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Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The best movies of 2025 so far, according to critics
When it comes to movies, why wait for the end-of-year best-of lists? A number of movies have already garnered 3.5 stars or more from The Washington Post's critics and contributors (Ann Hornaday, Ty Burr, Michael Brodeur, Jen Yamato, Michael O'Sullivan, Thomas Floyd and Chris Klimek — identified by their initials below). Throughout the year, we'll update this list — bookmark it! — with the films we loved and where to watch them. (Note that all movies reviewed by The Post in 2025 are eligible for inclusion.) Ryan Coogler's wildly entertaining mash-up of genres, tonal flavors and stunning production values veers confidently between pulpy and profound, never sacrificing what's on its mind for its primary aim, which is to shock and enthrall. There's a culture war raging within the throbbing, thrumming 1930s juke joint that serves as its backdrop; viewers should rest assured — or be forewarned — that this particular skirmish will leave blood on the floor. (R, 137 minutes) — Ann Hornaday Where to watch: In theaters The French writer-director Alain Guiraudie makes transgressive dramas that double as the bleakest of black comedies, where friendships between men veer from social to sexual to antagonistic and back, and where the morality of a country village can be a thin veneer over the darkest deeds of the heart. 'Misericordia' is less sexually explicit than Guiraudie's most well-known movie, the Cannes prizewinner 'Stranger by the Lake,' but it's no less fascinatingly, even amusingly wicked. (Unrated, 104 minutes) — Ty Burr Where to watch: In theaters It takes nerve to make a documentary about the most unpopular period of a massively popular public figure's life. 'One to One: John & Yoko' demonstrates that it's worth the effort. Co-directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards have done an impressively deep archival dive to give us this portrait of John Lennon in 1972, the year the ex-Beatle arrived in New York City to stay and embarked on a period of radical politics and art, accompanied by his wife, muse, collaborator and co-instigator Yoko Ono, whose mere presence drove most people nuts. (R, 100 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: In theaters In baseball, an 'eephus' is a trick pitch, a high-arcing throw that discombobulates a hitter while dazzling the crowd. Which is not a bad description of 'Eephus,' a tiny but nearly perfect movie that bids goodbye not only to a local ballfield and the middle-aged men who play on it, but to a vanishing America for whom baseball was the game — a definition of how we congregate and compete and build small myths to sustain us after the final at-bat. (Unrated, 99 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube The guinea fowl is a ubiquitous, henlike bird native to Africa, where it's known for traveling in flocks and raising a noisy alarm when predators are nearby. In Rungano Nyoni's scalding Cannes prizewinner 'On Becoming a Guinea Fowl,' the bird serves as a metaphor for a society that will do anything to avoid listening. Nyoni's film is a keening black comedy with sparks of magical realism and folktale, in which she lets the visual and thematic pieces of the dramatic puzzle fall into place gradually. (PG-13, 99 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube Nearly a decade ago, Britain's perennially hapless rom-com heroine Bridget Jones actually did make it to marriage and motherhood after three movies and countless comical indignities. But in the tender, sexy coda 'Mad About the Boy,' the fourth film adapted from Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary novel series, she discovers there's more life to live after the happily-ever-after. It's the best of the sequels yet. A buoyant and luminous Renée Zellweger returns as a widowed Bridget, with Leo Woodall of 'The White Lotus' as her younger love interest, Roxster. Michael Morris directs. (R, 124 minutes) — Jen Yamato Where to watch: Peacock Filmed from 2019 to 2023, this documentary is the work of a joint Palestinian-Israeli collective of four filmmakers, but really it's the story of two of them and of a friendship that is both hopeful and hopeless. Basel Adra is a young Palestinian activist who grew up in the southern Hebron Hills. Yuval Abraham is a young Israeli whose political views were changed by studying Arabic in high school; now he tries to get stories of the demolitions of Palestinian villages into an Israeli news media that doesn't want to hear it. As an act of citizen journalism, 'No Other Land' is a document as damning as they come, and it lands in this endless, bitterly complex struggle like an argument that refuses to be rationalized away. (Unrated, 92 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming This documentary about the conflict in Ukraine and the citizen army fighting back against Russia's invasion focuses squarely on artists and craftspeople who by necessity have become warriors. Are their senses and sensibilities dulled by the violence around them and the violence they're forced to wreak? Or are they more alert to the pains, paradoxes and even joys of struggling through to the end of each day alive? 'Porcelain War' is a testament to how life's beauty — all the world's fertility an artist is trained to see — endures among privation and death. (R, 87 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Not yet available for streaming Director Walter Salles crafts an epic within an epic: a teeming family drama contained within the melodrama of a country going insane. In 1970, Brazil existed in a state of constant tension, with a military dictatorship overseeing a resurgent economy and the increasingly brutal repression of anyone it saw as stepping out of line. Among the latter was Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), a civil engineer and congressman, whose disappearance unleashed the fury and determination of his wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres) — this film's real hero. (PG-13, 136 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube A ghost story, as told from the point of view of the ghost. 'Presence' is more unsettling than scary, more dramatically gripping than nerve-shredding. And it's directed by Steven Soderbergh, so you know it has to be smart. His camera silently roams an old suburban house, unable to step past the doors outside, putting the audience inside the mind of a phantom as it yearns to protect the most vulnerable member of the family that lives there. (R, 84 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube Building his scripts through collaborative improvisation with his casts, director Mike Leigh creates itchy comedy-dramas about life's misfits and reprobates and, occasionally, its optimists — average folk, often, who create and survive their own mundane disasters. 'Hard Truths' stars Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a middle-aged, working-class Londoner with a gift for invective and complaint: a woman of titanic feeling who has somehow become a prisoner of herself. (R, 97 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube This delightfully unhinged musical biopic from director Michael Gracey ('The Greatest Showman') chronicles British pop singer and former boy band sensation Robbie Williams, revisiting the singer's tumultuous rise and celebrating his effervescent body of Brit-pop hits ('Angels' among them). American audiences might be shocked at how well it works on all fronts. Especially considering that Williams is rendered throughout as a CGI chimpanzee. (R, 135 minutes) — Michael Brodeur Where to watch: Apple TV+, Google Play, Prime Video, YouTube Adapting Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that was inspired by the true story of dozens of young men (the majority of them Black) tortured and killed at a reform institution in the Florida Panhandle, RaMell Ross ('Hale County This Morning, This Evening') reinvents the cinema as a language of hope. Hope for what? Survival, connection, bearing witness to historical crimes, the sacrament of peering into another person's soul. It's one of the most visually and sonically gorgeous movies of the year. (PG-13, 140 minutes) — T.B. Where to watch: Apple TV+, Prime Video
Chicago Tribune
31-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
‘Misericordia' review: A funeral mourner sparks a tiny French village's erotic roundelay
Under wraps or busting out all over, inconvenient yearning is everywhere in the films of Alain Guiraudie. And like most of his characters, the French writer-director likes to keep his options open. No one genre suits him. Now at the Gene Siskel Film Center and the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 'Misericordia' begins with a homecoming, proceeds to a funeral, expands to other corners of a not-so-sweet-little-village, throws in a murder and a cover-up, and concludes with elements of a deadpan sex comedy. It's easier to get at what 'Misericordia' isn't than what it is. And that makes it all the more interesting. The story begins with Jérémie, around age 30 with an uncertain future, falling back into his past. He returns to his former village of Saint-Martial for the funeral of the town baker. Jérémie worked as his apprentice a decade earlier. At the cozy hillside home of Martine, the baker's widow, Jérémie settles in for a stay of undetermined length. Early on, we see one framed photo in particular that catches Jérémie's eye: the baker in his prime, in a Speedo, at the beach. Casually, Martine refers to an intimate connection between her late husband and his apprentice. Connections like that maintain the film's low boil of erotic intrigue. Martine's hot-tempered son, Vincent, a childhood frenemy of Jérémie's, lives nearby. He does not relish the upcoming funeral's conspicuous outsider worming his way back into Saint-Martial. Vincent and Jérémie, it's implied, were more than just frenemies when they were teenagers. The bad blood between them eggs the men onto violence, tinged with physical need. Elsewhere, 'Misericordia' lets a comically glaring moment of side-eye do what words cannot. Most of it comes from the town abbot who, in frequent scenes set in the nearby woods, always seems to be drifting into view with his basket of precious mushrooms, whenever Jérémie is near. The rhythm and plotting of 'Misericordia' subverts expectations, not with story twists but with a tonal game of three-card monte. Guiraudie's best-known work, the 2013 movie 'Stranger by the Lake,' blended a more selective array of genre elements more smoothly; his new film, nuttier, more free-ranging, sets its queer male gaze inside genre boundaries drawn and re-drawn on the fly. More than once, this or that villager sneaks into Jérémie's bedroom at night, with something urgent to say. It's as if a murder story changed its mind and turned into a Joe Orton farce, taken at a peculiar half-speed. Some will buy it, some will not. But if life can pull switcheroos on us, movies can, too. The cast finesses the material without a misstep as the pent-up townsfolk orbit around cryptic, magnetic Jérémie, played by Félix Kysyl. Portraying Martine, whose jealousy-tinged affection for her houseguest becomes genuinely touching, Catherine Frot is the X-factor that makes 'Misericordia' a whole, rather than merely parts looking for a whole. As the village abbot never far from the woods, or from Martine's little dining room table, Jacques Develay manages the trick of utter simplicity in his motives and line readings. Nobody in this village can quite figure out why the alluring tabula rasa, Jérémie, has a hold on everybody. They only know desire works in mysterious ways. Misleadingly, this filmmaker's brand of suspense has often been labeled 'Hitchcockian,' because there are sometimes corpses to be hidden and alibis to be faked. In 'Misericordia,' on the other hand, there's a touch of Hitchcock's atypical lark 'The Trouble With Harry' in its straight-faced handling of strange developments. The trouble with Jérémie isn't that he's dead, even though his homecoming involves not one but two casualties. Is he bad? Misunderstood? A tender soul in hiding? A portrait in opaque omnisexuality, as adaptable as a zipper? Since 'Misericordia' has no interest in being only one kind of movie, it seems strange to expect a single motive or simple explanation from anyone in it. 'Misericordia' — 3.5 stars (out of 4) No MPA rating (nudity, some language and violence) How to watch: Now playing at the Landmark Century Centre Cinema, 2828 N. Clark St., and Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St. In French with English subtitles.
New York Times
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Misericordia' Review: Danger Always Hides in the Bushes
In 'Misericordia,' a rakish youngish guy named Jérémie drives back to a French village for the funeral of his old boss, a baker, who has kicked the bucket at 62. And the instant the widow lets Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) into the living room, he and the baker's adult son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a mushroom forager, share the sort of charged eye contact that tells you 'Yup, these two definitely did it.' We don't know when or how far things went. Something happened, though. But because 'Misericordia' (Latin for 'mercy') has wafted from the cauldron of the writer and director Alain Guiraudie, it's possible I'm wrong. Ambiguity? Mixed motives? Casual lawlessness? These are his considerable strengths. 'Misericordia' culminates in kink, killing and some gloriously literal deus ex machina. So maybe what I'm experiencing as an erotic charge is caution. But again: it's Guiraudie, the man who brought us the 2014 murder-at-the-gay-nude-beach sensation 'Stranger by the Lake' and a bedroom farce ('Nobody's Hero,' 2023) whose component parts included racism, terrorism, sex work, domestic violence, paranoia, jogging and vaping. The caution is erotic. His movies, meanwhile, prove absorbingly absurdist, this new one especially. It's got its own rhythm. If Guiraudie isn't mocking the way we've been trained to receive stories, films, people, then he's at least disrupting the usual patterns. Retraining us to see anew, to suspend expectation and abandon comfort, the way that John Waters and Mike Leigh, Aki Kaurismaki, Hal Hartley and the other oddball live-action cartoonists have. It's risky, but something thrilling and often true usually comes of it. Guiraudie presents life at its basest and gamiest. So I trust my instincts about Jérémie and Vincent. I know hunger when I see it. And 'Misericordia' is dotted with hungry eyes. Jérémie stays the night at the widow's. The room she offers is the one Vincent grew up in, maybe the room where It Happened. Jérémie and Vincent even make the bed together. But rekindling's not on the program. Regression, maybe. The bed all made, Vincent — who's pushing 40, is bald, and has a lisp and a cleft lip — suggests playing some Yahtzee, like they used to. Jérémie declines. From there, reunion curdles into disunion. And the homecoming movie you might have been wanting becomes the funkier tale of a sociopath who opts to overstay his welcome. Jérémie doesn't get up to much: the occasional drive around town, a walk in the forest, some horseplay with Vincent on the forest floor where he should be foraging for mushrooms. What does he want? The late baker's clothes, for one thing; his shoes, too. The widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), seems super OK with that. She doesn't even appear to mind the probability that Jérémie's list of infatuations likely included her husband. They flip through a photo album together and admire how good the dead man looked in a Speedo. (They're not wrong.) Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
14-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Movies to watch in March, including 'Mickey 17' and 'The Woman in the Yard'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. March comes in like a lion this year, with films that are frightening, ambitious and just plain weird. They include the long-awaited follow-up to Bong Joon-ho's 2019 masterpiece, "Parasite," an erotic thriller set in a quaint French village and a gruesome comedy about the murder of a unicorn. This month's new releases will challenge your expectations. And they will certainly not have you leaving the theater feeling like a lamb. Bong Joon-ho, the director of four-time Academy Award winner "Parasite," is back with another dark comedy about class structure and workers' rights. Set in a dystopian future, the sci-fi tale stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey, a man living on an Earth now ravaged by catastrophic weather. He signs up to work as an "expendable" employee who embarks on space missions wherein he frequently perishes; every time he dies, he is cloned and reborn. "When scientists want to observe what happens after the human body is exposed to fatal amounts of radiation," for example, it is "Mickey's time to clock in and bleed out," said David Fear at Rolling Stone. As with "Parasite," adventures across the film's grim universe are presented as an absurdist jaunt. "Each time Mickey is resurrected by way of a massive 3D printer," you can "feel Bong's sense of humor shining through," said Charles Pulliam-Moore at The Verge. (March 7 in theaters) This sinister psychosexual comedy — a real tongue twister — is the latest from French director Alain Guiraudie, best known for 2013's erotic thriller "Stranger by the Lake," "one of the sexiest, deadliest and most explicit films of the 21st century so far," said Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire. The best body horror movies of the last half-century Why Japanese residents can't watch their country's Oscar-nominated #MeToo documentary Is method acting falling out of fashion? "Misericordia" is another exploration of queer desire, taking place in an autumnal French village where a down-on-his-luck baker has returned for the funeral of his former boss. When the protagonist begins to set down roots and intermingle with the locals a little too fondly, things get complicated — and potentially criminal. (March 21 in theaters) The debut feature from Parisian filmmaker Fleur Fortuné marks the second psychodrama on our March list set in a near-future Earth that has been — you guessed it — ravaged by climate change. Hopeful parents played by Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel must undergo a strenuous and surreal seven-day evaluation to be considered fit to have a child. Alicia Vikander plays the couple's assessor, Virginia, who eventually moves to role-play with the pair in an effort to see how they handle parental challenges (she plays the child). It might be Vikander's most affecting performance since she portrayed Ava, the overdeveloped robot in "Ex Machina." (March 21 in theaters) The latest from massive horror brand Blumhouse was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, a master of campy yet well-constructed horror ("The Shallows;" "Orphan;" "House of Wax"). Danielle Deadwyler stars as Ramona, a single mother of two whose family has begun to observe a terrifying spectral figure outside their rural farmhouse. The premise is chilling not merely because the intruder sits beneath a long black veil, watching the house — but because she claims she has been summoned there. (March 28 in theaters) If you watched 2023's "Cocaine Bear" and wanted more, "Death of a Unicorn" may be the spiritual sequel you seek. The titular beast is not on any narcotics this time, but the A24 comedy does similarly recall "monster flicks from the '70s and '80s with brutal quality kills placed in a tapestry of social commentary and funny characters," said Brian Tallerico at The story follows a man and his daughter who accidentally kill a unicorn with their car. When they discover the creature has healing magic, the father's boss attempts to exploit it — until the dead unicorn's mate shows up for revenge. "It's a story that Michael Crichton would have dug," said Tallerico, "one about the wealthy ignoring not only the signs in front of them but the history and the mythology of this world." (March 28 in theaters)
