Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, in Sinners, set in 1930s Mississippi.
Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, in Sinners, set in 1930s Mississippi.
Ten films to add to your watch list.
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning and the live-action Lilo & Stitch are flooding theatres, but if you don’t want to follow the crowd, it’s also a good time to catch up on some terrific films you may have missed earlierin the year. I asked New York Times chief film critic Manohla Dargis and movie critic Alissa Wilkinson to recommend releases worth your time.
Sinners
The story: The twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return from Al Capone’s Chicago to open a juke joint in Clarksdale, Mississippi. That’s when the devil, or rather, an Irish vampire, shows up in this talker of a film.
Manohla Dargis’ take: Directed by Ryan Coogler, this “is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies. Set in Jim Crow Mississippi, it is a genre-defying, mind-bending fantasia overflowing with great performances, dancing vampires and a lot of ideas about love and history.”
The story: Set in Brazil beginning in 1970, when a military dictatorship ruled the country, this drama follows the efforts of Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) to keep her family together and still work as an activist after her congressman husband, Rubens Paiva, is arrested and disappeared by the authorities. Based on a true story, the film, directed by Walter Salles, won the Oscar for best international feature.
Alissa Wilkinson’s take: “In her performance — which won a Golden Globe and [earned] an Oscar nomination — Torres stuns. Protecting her children means leaning into joy within the fear, hope in the midst of pain. Torres double-layers her performance with all of those emotions, and her searching eyes are magnetic.”
Black Bag
Their love language is espionage: Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender in Black Bag.
The story: Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender play married British intelligence agents who are each tasked with ferreting out a mole, who may possibly be their spouse in this Steven Soderbergh thriller.
Dargis’ take: The film is “sleek, witty and lean to the bone, a fizzy, engaging puzzler about beautiful spies doing the sort of extraordinary things that the rest of us only read about in novels and — if we’re lucky — watch onscreen. It’s nonsense, but the kind of glorious grown-up nonsense that critics like to say they (as in Hollywood) no longer make.”
The story: Tim Robinson plays Craig, a nice-enough guy with a wife and a house in the suburbs but no friends, until the cool new neighbour (Paul Rudd) moves in. Since this is a cringe comedy, all will not go well.
Wilkinson’s take: The film is “is often funny and always distressing. ... Robinson’s performance, which sometimes feels dropped in from a parallel dimension that’s about 3% different from our own, injects Craig with a quality most similar to an erratically ticking time bomb.”
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
Wallace (voiced by Ben Whitehead), left, with his garden-gnome robot, Norbot (Reece Shearsmith), and his ever-dependable beagle, Gromit. Photo / Netflix
The story: In the latest stop-motion adventure of the inventor Wallace and his trusty beagle, Gromit, the two must contend with the evil mute penguin Feathers McGraw and a garden-gnome robot gone awry.
Dargis’ take: The movie is “a diverting low-key thriller with Bond-like flourishes”. It moves with “smooth efficiency from its amusing, shadowy start to gently slapstick finish, propelled by its characters and [co-director and co-writer Nick] Park’s customary sweet-and-silly humour”.
Eephus
Keith Poulson, Joe Penczak, and John R. Smith Jnr in Eephus.
The story: In small-town Douglas, Massachusetts, two recreational baseball teams gather to play one last game on a field that’s going to be razed to make way for a school.
Wilkinson’s take: The movie “exists outside sports movie tropes altogether, though it’s most certainly a baseball movie. It dwells in some languid liminal space between hangout movie and elegy, a tribute to the community institutions that hold us together.”
The Annihilation of Fish
In Annihilation of Fish, James Earl Jones plays a Jamaican immigrant in New York who claims to be bedevilled by an invisible demon he calls Hank.
The story: In this gentle comedy, a Jamaican immigrant who goes by the name Fish (James Earl Jones) has been battling an invisible demon when he heads to Los Angeles. There he meets a woman (Lynn Redgrave) with her own invisible companion. The film, by Charles Burnett, wasn’t released for 26 years.
Dargis’ take: Calling it a “deeply humane, singular view from the margins,” she wrote, “Jones, who holds the movie throughout, imbues Fish with delicate charisma that becomes more pronounced as the story unfolds and emotions deepen.”
Zhao Tao in Caught by the Tides, directed by Jia Zhangke.
The story: Mixing footage shot for previous movies with new scenes, Chinese film-maker Jia Zhangke follows Qiaoqiao and her lover, Bin, a low-level criminal, over 20 years.
Dargis’ take: The film is “a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers”.
Presence
Chloe (Callina Liang) in Presence, directed by Steven Soderbergh.
The story: The second Steven Soderbergh film on this list is a ghost story set in the seemingly normal suburban home of a family that includes a star-athlete son and a daughter who’s clearly been traumatised.
Dargis’ take: The girl’s “past, her parents’ marriage and the ghost’s restricted point of view together create palpable unease that the filmmakers build on until everyone is vibrating with tension and things have gotten weird. Although there are a few haunted-house shocks, the cumulative effect is more unsettling than scary.”
The Last Showgirl
Pamela Anderson as Shelly in The Last Showgirl.
When the long-running Vegas show she is in closes, an ageing dancer (played by Pamela Anderson) struggles to find work and to connect with her grown daughter even as she finds community with friends (including one played by Jamie Lee Curtis).
Dargis’ take: Directed by Gia Coppola, the drama “tells a familiar story of bad luck and outwardly questionable choices with gentleness, a great deal of love for its characters and an obvious appreciation for the affirming highs and bitter lows that age and beauty afford. Modestly scaled and loosely plotted, it is an unusually tender movie.”
