kenny Rasmussen, just wonderful) – the weird kid with the rash – for taunts and bullying. Dubbing Eli’s skin condition as a “plague” that’s contagious, the boys are not shy about the finger pointing and mocking laughter.
Ben goes along to get along. But when he dares to show Eli some sympathy, he crosses an unpopular line. Jake and the King Bees decide it is Ben who now has the plague and must be cast out.
Writer/director Charlie Polinger’s feature debut bursts with vision and craftsmanship. He wanders the confines of the swimming pool, locker room and the campus buildings with a probing, studious eye, unveiling some gorgeously shot sequences with a cold detachment that fuels the mood of alienation.
Polinger’s writing is also urgent enough to make this more than just a chlorinated Lord of the Flies. Joel Edgerton’s coach character is aware of some of what’s going on in camp, but he’s purposely kept on the fringes, as Polinger explores how the boys navigate their cruelty around the adults’ anti-bullying sit downs.
Working equally as a microcosm and a singular coming-of-age narrative, The Plague is fascinating, heartbreaking and often quite beautiful. It’s a major debut for a gifted filmmaker, and an emotional showcase for a talented group of young performers.
Damn fine year, 2025. Well, for movies it was. Magnificent original films, like Ryan Coogler’s breathtaking Sinners, as well as blistering new work from Park Chan-wook and Yorgos Lanthimos. Gorgeous literary adaptations, including Chloé Zhao’s heartbreaking Hamnet, Clint Bentley’s lonesome Train Dreams, and GDT’s wondrous Frankenstein. Breathtaking stage-to-screen visions from Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Kail. Incredible documentaries, the best superhero film in years, remarkable horror, unusual comedies—if you couldn’t find a movie to love this year, you were not looking. But, we had to narrow it down, so here are our 25 favorites.
One Battle After Another
Though the massive cast is characteristically littered with incredible talents crackling with the electricity of writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s script, Benicio del Toro stands out. He brings a laidback humor to the film that draws out Leonardo DiCaprio’s infectious silliness. While much of One Battle After Another is a nail-biting political thriller turned action flick, thanks to these two, it’s also one of Anderson’s funniest movies.
It may also be his most relevant. Certainly, the most of-the-moment. A master of the period piece, with this film Anderson reaches back to clarify present. By contrasting Bob’s paranoid, bumbling earnestness with the farcical evil of the Christmastime Adventurer’s Club, he satirizes exactly where we are today and why it looks so much like where we’ve been during every revolution.
But it is the filmmaker’s magical ability to populate each moment of his 2-hour-41-minute run time with authentic, understated, human detail that grounds the film in our lived-in reality and positions it as another masterpiece.
2. Sinners
Ryan Coogler reteams with longtime creative partner Michael B. Jordan to sing a song of a 1932 Mississippi juke joint. The Smoke Stack twins (Jordan) are back from Chicago, a truckload of ill-gotten liquor and a satchel full of cash along with them. They intend to open a club “for us, by us” and can hardly believe their eyes when three hillbillies come calling.
Jack O’Connell (an amazing actor in everything he’s done since Eden Lake) has a brogue and a banjo. He and his two friends would love to come on in, sing, dance, and spend some money, if only Smoke would invite them.
It’s scary. It’s sexy. The action slaps. It’s funny when it needs to be, sad just as often. It looks and sounds incredible. And there’s a cameo from Buddy F. Guy, in case you needed a little authenticity. When Ryan Coogler writes and directs a vampire movie, he gives you reason to believe there is yet new life for the old monster.
3. Train Dreams
Beautiful, lush, and quietly meditative, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is the kind of movie you just don’t ever get to see. It’s a wonderous, melancholy character study set against the rapidly changing America of the early 20th Century, and it is shouldered by the best performance of Joel Edgerton’s career.
Edgerton has yet to turn in a bad performance, nor even a mediocre one, but he seems custom built for this introspective figure, a witness, haunted but open and admirably vulnerable. Bentley surrounds him with so many marvelous performances, sometimes leaving an astonishing mark—on audience and protagonist alike—in only a single scene. Edgerton will no doubt be remembered this awards season, as should the film itself.
4. Hamnet
Chloé Zhao has crafted, aided by magnificent performances and hauntingly stunning cinematography from Lukasz Zal (The Zone of Interest, Cold War), a film that is shattering in its articulation that it is the depth of love that deepens and amplifies the pain of grief.
People make movies about grief all the time. We can expect one every Oscar season. But what Chloé Zhao does with Hamnet is ask us to experience that grief, not just witness it, and in experiencing it we understand the power and vital importance of art.
5. Frankenstein
Lush and gorgeous, even when it is running with blood, the world del Toro creates for his gods and monsters is breathtaking. The choices are fresh and odd, allowing for a rich image of creator and creation, the natural versus the magnificent.
Oscar Isaac is a marvel of angry arrogance made humble. As his creature, the long and limby Jacob Elordi offers a monster who’s more sensitive son than wounded manchild.
Mia Goth delivers the same uncanny grace that sets so many of her characters apart, and del Toro’s script allows Elizabeth an arc unlike any previous adaptation. You don’t wander into a Guillermo del Toro film expecting less anything than glorious excess—another reason why Frankenstein and he were meant for one another.
6. No Other Choice
Park Chan-wook’s crafted a seething satire on capitalism but manages to edge the biting farce with strange moments of deep empathy—just one example of the tonal tightrope Park doesn’t just walk, he prances across.
No Other Choice is complicated but never convoluted, constantly compelling and almost alarmingly funny. Between the intricate detail of the thriller and the gallows humor of the comedy, Park crafts a wondrously entertaining film.
7. It Was Just an Accident
This is the first film for Jafar Panahi (No Bears, Taxi, Closed Curtain) since Iran lifted his decade-long filmmaking and travel ban, and while he’s no longer filming himself in secret, Panahi’s storytelling still bursts with intimacy and courage. It Was Just an Accident is more proof that he is one of the true modern-day masters, with a clear and distinctive voice that demands attention.
8. Sentimental Value
Joachim Trier’s rich, quiet, masterfully performed film is about the places we keep our memories rather than dealing with them directly. It could be a house, like the one patriarch Gustav Borg (never-better Stellan Skarsgård) turns into a movie set. It could be the movies, or any art where the artist attempts to address conflicting emotion and memory without the interference of others’ interpretations or responses. But at the heart of these repositories is the family that fosters these memories. In this case, among others, Gustav’s daughters (Renate Reinsve, magnificent, and Inga Ibsdottter Lilleaas, also wonderful).
Sentimental Value is a gorgeously crafted family drama brimming with visual flourishes, comedic moments, heartbreak and honesty. It also boasts one of the finest ensembles of 2025.
9. Hamilton
(Released in theaters for the first time this year) The difference between seeing something live and feeling the energy exchange between cast and audience, as opposed to watching it on a screen where you’re removed from the human element of it, is often hard to overcome. (Remember Cats?) But Thomas Kail – who also directed the 2016 Broadway shows that were recorded for this film – has crafted a near perfect mix of spatial movement and character intimacy.
10. Bugonia
The script from Will Tracy and Jang Joon-hwan offers director Yorgos Lanthimos and his small but savvy (including Emma Stone and Jesse Plemmons, brazenly magnificent) cast fertile ground for the bleak absurdism the filmmaker does so well. Bugonia treads tonal shifts magnificently, slipping from comedy to thriller to horror and back with precision. Lanthimos’s control over audience emotion has never been tighter.
11. Superman
12. Pee-wee Herman as Himself
13. Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
14. The Ugly Stepsister
15. Black Bag
16. Eddington
17. Hedda
18. Weapons
19. Zootopia 2
20. Friendship
21. Marty Supreme
22. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
23. A House of Dynamite
24. The Secret Agent
25. Baltimorons
Honorable mentions: Sirat, Nouvelle Vague, Warfare, Eephus
What an incredible year for horror! Two unquestionable Oscar contenders, great international fare, great reboots and sequels, amazing original material, great independent horror, great studio horror—remarkably spooky stuff!
The year held so much great stuff that we were forced to leave incredible films off our final top 10 list. Our apologies to Companion and Animale, Hood Witch and Dead Mail, Final Destination: Bloodlines and 40 Acres and a lot of other really quality films. But that’s just how strong the competition was this year!
10. The Toxic Avenger
On Prime
Though the story’s changed, much remains the same in writer/director Macon Blair’s reboot in all its goopy, corrosive, violent, hilarious glory.
Peter Dinklage is one of the most talented actors working today, and as Winston he is effortlessly heartbreaking and tender. He’s also really funny, and this is not necessarily the kind of humor every serious actor can pull off.
Blair’s vision for this film couldn’t be more spot-on. Joyous, silly, juvenile, insanely violent, hateful of the bully, in love with the underdog—Blair’s Toxic Avenger retains the best of Troma, rejects the worst, and crafts something delirious and wonderful.
9. Chain Reactions
On Prime
Not everyone believes Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a masterpiece of American filmmaking. I find those people suspicious. Luckily, those are not the people filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe (Memory: The Origins of Alien, 78/52) talks to for his latest documentary, Chain Reactions.
The film is a celebration of 50 years of TCM. The celebrants are five of the film’s biggest fans: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama. It’s a good group. Each share intimate and individual reminiscences and theories about the film, its impact on them as artists, and its relevance as a piece of American cinema. What their ruminations have in common is just as fascinating as the ways in which their thoughts differ.
Each of these artists came to the film from a different perspective—some having seen it early enough in their youth to have been left scarred, others having taken it in as adults and still being left scarred. But each one sees layers and importance—poetry, even—in Hooper’s slice of savage cinema.
8. Invader
On Shudder & Prime
Lean, mean and affecting, Mickey Keating’s take on the home invasion film wastes no time. In a wordless—though not soundless—opening, the filmmaker introduces an unhinged presence.
Immediately Keating sets our eyes and ears against us. His soundtrack frequently blares death metal, a tactic that emphasizes a chaotic, menacing mood the film never shakes. Using primarily handheld cameras from the unnerving opening throughout the entire film, the filmmaker maintains an anarchic energy, a sense of the characters’ frenzy and the endless possibility of violence.
Joe Swanberg, with limited screentime and even more limited dialog, crafts a terrifying image of havoc. His presence is perversely menacing, an explosion of rage and horror. Invader delivers a spare, nasty, memorable piece of horror in just over an hour. It will stick with you a while longer.
7. Bring Her Back
On Prime, HBO, Hulu, and Disney+
Filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou drew attention in 2022 for their wildly popular feature debut, Talk to Me. Before releasing the sequel, due out this August, the pair changes the game up with a different, but at least equally disturbing, look at grief.
It’s a slow burn, a movie that communicates dread brilliantly with its cinematography and pacing. But when Bring Her Back hits the gas, dude! Nastiness not for the squeamish! Especially if you have a thing about teeth, be warned. But the body horror always serves the narrative, deepening your sympathies even as it has you hiding your eyes.
Australia has a great habit of sending unsettling horror our way. The latest package from Down Under doesn’t disappoint.
6. The Monkey
On Prime, HBO, Hulu, and Disney+
Why is it that so many kids’ toys are creepy? Not that you should call The Monkey a toy. You should not, ever. Because this windup organ grinder monkey, with its red eyes and horrifyingly realistic teeth, is more of a furry, murder happy nightmare.
The film itself is a match made in horror heaven. Osgood Perkins (Longlegs, Gretel & Hansel, The Blackcoat’s Daughter) adapts and directs the short story by Stephen King about sibling rivalry and the unpredictability of death.
Perkins surrounds deliberately low energy leads with bizarre, colorful characters—even more colorful when they catch fire, explode, are disemboweled, etcetera. The film is laced with wonderful bursts of Final Destination-like bloodletting, as the Monkey’s executions are carried out via Rube Goldberg chain reactions that quickly become fun to anticipate.
Yes, fun. And funny.
5. Dust Bunny
In theaters
Imagine Guillermo del Toro meets Wes Anderson. Equal parts fanciful and gruesome, the film tells the tale of a precocious youth named Aurora (Sophie Sloan), who hires the neighbor in 5B (Mads Mikkelsen) to kill the monster that lives under her bed.
Sloan delivers Roald Dahl’s Matilda by way of Wednesday Addams, braids and all. Mikkelsen’s adorably gruff, and the great Sigourney Weaver is having a blast playing gleefully against type and shoplifting every second of screentime.
Writer/director Bryan Fuller wastes not a frame of his feature film debut. The saturated colors and intricate patterns and textures of the set design, the ballet of horror that is his shadow imagery, the boldly whimsical costuming—all of it conjuring an amplified fairy tale. It’s tough to believe this remarkably confident feature is his first foray behind the camera.
4. Weapons
On Prime, HBO, Hulu, and Disney+
Weapons delivers an elaborate mystery slowly revealing itself, ratcheting tension, and leading to a bloody satisfying climax. Unspooling as an epilogue followed by character-specific chapters, the film builds around a single event, developing dread as it delivers character studies of a town of hapless, fractured, flawed individuals in over their heads.
This is smartly crafted, beautifully acted horror. Those who worry Cregger’s left nasty genre work behind for something more elevated need not fear. Weapons is here to work your nerves, make you gasp, and shed some blood. It does it pretty well.
3. The Ugly Stepsister
On Prime, HBO, Hulu, Disney+, and Shudder
Writer/director Emilie Blichfeldt infuses her feature debut with an impossible-to-ignore blast of sharp wit, subdued rage, and grotesque bodily horrors.
The Ugly Stepsister(Den stygge stesøsteren) is the latest new angle to a classic tale, but don’t expect it follow the trend of humanizing misunderstood villains. Blichfeldt makes sure there are plenty of bad guys and girls throughout this Norwegian Cinderella story, punctuated by grisly violence surprisingly close to what’s in the 17th Century French version of the fairy tale penned by Charles Perrault.
It is fierce, funny, gross and subversively defiant. But is one feature film enough to immediately put Blichfeldt on the watch list of cinema’s feminist hell raisers?
Yes. The shoe fits.
2. Frankenstein
On Netflix
Lush and gorgeous, even when it is running with blood, the world del Toro creates for his gods and monsters is breathtaking. The choices are fresh and odd, allowing for a rich image of creator and creation, the natural versus the magnificent.
Oscar Isaac is a marvel of angry arrogance made humble. As his creature, the long and limby Jacob Elordi offers a monster who’s more sensitive son than wounded manchild.
Mia Goth delivers the same uncanny grace that sets so many of her characters apart, and del Toro’s script allows Elizabeth an arc unlike any previous adaptation. You don’t wander into a Guillermo del Toro film expecting less anything than glorious excess—another reason why Frankenstein and he were meant for one another.
1. Sinners
On Prime, HBO, Hulu, and Disney+
Ryan Coogler reteams with longtime creative partner Michael B. Jordan to sing a song of a 1932 Mississippi juke joint. The Smoke Stack twins (Jordan) are back from Chicago, a truckload of ill-gotten liquor and a satchel full of cash along with them. They intend to open a club “for us, by us” and can hardly believe their eyes when three hillbillies come calling.
Jack O’Connell (an amazing actor in everything he’s done since Eden Lake) has a brogue and a banjo. He and his two friends would love to come on in, sing, dance, and spend some money, if only Smoke would invite them.
It’s scary. It’s sexy. The action slaps. It’s funny when it needs to be, sad just as often. It looks and sounds incredible. And there’s a cameo from Buddy F. Guy, in case you needed a little authenticity. When Ryan Coogler writes and directs a vampire movie, he gives you reason to believe there is yet new life for the old monster.
