“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” and the live-action “Lilo & Stitch” are flooding theaters this Memorial Day weekend. 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 earlier in the year. I asked our chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and our movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, to recommend releases worth your time. All are in theaters or available online.
‘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, Miss. That’s when the devil, or rather, an Irish vampire, shows up in this talker of a film.
Manohla Dargis’s 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.”
Read the review; interviews with Coogler and Jordan, and other cast members; and a critic’s essay.
‘I’m Still Here’
Stream it on Netflix or rent it on most major platforms.
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.”
Read the review and an interview with Torres.
‘Black Bag’
Stream it on Peacock or rent it on most major platforms.
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’s 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.” Read the review.
‘Friendship’
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 neighbor (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 percent different from our own, injects Craig with a quality most similar to an erratically ticking time bomb.” Read the review.
‘Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl’
Stream it on 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’s 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 humor. Read the review.
‘Eephus’
Rent it on most major platforms.
The story: In small-town Douglas, Mass., 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.” Read the review.
‘The Annihilation of Fish’
Stream it on Kanopy.
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’s 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.”
Read the review and an interview with the director.
‘Caught by the Tides’
The story: Mixing footage shot for previous movies with new scenes, the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke follows Qiaoqiao and her lover, Bin, a low-level criminal, over 20 years.
Dargis’s 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.” Read the review.
‘Presence’
Rent it on most major platforms.
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 traumatized.
Dargis’s 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.” Read the review.
‘The Last Showgirl’
Rent it on most major platforms.
The story: When the long-running Vegas show she is in closes, an aging 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’s 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.” Read the review.
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