‘Good Boy’ (2025)
This tightly-constructed horror thriller from the first-time feature director Ben Leonberg has, first and foremost, one of the most accurate titles of recent memory: Its star Indy is, indeed, a very good boy. That’s because Indy is a dog, and the clever conceit of “Good Boy” is that it’s a horror movie where the central character is a pet, whose human, Todd (Shane Jensen), is … well, going through some things. The dialogue is minimal (and incidental), and the plotting is basic, which is for the best; this is a movie as much about deconstructing the genre as telling a story, and the ingenious ways in which Leonberg experiments with perspective and reappropriates horror tropes (particularly the “final girl” arc) are refreshing and entertaining.
‘The End of the Tour’ (2015)
In 1996, the novelist David Lipsky accompanied his fellow writer David Foster Wallace — then experiencing his first flush of fame for his seminal novel “Infinite Jest” — for the last few days of his book tour. Lipsky was writing a profile of Wallace for Rolling Stone that was never published; shortly after Wallace’s death in 2008, Lipsky compiled the transcripts of that trip into the book “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.” Those conversations form the spine of James Ponsoldt’s film, which is primarily a two-hander between Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky, who engage in a jousting match of literary theory, professional envy and general suspicion. (That these two actors also moonlight as writers seems to add to the authenticity of their interactions.) The results are witty, insightful and occasionally heartbreaking.
‘The Lady in the Car With Glasses and a Gun’ (2015)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
This French-Belgian adaptation of the novel by Sébastien Japrisot does, indeed, concern a lady in a car with glasses and a gun, so points for truth in titling. Her name is Dany (played with cool elegance by Freya Mavor), a likable secretary whose boss (Benjamin Biolay) ropes her into driving his gorgeous Thunderbird to his home for him. In a tiny act of rebellion, she decides to take it on a seaside joyride, which takes a peculiar turn when people keep mistaking her for someone else along the way. Joann Sfar’s direction is snazzy and stylish, leaning into the moody atmosphere as the twists pile up, and the eventual payoff is supremely satisfying.
‘Cheech & Chong’s Last Movie’ (2025)
Few comedy teams flew quite as high (pardon the pun) as Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, whose stoner antics made them stars of nightclubs, record albums and feature films from the mid-1970s through the early 1980s. Their spectacular rise and worldwide fame are well-covered in this authorized documentary, but the more fascinating material concerns their contentious breakup, and the hurt feelings that both men still harbor over it. The inherent irreverence of its subjects keep it from falling into (most of) the traps of the official celebrity biodoc, however; the director David Bushell wisely intermingles the customary talking head interviews and archival footage with wildly funny, slyly scripted road-trip scenes between the duo. Those sequences turn “Last Movie” into less of a fawning documentary than, well, a good old-fashioned Cheech and Chong comedy.
‘Benedetta’ (2021)
If you thought the director of “Showgirls” and “Basic Instinct” would make a straight-faced, pious movie about Catholicism, you should seek counseling. But the most recent feature from Paul Verhoeven isn’t some empty-headed provocation or flesh-baring nunsploitation riff, either; Verhoeven is enough of an armchair biblical scholar to have written a book about Jesus in 2007, and his thoughtful grappling with the tenets of organized religion are what give this story of a young nun (the enrapturing Virginie Efira) torn between miracles of the soul and pleasures of the flesh its juice. There are other, more prurient qualities, of course — this is a Verhoeven movie, after all — but what’s most surprising about “Benedetta” is how fully it stimulates the heart and mind as well.
‘Under the Silver Lake’ (2019)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
The writer and director David Robert Mitchell took four years to craft his follow-up to his indie horror breakthrough “It Follows,” and it’s the kind of movie that a youngish man makes after early success: a sprawling, lengthy, messy ode to the pleasures of wandering around Los Angeles, populated by a cast of hot young actors (including Andrew Garfield, Riley Keough, Zosia Mamet, Grace Van Patten and a pre-fame Sydney Sweeney) and filled with expensive needle drops and meta-references to cool movies and novels. Yet even with all of the movie’s disorder, Mitchell gets at something difficult to articulate about its setting and the people who populate it, capturing the defiant chaos and self-conscious cool that has come to define a region and a generation.
‘Silent Night’ (2023)
It’s hard to overstate how influential the director John Woo’s Hong Kong action epics of the late 1980s and early ’90s were on Hollywood action filmmakers of the era; when he came to America riding the crest of that wave and made hits like “Face/Off” and “Broken Arrow,” he seemed unstoppable. But a couple of stumbles sent him back to Hong Kong, where his work only made it to American art houses; he took his first stab at reclaiming his dominance with this vigilante thriller. Its central gimmick is ingenious; as its protagonist (Joel Kinnaman) is unable to speak, Woo crafts the picture without spoken dialogue, combining the aesthetics of the modern action movie with those of silent cinema. Some filmmakers would struggle with the challenge, but Woo calls upon his peerless visual instinct and fiercely energetic directorial rhythm to pull it off.
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