‘The Voyeurs,' ‘Cyrano' and More Streaming Gems

New York Times

16-04-2025

'Cyrano' (2022)
Edmond Rostand's late-19th-century play 'Cyrano de Bergerac' has proved to be quite a durable text, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise; few things translate as well, no matter the period or genre, than the feeling that the person you love could never feel the same. This adaptation by the director Joe Wright ('Pride & Prejudice'), first presented onstage by the New Group in 2019, changes the source of the title character's low self-image: Instead of an oversize nose, he is of undersize height. Peter Dinklage is marvelous in the starring role, finding the cockiness and bluster that Cyrano uses to compensate, while showing the beating heart just under that hard surface. He also provides a pleasant baritone for the songs by members of the National, which are the film's other key deviation from Rostand's original. They're a masterstroke, beautifully conveying the longing and regret of this tragic tale.
'The Last Stop in Yuma County' (2024)
Three cheers for this A+ premise: The pumps are empty at the last gas station for 100 miles and the truck with the refill is running late, so stranded motorists are killing time at the diner next door — among them, two crooks who made off with a trunkful of bank loot. The writer and director Francis Galluppi works from his own Swiss watch of a script, equally influenced by 'The Desperate Hours' and the dusty neo-noirs of the 1990s, where the turns are unpredictable yet organic and precise, and there are chances for every one if its character actors to shine. Snappily paced, delightfully stylish and refreshingly bleak, this movie is an assurance that we're going to hear much, much more from this gifted first-time filmmaker.
'The Voyeurs' (2021)
There's a fair amount of nostalgia these days for the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and '90s, but most of those with fondness for the subgenre are recalling such major studio releases as 'Basic Instinct' and 'Indecent Proposal.' This Amazon original hews more closely to their direct-to-video stepchildren (celebrated in the recent documentary 'We Kill for Love'), glossy entertainments with interchangeable titles like 'Body Chemistry' and 'Naked Obsession,' in which beautiful squares are tempted out of their vanilla sexual boxes, often with deadly results. Said squares are played here by Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith, as a young couple whose trendy new apartment offers an unobstructed view of their beautiful and randy neighbors (Ben Hardy and Natasha Liu Bordizzo). Their voyeurism is presented as fairly understandable; we all like to watch, the writer and director Michael Mohan assures us. But then the situation gets sticky. It's a touch overlong, with a plot twist (or two) too many, but 'The Voyeurs' delivers the lurid thrills it promises, along with compelling performances by Smith (of last year's 'I Saw the TV Glow') and Sweeney (with whom Mohan would team up again, for 'Immaculate').
'Official Competition' (2022)
The self-importance of art house filmmakers and Method actors is delightfully skewered in this showbiz comedy from the Argentine directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn. Penélope Cruz is a brilliant but bonkers director, hired by a rich industrialist to film an acclaimed novel that he has never bothered to read. She hires two diametrically opposed actors — an actor's-actor theatrical legend (Oscar Martínez) and a gorgeous, dimwitted movie star (Antonio Banderas) — and the sparks fly. All three actors are clearly having a gas sending up their profession (and perhaps settling some scores), while Duprat and Cohn, who wrote the script with the Duprat brother Andrés, build their inside-baseball satire to a fever pitch.
'Every Secret Thing' (2015)
The gifted documentary filmmaker Amy Berg ('Deliver Us From Evil') makes her narrative feature debut with this tricky and prickly adaptation of the Laura Lippman novel. Dakota Fanning and Danielle Macdonald are excellent as teenage girls suspected of kidnapping a baby, and their complex dynamic recalls the knotty codependency of 'Heavenly Creatures,' while Elizabeth Banks brings a haunted tenderness as the lead police detective. Berg has a good feel for the story's small-town setting, building menace and dread out of everyday assumptions and offhand interactions.
'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' (2020)
Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is a 17-year-old with an unwanted pregnancy. She can't terminate it in the small Pennsylvania town where she lives, so she gets on a bus with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) and heads to New York City. It's a simple premise, but the writer and director Eliza Hittman ('Beach Rats') spins their journey into both a quiet howl of fury (the bureaucratic hoops Autumn must jump through are infuriating, and played as such) and a modest yet powerful character study.
'Look Into My Eyes' (2024)
The documentary filmmaker Lana Wilson ('Taylor Swift: Miss Americana') profiles seven New York City psychics, and it's easy to imagine how such a portrait could have been cynical, or even cruel. Instead, 'Look Into My Eyes' is deeply empathic, not only to the clients who come with questions — some tiny and specific, others as big as any we can ask — but also to these souls who try to answer them. Wilson isn't concerned with anything as binary as 'fake' or 'real'; she wants to know what draws these people together, what affirmation is provided by their interactions. Unsurprisingly, many of the psychics are struggling actors and writers, and they have moments of doubt and failure both in and out of their sessions. Some of it is sad, and some of it is funny, but it's never simple. Wilson takes her subjects seriously, and by the film's conclusion, so do we.