Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo)

Rico (Juan Collado) is 19 years old, lives with his Dominican mom and sister (Yohanna Florentino and Nathaly Navarro, respectively) in their Bronx apartment and has no grand plan beyond shilling bootleg cocktails on local beaches, and then getting drunk himself, and then waking and baking the next morning and doing it all over again. But when his 16-year-old girlfriend Destiny (Destiny Checo) tells him she’s pregnant, he is forced to grow up in a hurry. Well, let’s say it requires him to grow up in a hurry as writer/director Joel Alfonso Vargas’s low-budget indie takes place in that liminal space between realizing you need to grow up and, in fact, doing it. Rico wants to keep the baby if only to prove he’s not the man his father was, even if he keeps slipping into his father’s old habits, lurching between talking a big game about personal responsibility and then getting fired and coming home drunk, brought home in Collado’s oft-exasperated and occasionally exasperating performance demonstrating the supreme difficulty of metaphorically just managing to walk with one foot in front of the other. Those oscillating emotions are enhanced by the portrayal of Rico and his family, introduced screaming at one another before a quick cut shows them sharing a sweet moment, like the previous one never happened, illustrating in equal measure the pressures that go with living and very real love. 

Vargas accentuates such emotional fluctuation with a visual strategy of static frames and long takes, evoking the movie as one carved from slice of life observation more than any kind of electric plotting, and just sort of letting moments both big and small play themselves out in what feels like real time. The basic elements are familiar, and Rico can even sometimes be a bear to hang around, though that makes you feel like everyone else in his orbit, wanting to shake him and tell him to get it together because just enough sweetness emerges to make you want to believe in him. And though the focus is on Rico, “Mad Bills” never loses sight of Destiny, who moves in with his family and then moves out, coming into her own even as Rico struggles to do the same. The end sneaks up on you. It’s neither happy nor sad, pitched in that uncertain space between, Rico and Destiny clutching one another’s hand in a way that made me think of, well, who else but Bruce Springsteen: “Well, cuddle up, angel, cuddle up, my little dove, and we’ll ride down, baby, into this tunnel of love.”

The Weight

1953’s “The Wages of Fear” beget 1977’s “Sorcerer,” both adapted from Georges Arnaud’s 1950 novel in which hardscrabble men are paid to transport nitroglycerin canisters by truck through the perilous South American jungle. And though Padraic McKinley’s 2026 directorial debut “The Weight” is culled from original screenplay by Matthew Booi and Shelby Gaines, it owes a significant debt to those two movies, nevertheless, updating it for the present even though it takes place in the past. Set in 1933, “The Weight” involves several men hauling gold by backpack through the Oregon wilderness. That’s the first nifty twist on the original conceit: they are going on foot rather than by truck. (As David Bowie once noted, duplicate, then elaborate.) The second twist is that the crew is comprised of convicts hauling the gold to earn their freedom rather than money. Moreover, the man ostensibly in charge, Samuel Murphy (Ethan Hawke), also seeks freedom to reunite with his daughter, an appropriate detail. Because if Ethan Hawke was ever going to make a movie about a parent-child reunion, it was going to be served with a side of existentialism.

Widowed and raising the seven-year-old Penny (Avy Berry) during The Great Depression, Murphy is introduced as struggling to make ends meet, winding up evicted and then incarcerated when he confronts an undercover police office he thinks harbors bad intentions. With his daughter in state custody, Murphy ends up at a labor camp run by Clancy (Russell Crowe), fingering this prisoner as a man of strong aptitude and intelligence and enlisting him to enlist a small team to transport all the gold from a mine about to be claimed by the government on the condition of early release. That’s a lot of set up, and at several minutes under two hours, “The Weight” does an impressively economical job of doling out information while also establishing character in single scenes. When Clancy invites Murphy into his place to make his pitch, the way Hawke has his character take a beat as he does so, like he’s trying to get his bearings at being inside a real home, communicates so much. Hawke and Crowe develop such an enjoyable rapport as two equally wary men, in fact, that even if you understand why the narrative prevents the latter from appearing more, you still wish that he would.

In addition to the pair of armed men safeguarding Clancy’s interests, Murphy handpicks three fellow prisoners, Singh (Avi Nash), Olson (Lucas Lynggaard Tønnesen), Rankin (Austin Amelio), as his gold-hauling crew. Not long into their trek, they are joined at her insistence by the indigenous Anna (Julia Jones). Her inclusion is less a narrative stretch, frankly, than Rankin’s, the latter deliberately introduced as untrustworthy and beggaring belief that the otherwise thorough Murphy would call on him. (Amelio’s performance is still spot-on.) Indentured to servitude, Anna is nothing less than a prisoner too, seeing this crew passing by as her only chance at escape. And through nothing more than a single introductory close-up in which we see her sizing up these men as they pass her by, “The Weight” conveys her intelligence as no less formidable than Murphy’s. In one suspenseful sequence, she saves his life, a neat blending of presence of mind with romantic spark.

As he reproved with his Oscar nomination for last year’s “Blue Moon,” Hawke has a gift for talkative roles, though in “The Weight,” he demonstrates an identical knack for non-verbal communication. Even without the fancy shot reflecting a crackling campfire in Murphy’s eyes, Hawke figuratively conjures that fiery-eyed nature throughout in a determined gaze imbuing his character’s constant deliberation. Hawke also lets in just enough vulnerability to render the character believable. The tautest sequence involves transporting all the gold bars across a rickety wooden bridge by way of the most dangerous game of catch of all time, necessitating Murphy receiving one gold brick at a time in the middle of the overpass and then hurling it himself to the other side. With each reception and throw, Hawke evinces a palpable physical exhaustion that only amplifies the suspense.

The title of McKinley’s movie, of course, is not just literal but also figurative. Not just in the emotional weight that Murphy carries from wanting to reunite with his daughter but in how these men can only be set free in this capitalist society by doing capitalism’s bidding. The government’s very meddling that this quest seeks to avoid might intend to temper that sense of greed, and Singh is revealed as a socialist in a mid-movie monologue outlining the alternative, but the concluding twist also can’t quite square the circle between those opposing ideologies. Not that it necessarily needs to. “The Weight” still succeeds as something like a spiritually freeing heist movie, and besides, the penultimate scene in which a few characters do nothing but share a single cigarette by passing it around suggests its own kind of collectivist victory.

Late Fame

Set in present-day New York, the resurgent celebrity of director Kent Jones’s “Late Fame” is Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a one-time poet of the city’s downtown bohemian art scene. Based on a posthumously published novella written in 1895 by Arthur Schnitzler (Samy Burch adapted it), “Late Fame” begins with Saxberger’s lone published collection of poetry, Way Past Gone, having been discovered by recent NYU grad Meyers (Edmund Donovan) who loosely runs a small artistic circle. That Saxberger is less a celebrity, really, than a cult favorite, and that he is reclaimed by this miniscule clique rather than, say, a poetry foundation, or a New York Times culture writer, evokes “Late Fame’s” more modest aims and quiet revelations, both of which help to temper some of its broader elements, as does Dafoe’s affecting, understated performance.

Saxberger has been working at the post office for decades with his poetry-writing past so far behind him that his dive bar buddies are unaware of it. Yet, for one brief moment, we also glimpse Saxberger with a plastic bag that appears to contain a couple books, not only suggesting that he has maintained his interest in the art world but subtly rebutting the frequent movie cliché that a blue-collar lifestyle and intellectual pursuits do not go hand in hand. He is carrying that bag, in fact, when he is approached by Meyers, who lavishes him with praise. Meyers talks about how much the poems relate to the present moment, an idea that is never expounded upon any further, tinging it with the scent not so much of someone blowing smoke but the way a young person who doesn’t yet know any better tends to talk in too many superlatives. As he prattles on, Jones gives Dafoe a big, juicy close-up, his lips transforming into a smile at once flabbergasted and flattered, instantly communicating that no matter how much he begs off, he will become ingratiated with Meyers and his group.

That group dubs itself The Enthusiasm Society, an alternative to the cynicism and snark that rules the modern age, even if occasionally in their Whit Stillman-like affectations a little snark still shines through, especially when addressing the social media influencer gang that hangs out in the same place on the other side of the same room. They welcome Saxberger into their group as some odd mixture of mentor and mascot, urging him to write a new poem for a reading they plan to stage. Given not just these plot points but The Enthusiasm Society’s retro attire, like it’s a “Midnight in Paris” costume party, “Late Fame” tiptoes right up to the line of caricature. Yet, if they become semi-unwitting caricatures in the context of the movie’s world, they never quite become caricatures in terms of the movie itself. You find it hard to take them seriously, but you believe that they take themselves seriously, rich kids cosplaying as struggling artists. 

Their performative nature is echoed in Gloria (Greta Lee), the lone female member of their expectedly male-heavy group. Saxberger does not meet her initially, a shrewd narrative decision to enhance her intentionally created air of mystery, and from the moment she first sweeps into the room in her cabaret star-like costuming and larger-than-life manner, it is obvious to us and to him that she is performing. It’s a charismatic performance, both Gloria’s and Lee’s, and though Saxberger is partially content to let himself get caught up in it, he also delicately presses her for the truth. That truth is not hard to foresee and speaks to the screenplay’s occasional tendency toward pat predictability. Yet, just as often, the script transcends it, appearing to plant familiar seeds that don’t quite pay off in ways you expect, or even more refreshingly, such as in the case of Saxberger being on the wagon, don’t pay off at all.

The Enthusiasm Society does expectedly combust, but this is portrayed less as a nominal surprise than a reflection of how such movements are always destined to burn as briefly as they might brightly. Indeed, the one fragment we hear in an internal monologue of Saxberger’s never-finished new poem merely evokes how the season of Saxberger’s poetry has long since passed. The poem he reads at the climactic event turns out to be an old one, and that poem turns out to be an act of remembering, providing the sequence two layers of reflection. And the way Dafoe infuses his character’s reading with a sense of peace rather than disappointment or even wistfulness brings “Late Fame” home. It’s as if he is flipping through an old photo album and when he’s done, he shuts it and puts it back on the shelf, happy to have the memories, content in knowing that’s all they are. And the final scene goes to show that in a movie made of so many words, or attempted words, that sometimes, no words need to be spoken at all.

Erupcja

In “The Moment,” Charli XCX channeled Larry David for the TikTok generation. In the Polish American “Erupcja,” on the other hand, in her capacity as both co-star and co-writer, Charli XCX is reimagining “Serendipity.” Kate Beckinsale’s character in that 2001 romantic comedy believed that fate sent her signs and that how she read those signs determined her happiness. In director Pete Ohs’s “Erupcja,” every time Bethany (XCX) and her childhood Polish friend Nel (Lena Góra) reconvene after years apart, a volcano erupts, which they read as fate sending them a sign of their being soulmates. And if you can’t stop a volcano from erupting, only seek to contain the fallout, when Bethany and Nel reconvene in Warsaw at the same time Bethany’s boyfriend Rob (Will Madden) plans to propose, there might well be another chemical discharge but also emotional fallout to which they remain oblivious. That turns “Erupcja” into something not quite profound, perhaps, but with deeper knowledge than this genre typically allows, a diaphanous 71-minutes drama that manages to knock you over with a feather.

Every time Rob mentions Warsaw, he says, “Warsaw, Poland,” just like that, both city and country, as if he’s willing himself to be there, perhaps, but also determined to embrace it since it means so much to Bethany. It’s evocative of his unwitting sweet nature, even if that sweet nature proves no match for what his girlfriend feels with Nel. “The earth doesn’t shake,” Bethany explains of her relationship with Rob. “Volcanos don’t erupt.” These are sensations that Ohs brings to life on the soundtrack through rattling glasses and tableware, even luggage on the cobblestone streets, making it seem as if distant volcanic tremors are sending a warning on a frequency that not everyone can hear. Indeed, at breakfast, Rob gets a notification on his phone of a cancelled flight home: Italy’s Mount Etna has erupted. That’s the sign: Bethany essentially ghosts her would-be fiancé just as Nel inadvertently ghosts her ex-girlfriend Ula (Agata Trzebuchowska) just back in town. It’s not so much that the rest of the world can wait as it ceases to exist.

Among the most intriguing elements of “Erupcja” is that Bethany and Nel’s relationship is presented as platonic yet conveyed with the same sort of headlong rush typically associated with a physical relationship, suggesting that romantic soulmates exist in all manner of shapes and sizes. Ohs brings that connection to life less through traditional scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends than through aesthetic jolts of montage and music – eruptions, if you will. Such an approach is unsuitable to filling out backstory and so Ohs leaves the exposition to novel-like narration by Jacek Zubiel that in his wry tone suggests a kind of cheeky cultural anthropologist. Nel works at a flower shop, and through this narration we learn that she and Bethany met when the latter was buying flowers for herself, an action that can appear as self-care through one lens and narcissism through another.

Indeed, if there is self-evident selfishness to Bethany and Nel’s way of life, that is not glossed over but made clear. Nel’s American expat artist friend (Jeremy O. Harris) goes so far as to point out that, like, you know, “Volcanos kill people.” To Bethany and Nel, though, this concrete fact seems to go in one ear and out the other, making me think of the recent SNL sketch where in playing one real-life media influencer feuding with another real-life media influencer, Chloe Fineman described her character’s dispute as “worse than 9/11.” Another movie might also have written off Rob as collateral damage, but the denouement of “Erupcja” cedes the stage to him, imbuing a genuine sense of his confusion and dismay, as if Bridget Monyahan’s character had been given a say in “Serendipity.” And as the narrative gets handed off to him, Bethany recedes from view, her quasi-resolution mentioned in passing by the narrator as an afterthought. Before that happens, though, she delivers a monologue straight to the camera by reciting Lord Byron’s poem Darkness, which comes across like the most XCX touch of all. This poetry recitation is what passes for an explanation, like a celebrity apologizing via Instagram without apologizing for anything in particular.

Normal

The small Minnesota town giving Ben Wheatley’s action-comedy “Normal” its name is reminiscent of the English village Sandford in 2007’s action-comedy “Hot Fuzz” in so much as its idyllic nature belies a bevy of unhinged arms-toting citizens. The latter held that twist for a good chunk of its running time whereas “Normal” gives it away immediately in its Tokyo-set prologue where a Yakuza boss dispatches a pair of underlings who have failed him to the American Midwest. This is one of the more interesting decisions that screenwriter Derek Kolstad (he conceived of the story with star Bob Odenkirk) makes. It means that Normal’s interim Sheriff Ulysses (Odenkirk) is the only one unaware of the town’s nefarious underbelly, including the audience, stressing the feeling of his being an outsider. Gradually, as he gets to know the tiny police force and meets other members of the community, he begins to suspect something is amiss in the death of Normal’s previous Sheriff, setting out to uncover the truth.

It’s a solid-enough set-up, an American western on the frozen tundra, but Kolstad’s script never finesses its ideas. There is something potentially interesting in a small town circa Right Now choosing to go all-in with the Yakuza to survive but “Normal” isn’t sure what to make of it – right, wrong, or in-between – and lets it burn out while Sheriff Ulysses’s backstory is hopelessly wan and means the conclusion lacks additional emotional punch. Indeed, the ever-changing factions of Normal, good helping bad and vice versa, provides some spark that never quite goes anywhere because eventually it’s revealed as mere twisty structure for the sake of twisty structure. And fair enough. Normal, Minnesota might as well be a soundstage, a depressed cop movie giving way to a western giving way to Japanese gun-fu, and so on, as if Normal, Minnesota is really just a “Blazing Saddles”-style series of soundstages, one genre followed by another, an elaborate excuse to shoot some people’s limbs off, proving there is more than way to skin a cat.

Pressure

There is a double meaning to the title of the new war movie “Pressure,” one glimpsed in the opening image of the clouds, referring not only to the inherent mental strain of the 1944 D-Day invasion but how that invasion was predicated on nothing less than an accurate weather report. That’s quite a task for director Anthony Maras and his co-screenwriter David Haig (who wrote the book on which it is based) to manage – rendering not only a movie with a foregone conclusion but a foregone conclusion hinging on feuding weathermen thrilling. They succeed by crafting an old-fashioned feeling kind of drama from performances and writing, making the meteorological details both palatable and dramatic, boiling everything down to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower’s (Brendan Fraser) one key question: Do we go? And yet, as old-fashioned as “Pressure” feels, it also comes across modern in a funny kind of way by suggesting a wartime “Moneyball,” of all things, advancing the argument that when it comes to active combat, the data overrides wishful thinking.

“Pressure” is seen through the eyes of RAF Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott), leaving his pregnant wife Liz (Tamsin Topolski) at home, one of the many little details that gets neatly folded into the overarching drama, summoned by Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) to provide an accurate forecast ahead of the proposed June 5th date for D-Day. After all, they can only launch with good weather. Stagg, though, clashes immediately with Eisenhower’s American meteorologist, Colonel Irving P. Krick, played by Chris Messina with great relish, making for an obvious if no less enjoyable antagonist, often evincing the air of a haughty student in a debate competition. Krick will be proven wrong, of course, and part of the fun is in seeing the antisocial, pragmatic Stagg figure out how to access his inner emotionalist to reach a roomful of uniformed men who fancy themselves pragmatists, too, without quite realizing just how much they are guided by feelings.

As Eisenhower, Fraser embodies both the Supreme Commander’s tact and temper and, even more than that, the figurative weight of the world on his shoulders, conveying in equal measure how the crucial decision gradually becomes inevitable while still feeling impossible. Kerry Condon, meanwhile, in playing the part of Eisenhower’s private secretary, First Lieutenant Kay Summersby, continues to prove she is one of our most exciting current actors by beathing life into what could have been a stock character, a cool, patient turn evoking the old phrase it takes an army. When Kay remarks “Men are too fond of that word” after Eisenhower says Stagg is known as a genius, Condon’s line reading brings the house down.

For as much as Maras prefers to emphasize plot and performance, however, he does make room for one true filmmaking flourish. It occurs on that fateful Sunday, June 4th, right after Eisenhower is convinced to postpone the invasion. The day begins in the bright sunshine with all the major characters attending Sunday mass, save for Stagg, pointedly outside the church when the wind picks up, the clouds roll in, and the rain pours. If the cinematography and soundtrack lay it on a little thick, I still liked it, the forceful way in which Maras mocks not only the notion of praying for good weather but that all the military might in the world doesn’t get first say over the weather gods. It’s so satisfying that yet one more brief recreation of D-Day in its aftermath cannot help but pale in comparison, drawing an otherwise solid movie to a somewhat anti-climactic conclusion, though, by that time, I was already satisfied.

Carolina Caroline

The funny thing about confidence game movies is that because they tend to rely on familiar narrative devices and patterns, they effectively become confidence games themselves, persuading the audience to believe what they are seeing no matter how clichéd and obvious. James Foley’s “Confidence” (2003) was not especially good at such persuasion, save for one sequence ripped directly from David Mamet’s superior “House of Games” (1987). As I watched it, I thought, “this is like ‘House of Games,’” and yet, Rachel Weisz still got me to sign on the figurative dotted line. Adam Carter Rehmier’s “Carolina Caroline” is the latest confidence game movie as confidence game itself, though in this case, screenwriter William Thomas Harper IV has melded a confidence game movie with a lovers on the lam movie. If that renders the task doubly difficult, it makes the result all the more remarkable; just like Caroline herself, you might well spot the emotional swindle and then give yourself over to it anyway.

If Faye Dunaway’s Bonnie Parker was a bored waitress in small town Texas than Samara Weaving’s Caroline Daniels is a bored gas station attendant in small town Texas. Her life is altered, however, when Oliver Anderson (Kyle Gallner) walks in and hoodwinks her owner with a shortchange con. Caroline calls him on it, but only because his charismatic chutzpah sweeps her off her feet, and because she sees an opportunity not so much to leave her small town as go find the mother who abandoned her in South Carolina. Before long, she has left her genial dad (Jon Gries) behind for a life on the road in which she learns the confidence game ropes before graduating to bank robberies, wielding a weapon and getting the cash while Oliver drives the getaway car. Rehmeier typically conveys these scenes in montages scored to pop songs and just as Oliver dismisses free will as an illusion, that we are guided by neurons firing in our brains, I confess, when Rehmeier cued up Margo Cilker, or Sarah Shook, or Chris Stapleton, or Emmylou freaking Harris covering Bruce freaking Springsteen, I had to confess that neurons were being fired in my brain over which I had no control.

“Carolina Caroline” does not merely get by on its soundtrack, however, but also Weaver and Gallner’s chemistry, which defies description, a real you have to experience it to understand it sort of situation. It not only carries the movie through the fallow first half, but makes the back half when events take a turn for the worse hurt for real. Yet, at the same time, there is an undercurrent of nihilism that “Carolina Caroline” can’t quite square; if anything, Caroline’s eventual meeting with her mother works as an overly neat excuse for it. Oliver seems to have a nihilistic streak too, though “Carolina Caroline” never peels back the character’s mask enough to let us know. If Caroline can’t help but see him through the haze of romantic projection, that’s how “Carolina Caroline” ultimately chooses to see him too, meaning that with the capping confidence game the character and the movie unite in pulling the wool over their own eyes. 

Omaha

“Omaha” begins with an unnamed dad (John Magaro) waking his nine-year-old daughter Ella (Molly Belle Wright) and her younger brother Charlie (Wyatt Solis) early one morning, asking them to round up the family dog, gather a few of their favorite things, and set off on a vaguely defined road trip. The title gives away the destination, of course, even if at the same time the title doesn’t explain half of it. This is evocative of director Cole Webley’s withholding approach, conveying information less through obvious exposition than behavior, context clues, and even camera placement. It’s often effective, and generally lets us understand what’s happening, even occasionally what the characters are feeling, though not, necessarily, what the characters feel once this journey comes to a head, an evasion that can’t help but drag otherwise good movie down.

Their beater of a family car frequently requires a push start, a la “Little Miss Sunshine,” though unlike the kind of comical valor of that movie’s recurring bit, the one in “Omaha” is more wearily matter of fact. Money is tight, evoked not just in the mention of food stamps but in Magaro’s air every time his character goes into his wallet; you feel the weight of what each dollar means. That is not to suggest “Omaha” is merely one more exercise in indie miserabilism. Though their road trip is not exactly a vacation, it is made to feel like a vacation, nevertheless. Sing-alongs to songs on the car radio, a visit to McDonald’s Playland, and a stop for gas station ice cream all evoke the kind of specific car-centric getaway that any middle-to-lower class kid might recognize and might recognize as being so much fun in that way of fun being what you make it no matter the financial constraints. The dad might be recently widowed, eliciting a sense of mourning, but the joy of these scenes still evokes a happy family. 

Throughout these road trip scenes, Webley also honors Ella and Charlie’s point of view without ever doing that thing that some filmmakers do with preadolescent characters and render them too much like little adults. What’s more, in straight-on shots of Ella in the front seat, Webley quietly communicates how Ella is aware their dad is not telling them everything just as shots of their dad from behind the headrest of his car seat communicate that he is, in fact, concealing something just as “Omaha” is concealing something from us. A movie does not necessarily owe us an explanation; often, deeper emotional power stems from such ambiguity. But the problem is less “Omaha” lacking an explanation, because its denouement suggests that such extreme measures might make one impossible anyway, than it is a refusal to let its characters express themselves about what happens. And in that refusal, Webley betrays the characters he clearly loves and ultimately renders “Omaha” incomplete rather than ambiguous. 

Disclosure Day

“Disclosure Day” begins in media res with a point-of-view shot of a professional wrestler in the ring getting a boot to the face. It’s quite the wakeup call, dropping us directly into 79-year-old director Steven Spielberg’s 37th feature film with nary a warning and foreshadowing a sci fi-thriller that never takes a moment to let us get our bearings, just as some of its key characters never really have time to get their bearings, and then never really stops going, virtually two hours and twenty-five minutes of rising action in which the concluding line functions as the climax. That line, though, taken in tandem with the opening shot also suggests a wakeup call as a sort of Spielbergian version of Wake Up, Sheeple! There’s an alien conspiracy theory at the heart of David Koepp’s screenplay, true, but Spielberg has never really been about rolling in the mud where most conspiracy theories reside and more about lifting us up. “Disclosure Day” does not suggest that the truth is out there so much as the truth in here, in you and me, in all of us, and has been for a long time, as if he has ineffably transmuted the long-buried alien tripods of H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds” into dormant machines, to quote the esteemed Roger Ebert, for generating empathy. 

The truth is inside Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity expert for a nefarious corporation in cahoots with the department of defense called Wardex, who absconds with numerous computer files demonstrating not just the existence of extra-terrestrial life but a 79-year cover-up. He’s a whistleblower, in other words, aiming to get the files to several other Wardex defectors, including Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who is adamant about broadcasting the images rather than uploading them. Kellner, however, is doggedly pursued by Wardex’s CEO Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), a creepier version of Tommy Lee Jones’s Agent K in “Men in Black” in so much as he contends that mankind can only get on with their happy lives if they don’t know the whole truth. It’s as fascinating question as the one posed by Kellner’s semi-inadvertent co-conspirator and pious girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) about whether the revelation will trigger a societal crisis of faith. “Disclosure Day,” however, is not interested in truly debating these points but rather paying them lip service by lining them up as a few philosophical bowling pins to just knock them right back down.

Like Kellner, Spielberg has already made up his mind, and the filmmaker has always believed in some larger force, not God, necessarily, but a higher belief that something in the cosmos is meant to unify us in the face of our earthly strife. That strife is evoked in “Disclosure Day” through an impending nuclear strike involving North Korea, an idea that Spielberg is content to let linger on the periphery rather than truly foregrounding it. The larger cosmic mystery, meanwhile, takes root both in Daniel’s emergent backstory and how it ties to the emergent backstory of the other main character, Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City meteorologist who suddenly finds herself endowed with psychic abilities and unwittingly speaking what proves to be alien dialect on live television, drawing the attention of both Wardex and its defectors as Hugo sees her as nothing less than a sign he has been waiting for to tell the world that we are not alone.

Blunt’s performance is a marvel. As written, her character skews broad, a perky weather girl who wants to be taken seriously becoming a spokesperson for the whole universe. In a sense, all the moving parts of Koepp’s screenplay bloom in Margaret and Blunt binds them all together without going over the top, evincing in equal measure fear and a sense of innate responsibility as someone swept along by forces they don’t understand. In that way, she’s an impeccable surrogate for the audience. Her character is trusting that all this will lock into place just as we are trusting that all this will lock into place, and that is how “Disclosure Day” engenders suspense as much as its expertly staged chase sequences. Every time we see Hugo he appears to be on a soundstage with some sort of set being put into place behind him, quietly implanting the idea in the back of our mind that once this set is ready, the final piece of the narrative puzzle will click. 

Hugo’s soundstage and what it ultimately engenders comes with a deeper meaning. “Disclosure Day” does not render its own artifice as explicitly as, say, Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” but in gathering all his characters at a soundstage where Hugo functions as nothing less than a director nods at his artifice, nevertheless, while also illustrating his six-decade career as an artist who has always believed in the power of the moving image to unite us. Spielberg might be pulling bits from so many previous movies, from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” to “Minority Report,” from “E.T.” to “War of the Worlds,” but the movie that his 37th one most echoes turns out to be the 36th: “The Fabelmans.” “Disclosure Day” is not just Spielberg replaying the hits but drawing together all the themes that have fascinated him his whole career. If the aliens feel almost beside the point by the time the movie ends, it is because they are the vehicle not only for Spielberg’s plea for empathy but a full-fledged act of self-expression. 

Send Help

Send help is a phrase colloquially associated with castaways, or movie castaways, at least, but in Sam Raimi’s horror-comedy “Send Help,” the phrase may as well be stamped on the forehead of his hilarious, hapless, resourceful, unexpectedly complicated anti-hero Linda Liddell (Rachel McAdams). Perpetually unkempt and smelling of tuna, Linda is the office pariah even if she doubles as its dynamo, working overtime to compose a report for the frat brother (Xavier Samuel) of her new CEO, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who subsequently gets the promotion that she had been promised. The opening 20 minutes is fast-paced and flashy, but it is also oddly predictable. When we see Linda at home talking to someone, it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to know that when the camera finishes pulling back, it will reveal that she’s been talking to her pet. That this extended opening works so well anyway is a testament to McAdams creating a character out of what could have become a caricature by brilliantly jibing with Raimi’s frenetic aesthetic to evince the air of someone so awkward and oblivious that she can’t help but step on social rakes over and over with a well-meaning smile on her face. Even if I always knew the cringe that was coming, McAdams made it so that I could hardly stand to look. Truly, it’s easier to watch her repeatedly projectile vomit on someone’s face than unwittingly talk to someone with tuna on her chin.

Linda does not so much find the wherewithal to confront Brantley about being passed over as she does suffer something like a temporary bout of insanity, marching into his office in lieu of breaking down. He does not recant his decision but instead invites her on his private plane to a meeting in Thailand to prove herself. Little does he know! Aboard the plane, however, the other executives make fun of her behind her back by watching her Survivor audition tape, apparently angering the gods so much that the plane’s engine fails and sends them hurtling into the sea, a sort of diabolical version of a corporate retreat challenge in which seeing what everyone is made of mixes with showing their true colors, and turns out, Linda is made of the stiffest stuff. It also foreshadows how nimbly Raimi turns blood and gore into unexpected personal growth. Only Linda and Bradley survive, washing up on a seemingly deserted island, though at first the latter is infirm due to a nasty gash on his leg, foreshadowing a shift in the balance of power.

I am reluctant to delve too deep into spoilers. It’s not that “Send Help” becomes less predictable, per see, but that it deviously remixes deserted island cliches and wields them in an order you are not necessarily always anticipating. It also ditches any sense of practical realism, speeding through all bits and bobs that it took Tom Hanks’s character forever to sort out in “Cast Away,” for an effective emotional realism that essentially recasts their setting as a beachside boardroom. Honestly, at times “Send Help” evokes an R-rated “Gilligan’s Island,” like the makeshift desk that Linda fashions out of sticks to manifest the undergoing power shift between she and her boss. If it’s clear that Raimi sides with Linda in the emergent struggle for control, it’s just as true that writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift infuse her with contradictory traits that pleasingly muddy our attachment to her, adding dimension that gives “Send Help” some real juice. It carries that juice all the way through a conclusion that is literally ambiguous but figuratively clear as day, stretching the corporate retreat as horror movie allegory as far as it will go. She has visualized success.  

Cold Storage

“Pay attention,” a cheeky title card for “Cold Storage” declares, “this shit is real.” Well, it is and isn’t. In adapting the screenplay from his own 2019 novel, writer David Koepp has utilized the real-life 1979 incident in which the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab re-entered Earth’s atmosphere, burned up, broke apart, and scattered debris across Western Australia. Though all the remains were eventually collected, what “Cold Storage” presupposes is, what if it wasn’t? Written by middling thriller hall of famer David Koepp, adapted from his own 2019 novel, and directed by Jonny Campbell, this jovial horror/thriller/comedy hybrid begins with a biochemist (Sosie Bacons) and a pair of black biochemical op agents, Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and Trini Romano (Lesley Manville), investigating a leftover Skylab oxygen tank that has been transformed into a makeshift Australian museum and is now oozing some type of mutated green fungus. It’s a snappy opening defined by a dexterous camera that is always pulling back or craning up to both elicit surprise and dispense information. And because mankind can’t leave well enough alone, the group takes a fungus sample for study, subsequently transporting it to a federal cold storage facility in Kansas that via time lapse photography we see sealed off and mutated, itself, into an unsuspecting self-storage company.

That’s where “Cold Storage” mostly takes place, at the self-storage company, picking up 18 years later as security guards Travis (Joe Keery) Naomi (Georgina Campbell) settle in for the night shift. They are not slackers, exactly, just two people trying to get things together, and bonding from both desire and necessity when a faint beeping drives them crazy, sending them hacking through drywall to find the source and into a situation that spirals quickly out of control as the green fungus oozes amok. When it does, Quinn is summoned from retirement by Abigail (Ellora Torchia), a deskbound military bureaucrat ignoring the nothing to see here admonishment of her commanding officer (Richard Brake), a storyline that neatly splits the difference between big government proactivity and paranoia. Eventually, Quinn re-teams with the also-retired Trini to make haste for Kansas to help Travis and Naomi prevent an impending global calamity.

Neeson finds a sweet spot between Frank Drebin Jr. and all his characters through the years with names like Bill Marks and Mike McCann while Manville is wry in a way that is baked into the character rather than a wink at the audience. If anything, “Cold Storage” might have used more Neeson and Manville, though on other hand, just as the story ultimately turns on Travis and Naomi so does the movie turn on Keery and Campbell. They are going concerns on account of two popular TV shows, “Stranger Things” and “Black Mirror,” respectively, though I have seen neither, making this my first experience with them, and I have to say, I quite enjoyed their warm and amusing performances as two people having the time of their lives while having to stay alive. They find the perfect middle ground of never taking it all too seriously but never devolving into full-throated send-up, evoking the same B-movie spirit as “Cold Storage” itself, summarized in the climactic show-stopping moment when Quinn dispatches Travis and Naomi on a mission to, like, you know, save civilization: “You two may have started the night minimum wage guards,” he says, “but you’re a green light team now.” I was watching alone in my living room, but I stood up and cheered. 

Crime 101

It turns out that “Crime 101” is not a title generated by AI but a strained pun referring to a Los Angeles jewel thief, Mike Davis (Chris Hemsworth), pulling heists near US 101 to provide himself a convenient escape route. He’s pulling one as director Bart Layton’s crime-thriller begins, and doing so all on his own, establishing a lone wolf air. The investigating detective, Lou Lubesnick (Mark Ruffalo), is convinced this robbery fits a pattern, one tying to both the 101 and a conspicuous lack of violence, only to be told by his superior to back off because reopening closed cases would wreak havoc on the department’s clearance rate. That marks Lou as something of a lone wolf too, though that’s not to say he and Mike are quite mirror images. There is a comical match cut in which we see the dapper Mike exiting a door and then a rumpled, just-awakened Lou plodding through his bathroom door, eventually sitting on the toilet while brushing his teeth and reading about the latest jewel heist on his phone. 

“Crime 101,” though, adapted by Layton from Don Winslow’s novella of the same name, is not merely abut a cop and a robber but also a claims adjuster, Sharon, who does not come between the cop and the robber but instead becomes intertwined with them. I know, I know, a claims adjuster? But this is a glamorous claims adjuster, working for a high-end insurance firm and played by Halle Berry with a trove of statement jewelry. Then again, glamorous though she may be, we meet her botching a big meeting with a rich doofus (Tate Donovan, firmly in his rich doofus era) and the sleep app on her phone constantly taunts her for failing to get a good night’s rest. The latter is the germ of a good idea also briefly evoked in the schlub-like Lou taking up yoga that needed more follow through or to be dropped altogether given how Layton never quite decides if he is being sincere about the idea of wellness or sending it up. 

Sharon might excel at reading people in her job, but she can’t quite read herself, stuck as a 53-year-old woman partner in an ageist, sexist firm with nowhere else to go. That is why when Mike seeks Sharon’s help in ripping off her place of employment, she is intrigued, evoking such drastic measures as the only means to security for a woman of a certain age, a plot point undergirded by Berry’s own career struggles with Hollywood ageism. This inside job could double as Sharon’s unlikely One Last Job, in other words, just as Mike is hoping to make it his One Last Job too, frequently referring to a financial number he has in mind that will set him up for life. He references this number in conversations with Maya, his kinda, sorta girlfriend, a truly thankless role into which Monica Barbaro at least manages to breathe some bright life. Mostly Maya is there to spotlight Mike’s emotional emptiness, and while Hemsworth fatally cannot make the turn to real emotion when that is eventually required, as if he has dug himself too big a stoical hole, he brilliantly plays a blank slate, emotions just bouncing right off him, sort of channeling, I swear to God, Kylie Sven Opossum in “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” (“Can you give me some kind of signal once in a while,” you can imagine Maya saying to him, “just so I know any of this is getting through to you?”) 

In seeking to leave the criminal world behind, Mike is forced to break contact with his longtime fence (Nick Nolte), who enlists a younger and much more reckless thief, Ormon (Barry Keoghan), to take Mike’s scores and to take down Mike too. The part of Ormon is just a standard-issue antagonist, there to muck everything up and create some action scenes, but Keoghan’s malevolently kooky performance is also “Crime 101’s” most thrilling element. Keoghan takes his character repeating his dad’s mantra, “You have to break some eggs,” noticeably absent the part about also making an omelet, and running with it, playing the whole part like a guy running down the supermarket aisle of life, taking eggs from their cartons, breaking them, and leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. His jewel store robbery that goes wrong without entirely going wrong is weirdly, hilariously exhilarating.

True, during the big closing sequence in which Ormon sneaks his way into a hotel suite through a kitchen, you half expect to see him watching what is tantamount to the same scene from “Heat” on his smartphone as he does so, like an instruction manual, evoking the blatant and myriad parallels to Michael Mann’s 1995 ur-Los Angeles crime text. Surprisingly, however, “Crime 101” does not spiritually evoke “Heat” in the end so much as a noir version of another southern California epic, Lawrence Kasdan’s striving-to-be-great but just so-so “Grand Canyon” (1991) about the lives of disparate Los Angelenos intersecting. In “Crime 101,” three disparate Los Angelenos converge to get a leg up.

Eephus

The Major League Baseball glossary explains the roots of the Eephus pitch are in Hebrew, the word eefes loosely translated to nothing, as described by a teammate (Maurice Van Robays) of the pitcher (Rip Sewell) who first regularly threw it: “Eephus ain’t nothing.” Carson Lund’s 2025 movie that takes the pitch’s name for its title is not nothing, either in a Seinfeldian sense or more broadly, but I have never seen a movie that so implicitly captures the deliberate, relaxed rhythms of a baseball game quite like this one. That is because unlike virtually all other baseball movies, which tend to climax a larger narrative through a game while sprinkling in snippets of other games via montage, “Eephus” just is a baseball game: one recounted from beginning to end. It’s as if Lund and is co-writers Michael Basta and Nate Fisher adapted Arnold Hano’s “A Day in the Bleachers” but instead of recounting Game 1 of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and Cleveland Indians are recounting a fictional 1990s New England rec league game between the Riverdogs and Adler’s Paint. 

There are a multitude of players, but “Eephus” proves less interested in developing their personal stories then in demonstrating how they all relate to one another in the context of the game. There are hits, and outs, and runs, but the camera is just as often pointed away from home plate, toward the fielders, and the base runners, eavesdropping on their between-pitch chatter and conversations in the dugout. The result of the game does not even seem to matter all that much, evoked in how one player arrives to the game late and another departs early, committed to a prior engagement. Even the umpire bails early, forcing a spectator to step in and call balls and strikes, albeit from the stands. This makeshift arbiter taken in tandem with a couple young people in the bleachers wondering what all the fuss is about and a vendor outside the stadium quietly suggest that the only thing holding the nature of any game together, really, is the collective importance we impress upon it. 

The field is scheduled to be torn down after this game, though it is not making away for something like a Kmart or a Walmart, however, but a school, shading this finality with melancholy rather than anti-capitalist fury. What, precisely, will become of these teams is never explicated, and all the men playing would rather not talk about it, and as the game stretches on, nine innings giving way to extras, day ceding to night, forcing the players to turn on their car lights and aim them at the field, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot fuses with Roger Angell’s The Summer Game and the latter’s observation that “baseball time is measured only in outs” takes on the absurdist quality of the former, making it truly feel as if “the end of this game may never come.”

Souleymane’s Story

The title of Boris Lujkine’s French film is not a generic catch-call – as in, this is the story of Souleymane – but a specific reference to the asylum interview of the eponymous character (Abou Sangaré), a Guinean immigrant in Paris. The opening scene finds Souleymane waiting for that interview, harried in his air, a conspicuous wound on his forehead, and then flashes back 48 hours earlier to show us how he got here. That’s a thriller device, and though “Souleymane’s Story” is billed as a drama, like Eric Gravel’s sensational 2021 French thriller “Full Time,” Lujkine sculpts genuine suspense from nothing more than everyday details, the nightly bus that Souleymane must catch at a certain time back to a homeless shelter so he as a bed to sleep in, or else be resigned to the street, the orders he ferries as food delivery courier, and the precious state of the e-bike he uses to deliver them, all in the name of ginning up enough money to pay a so-called Fixer, Barry (Alpha Oumar Sow), to outfit him with a phony story of political persecution back home to increase his asylum odds. That last one is an evocative detail rendering Souleymane’s desperate plight as existential, bolstered by his job in which he must pay to use the app of another delivery driver, masquerading as that person while working. And it’s why even if the typical kind of character details that might humanize Souleymane are scant, it’s all for a broader purpose, of demonstrating the dehumanization of the immigration process. When his asylum interview finally comes back around, you might know what’s coming, but the rendering is so gently forceful that is works in spite of the predictability, embodied in Nina Meurisse’s performance as the government agent conducting the interview who tells him with straightforward patience that this is his opportunity to tell his story. And finally, after over a frenzied hour, the movie stops, sits back, and gives Souleymane the floor, a sustained unburdening of the overwhelming stress that comes with concealing your true self.  

Sirât

When the title card for “ Sirât” finally appears a half-hour in, you feel its full weight, laid out over an arresting image of a three-vehicle caravan racing through the Moroccan desert. Director Oliver Laxe takes the name of his phantasmagorical Spanish film from the metaphorical bridge in Islamic belief connecting Heaven and Hell, “one thinner than a strand of hair,” and in this shot, he essentially conjures that bridge to life, one his unlikely collection of characters traverses throughout, an ostensible cinematic thrill ride reimagined as a harrowing existential crossing. An unseen war looms just over the horizon in “Sirât,” hinted at in radio news reports and the occasional presence of companies of soldiers, and Laxe initially embeds with a free spirit collective traveling from place to place to hold massive desert raves. That might sound nihilistic, as if they are checking out as the world comes to an end, but rave culture has never been about checking out but plugging in to a sense of community and a larger spiritual pursuit. Laxe embodies this idea through opening shots of a massive sound system being plugged in; he is also asking us, the audience, to plug in too. 

“Sirât” begins by lingering over a rave for a long time, the pulse of the music and the bodies swaying to it, so that when an older man named Luis (Sergi López) finally wanders into this throng of bodies, we can sense he is out of place. He and his son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) are looking for his daughter, Mar, who has gone missing, handing out flyers with her likeness. No one recognizes her, but when one small group suggests she might be at the next rave on the other side of the desert, Luis and Esteban tag along with that same group in the hopes of finding her there. The journey is arduous, even deadly, and though questions are occasionally raised about gas and supplies, it never devolves into the kind of civil breakdown we are conditioned to expect just as the characters never deepen in ways we might anticipate. Narrative and character are sidelined in the name of the experience, and incredibly, through sound design and soundtrack, “Sirât” comes to embody the air of a rave itself, a subjugation of self for something higher, which can sometimes feel impossibly far away, and sometimes so close. When the ravers put on a song, Luis laments he can’t understand the lyrics, to which he is told, it’s not about listening but about dancing, reminding me of the timid clerk Kleinman in “Shadows and Fog” being asked for his thoughts on the nature of existence itself: “Maybe if I get a little drunk, I could dance it.”

Given that the opening moveable rave consists predominantly of Europeans, and that Europeans are ordered to evacuate given the unseen conflict, Laxe buries a wicked tables-turned joke in there. He might have been wise to more fully finesse the politics of this explosive situation; after all, war is the continuation of politics by other means, as the saying goes, and war seems to have brought the world of “Sirât” to this place. By relegating politics, however, Laxe emphasizes the metaphysical, suggesting that once the world has reached an apocalyptic precipice, the how, the why, and the what all become meaningless. All that remains is the world’s cruel indifference and humanity’s struggle not so much to find meaning and serenity in the middle of it as to push past it to find something better. That odd sense of hope ensures that “Sirât” is more than merely a theatre of cruelty. The climax improbably suggests a techno remix of the climax to “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” turning a leap of faith into a walk of faith, a desire to believe in something better to all evidence of the contrary. 

The Zodiac Killer Project

“The Zodiac Killer Project” is the ultimate test case of what whether the movie imagined is better than the movie made. Because when director Charlie Shackleton lost the rights to California Highway Patrol Officer Lyndon E. Lafferty’s 2012 true-crime book, “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up,” right before he was about to begin filming a documentary based on it, rather than call the whole project off, he improvised and made something else instead. What emerged is not all that interested in The Zodiac Killer himself, whoever that may or may not have been. When Shackleton’s producer impresses upon him from off screen the need to provide basic details about the serial killer terrorizing California in the seventies, Shackleton laughs and says he’d rather not. It’s not him evading pertinent details but rather demonstrating what he has decided in his new project will be deemed pertinent, and by shrugging off the constraints to which such movies are typically bound, “The Zodiac Killer Project” is one of the fortunate few that is in effect, set free.

Shackleton’s approach is to show locations he had scouted and planned to use for dramatic re-creations of Lafferty’s book while the scenes that would-have-been in voiceover as he had conceived them by using the record of Lafferty’s private investigation as culled from other sources than his book to avoid legal entanglements. In doing so, he probes true crime clichés (deploying familiar sound effects of the genre so relentlessly that they assume a laugh-out-loud comical quality) and how those clichés are utilized to manipulate us, but more than that, by working through the film he wanted to make, he probes his own artistic intentions. And if “The Zodiac Killer Project” demonstrates the spell true crime holds over us, occasional moments when Shackleton wistfully mourns just how good a certain scene might have been, he can’t help but reveal himself as being under its spell too, so much so that I am not quite sure he knows the movie he made is probably better than the one he imagined. 

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

We live in a time where faith can feel hard to maintain and belief in the rational is under siege. So, perhaps it’s no surprise that in his third “Knives Out” whodunit, officially titled “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery,” writer/director Rian Johnson pits these opposing ideas against one another. He does so via Jed Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), a one-time boxer turned Catholic priest who is assigned to a rural parish led by Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin). Despite his pugilistic background, Jed views the church as a place of compassion and understanding whereas Wicks is the one who views faith as akin to an existential fight, circling the wagons of his dwindling but fervent flock against ostensible secular forces. Brolin cuts an intense fundamentalist presence, brought to life through frequent low angles that make it seem as if he is staring down on us from a pulpit, and betraying nothing in an unrelenting stern expression that might be full of the Holy Spirit or just full of it. That question will gradually be answered during a service when he repairs to his usual hiding place just off to the side of the sanctuary to gather himself and then drops dead.

Enter: Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), the world’s greatest detective and the “Knives Out” series’ one recurring character. He does not really even get introduced, he just sort of appears, as if conjured by miracle, though he would be the first to tell you that miracles always have a logical explanation. If Jed is fingered as the suspect in Wicks’s apparent murder, Blanc is convinced of the young priest’s innocence and sets out to prove it, and more than Craig and Ana de Armas in the first “Knives Out” and Craig and Janelle Monae in the second, he and O’Connor make a dynamic team. That’s chiefly because Johnson has written them as investigatory allies but also philosophical opposites, evoked in dueling monologues inside Jed’s church where the priest effuses his belief and Blanc his skepticism. It’s a marvelous sequence of acting, writing, and visual composition, with Biblical lighting cues, walking the perfect line between entertaining melodrama and deeper meaning and leaving you as enthralled by the actors and as moved by the characters. 

It is also “Wake Up Dead Man’s” high point. Though Wicks’s flock is portrayed by some big names (Glenn Close, Kerry Washington, Andrew Scott, and Jeremy Renner), the characters are never really fleshed out, and aside from a few isolated moments involving Close, never really come to life, dragging the movie down so that you feel its two-and-a-half-hour length a little too much. You also feel the length on account of one too many expository monologues deployed to wrap up a mystery that grows increasingly convoluted and worse, ultimately only seeks to challenge Blanc’s skepticism in service of a fake out, making the whole thing feel cheap. It’s also that “Wake Up Dead Man’s” ostensible main mystery can’t help but spiritually come to feel like a subplot, small potatoes in the face of the bigger questions bouncing back and forth between Jed and Blanc, intrinsically if not inadvertently reminding us that the most interesting mysteries are always the ones that can’t really be solved.

Nouvelle Vague

Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” is a movie in which the making of it has become as famous as the movie itself. After all, it not only helped usher in the vital French New Wave filmmaking movement but essentially ushered in modern movies themselves; as no less an authority than Criterion puts it, “there was before ‘Breathless,’ and there was after ‘Breathless.’” But the movie has become so synonymous with its making because more than most, the production and the completed motion picture are wholly intertwined. By utilizing familiar, rulebound Hollywood genres and then reimagining them through rule-breaking techniques, Godard was not only commenting on and critiquing Hollywood but rendering an intrinsic argument that how a director chooses to tell his or her story makes a movie what it is in the first place. If you watch Richard Linklater’s new Netflix movie “Nouvelle Vague” about the making of Breathless having never seen it, you might come away wondering what, exactly, “Breathless” was about as it remains, well, a little vague on that topic. Yet, it still succeeds not because it’s more about the production than the finished product but because in the way that Godard made movies, the finished product was the production, and vice-versa. To see “Breathless” being made is to see “Breathless.” 

If “Breathless” is inseparable from its making, so, too, is it inseparable from its auteur. Famously, Godard infused his movies with quotes and observations reflecting his own attitudes and philosophies and so Linklater has his perpetual sunglasses-wearing Godard (Guillame Marbeck) communicate almost exclusively in quotes and observations, not like one of his characters but to evoke how his characters were him. His filmmaking methods, meanwhile, deploying a moving camera, not even bothering to look through the viewfinder, eschewing continuity, wears his producer (Bruno Dreyfürst) thin while his star, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch), ponders jumping ship. In traditional terms, that might make “Nouvelle Vague” an underdog story, but, of course, we know how this story ends, and it’s a testament to Linklater’s carefree style that the proceedings never turn sentimental or solemn. He is a modern master of the hangout movie, after all, and that’s what “Nouvelle Vague” often resembles, its cast and crew in repose in cafes as Godard consults his notebook, bringing his belief that the movie before him exists as a kind of blank page to leisurely life.

As the title suggests, however, “Nouvelle Vague” is not just about the making of “Breathless” but the French New Wave itself. That’s why we see Godard consulting and socialize with esteemed fellow members of the movement. The ones that Linklater cannot manage to squeeze into the narrative he still honors by identifying them via title card while having them look straight into the camera. Yet, despite being a concise evocation of how it takes village, these cameos belie “Nouvelle Vague” as requiring some prior knowledge of its eponymous film movement; this is not necessarily a movie for beginners. But that’s also what fascinates me. Godard was suspicious of Netflix, and it’s more than a little odd that a movie about making “Breathless” would be tucked in there with so many deliberately forgettable titles, just one more to scroll past. But there is something tantalizing about it too. “Weekend” and “Vivre sa vie” were not the first Godard movies I saw, but they were also some of the first times I remember really wondering of movies, “Ok, what is this?” I like imagining unsuspecting people having their curiosity sparked by “Nouvelle Vague,” investigating the movement’s back catalogue and even being inspired to gather some friends and go make something of their own. And that is why Linklater might not have intended this as a love letter so much as a message in a bottle. 

Bunny

“Bunny” begins with its eponymous hustler and gigolo (Mo Stark), like Richard Gere, he helpfully explains in voiceover, in the back of a cop car due to the dead body that turns up in his East Village tenement building. That sound likes a thriller, but Ben Jacobson’s film is anything but, more like a life-affirming comic potboiler. To get the body outside without drawing the attention of the neighborhood cops asking questions about the deceased’s illegally parked car, Bunny draws on the help of myriad tenants, like his best friend Dino (Jacobson), and even unexpected outsiders, such as the Orthodox Jewish Airbnb tenant (Genevieve Hudson-Price), revealing himself as the gregarious straw that stirs the whole building’s drink. No wonder his wife (Liza Colby) wants to give him a special birthday present (it is his birthday, after all): a threesome. This prospective gift and its sweet intent underlines Bunny’s lack of a proper rating in so much as it improbably blends myriad R-rated elements with a G-rated spirit.

Taking place almost entirely in and around this tenement building, moving up and down floors and from apartment to apartment, sometimes out onto the sidewalk and then back inside, Jacobson conveys “Bunny” through a handheld camera that is not like a fly on the wall but an active participant, right there in the middle of the scrum and putting us in the middle of the scrum too so that we process information at the same time as the characters. This underlines how “Bunny” shows little interest in backstory, preferring to exist in the moment, shaping its characters by how they react to unfolding events. Take Bunny’s father-in-law (Tony Drazan), who shows up to try reconcile with his daughter but then gets a little stoned and winds up coolly riding the proverbial wave, or the cop on the sidewalk (Liz Caribel Sierra), who starts off suspicious of Bunny but comes to see who he really is and what he stands for, embodying an unlikely sense of community policing.

That notion of community policing might be a fantasy gone too far for some viewers. And the truth is, even if “Bunny” does a credible job making you believe the tenants might be willing to hold their noses at a bad smell, or look the other way at some moral infraction, the dead body driving the plot forward cannot help but start to feel sort of figuratively weightless. It’s an entertaining ride throughout, don’t get me wrong, but that lack of tension prevents a true culmination, almost as if its kind heart was not quite willing to take the dark-hearted premise as far as it might go. 

Sacramento

“Sacramento” begins in Los Angeles where dad-to-be Glenn (Michael Cera) puts the finishing touches on what will be his first child’s crib. Overcome with anxiety, he decides the crib isn’t sturdy enough, rips it apart, and dumps the splintered remains outside. He’s not ready to be a dad, in other words, and which his wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart) knows, encouraging him not just to go hang out with his rash friend Rickey (Michael Angarano), who first appears hiding in a tree outside their home, seeking an element of surprise in his saying hello, but to take a spur of the moment road trip with him to California’s capital city to help him grieve by spreading his father’s ashes. After all, a road trip is the only cure for such male blues, a rather conventional hook belying a rather conventional arc that Angarano, who directed, still evinces with enough flair and wit to render it enjoyable. 

In Rickey’s air, it is as obvious to the audience as it is to Glenn that this trip really isn’t about his father’s ashes, and thankfully Angarano, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Smith, doesn’t endeavor to conceal this truth too long. When the director reveals this truth to the audience, it’s through a slapstick scene at a gas station in which Rickey stuffs dirt in a tennis ball can in the guise of ashes, building to a solid comic capper where an unwitting Glenn kicks away one of the tennis balls, demonstrating Angarano’s penchant throughout for visual physical comedy. And though he does tend to let his soundtrack do too much of the emotional work, I liked Angarano’s choice of Smog’s “Hit the Ground Running” laid over a scene in which the two friends/not-friends end up comically/not-so-comically acting out their passive aggressions in a fighting ring in lieu of going to therapy.

As “Sacramento” closes in on Rickey’s real reason for bringing Glenn there, it can start to feel like a left coast version of last year’s “A Real Pain” but with fatherhood as the subject rather than heritage. That’s not to suggest it’s derivative, just that there are striking similarities between the characters, and just as in “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg as director let his acting co-star Keiran Culkin walk away with the picture so, too, is Angarano content to center his picture as Cera’s. And though the script might have stood to round out Glenn a little more, especially where his job is concerned, Cera brings the character fully to life, nevertheless, bordering on unlikable without tipping over into unsympathetic.

As good as Cera is, though, Stewart quietly, effortlessly walks away with “Sacramento” despite limited screen time. If one more tale of immature dudes finding the wherewithal to mount up and become men leaves you nonplussed, honestly, I understand, and the truth is, “Sacramento” isn’t entirely helped by its ending glossing over some tough questions with montages. Neither, though, does “Sacramento” abandon its female characters in the way that Rickey and Glenn do. As Rickey’s old flame Tallie, who appears at the beginning and then again toward the end, Maya Erskine makes the movie itself and its deliberate semi-aimlessness focus as much as Rickey himself. Her character, though, is also more well-drawn than Stewart’s and so it’s an extra testament to the latter that she still makes Rosie feel lived-in. Written as almost heroically patient, Stewart smartly lets quiet exasperation still seep through, bringing the character’s dressing down of Glenn that she shouldn’t have to take care of him like a second infant to life.