Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2026)

Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary

Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz (voice), Lionel Boyce, Milana Vayntrub, Ken Leung, Priya Kansara (voice). Screenplay: Drew Goddard, based on a novel by Andy Weir. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Charles Wood. Film editing: Joel Negron. Music: Daniel Pemberton. 

Like most sci-fi movies, Project Hail Mary is more fiction than science, but it does put the science at its center. It has that in common with the other movie scripted by Drew Goddard from a novel by Andy Weir, The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015).  Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's film is somewhat more fantastical than Scott's, involving as it does the extinction of the human race by a plague of extraterrestrial entities known as astrophages -- star-eaters. This time the hero is not a plucky astronaut trying to survive on Mars by sciencing the shit out of it, but a misfit scientist who gets shanghaied into a one-way trip to Tau Ceti. There he has a close encounter with a benign ET. Yes, Project Hail Mary is derivative, but at this stage what sci-fi movie isn't? It's all done with a great deal of wit and charm, largely on Ryan Gosling's part but also the puppetry and voice work of James Ortiz as the amiable Rocky. At an hour and half, it's a shade too long, but it deserved to be the hit it was. 

Pressure (Horace Ové, 1976)

Herbert Norville in Pressure

Cast: Herbert Norville, Oscar James, Frank Singuineau, Lucita Lijertawood, Sheila Scott Wilkinson, Ed Devereaux, T-Bone Wilson, Ram John Holder, Norman Beaton, John F. Landry, Archie Pool. Screenplay: Horace Ové, Samuel Selvon. Cinematography: Michael J. Davis. Film editing: Alan Cummer-Price. 

"Message movies" get a bad rap. The message too often undermines characterization, turning people into ideas. Horace Ové's Pressure is guilty in that regard. His young protagonist, Tony (Herbert Norville), is a vehicle for the film's ideas about racism, immigration, capitalism, and imperialism. Tony is the England-born son of Trinidadian immigrants, who would like nothing more than for him to assimilate into British culture. His older brother, Colin (Oscar James), who came to Britain with his parents, however, has turned his experience of racism into activism in the Black Power movement. Tony has finished school but struggles to find work, and his idleness begins to get him in trouble. Eventually he joins Colin in the movement, but the film ends on a bleak moment in that struggle, too. It's easy to dismiss Pressure as preaching to the choir and to observe that the struggle for economic justice and ethnic identity continues unabated 50 years after the film was made. But Pressure is skillfully made, effectively dramatizing its issues with scenes that verge on comedy, like Tony's job interview with a politely indifferent potential employer, and even touches of the fantastic, like the dream Tony has under the influence of a reefer. Ové has successfully channeled anger into art. 

Vera (Sergio Toledo, 1986)

Ana Beatriz Nogueira in Vera

Cast: Ana Beatriz Nogueira, Raul Cortez, Aida Leiner, Carlos Kroeber. Screenplay: Sergio Toledo, based on a book by Anderson Bigode Herzer. Cinematography: Rodolfo Sánchez. Art direction: Naum Alves de Souza, Simone Raskin. Film editing: Tércio G. Mota. Music: Arrigo Bernabé. 

The title, Vera, is the deadname of Bauer (Ana Beatriz Nogueira), a young transgender man who does what he can to reject it, an even harder task in 1980s Brazil than it is today. Growing up in an orphanage, he writes poems that get the attention of a prominent educator (Raul Cortez), whom he calls "Professor." (The character is based on the economist Eduardo Suplicy.) When Bauer ages out of the institution, "Professor" finds work for him in a research center, where he meets Clara (Aida Leiner) and falls in love with her. The film, based on the life of Anderson Bigode Herzer, flashes back to his struggles in the institution as he faces a different set of obstacles in the outside world.  Sergio Toledo does nothing to mitigate the sadness and pain in the story he tells, although he stops short of the suicide that ended Herzer's life, leaving some hope for Bauer. Nogueira's beautifully sensitive performance won a best actress award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1987. The only real flaw in the film is in framing Bauer's story with gratuitous shots of the launch of a space shuttle (1986 was the year of the Challenger disaster) and atomic explosions, which seem to be an attempt to heighten the story's significance but only distract from it. 

Art School Confidential (Terry Zwigoff, 2006)

Max Minghella in Art School Confidential

Cast: Max Minghella, Sophia Myles, John Malkovich, Jim Broadbent, Matt Keeslar, Ethan Suplee, Joel David Moore, Nick Swardson, Anjelica Huston, Adam Scott, Jack Ong, Scoot McNairy, Jeremy Guskin, Steve Buscemi. Screenplay: Daniel Clowes. Cinematography: Jamie Anderson. Production design: Howard Cummings. Film editing: Robert Hoffman. Music: David Kitay. 

Terry Zwigoff's Art School Confidential has its origins in a story that appeared in a comic book, and it shows. Daniel Clowes's screenplay, like much graphic fiction, often feels like a collection of set pieces, composed of individual scenes and moments, instead of a coherent narrative. Jerome (Max Minghella), whose artistic talent helped him survive being bullied in high school, goes to a prestigious art school in New York City, thinking that art is his calling. The Strathmore School of Art is staffed by artists who need the money because they have never quite made it on art alone, and it's attended by a variety of kids like Jerome, who have talent but not vision and maturity. It soon becomes clear that the school isn't likely to help them develop that. In addition to scenes lampooning the pretentiousness of the art world, Clowes and Zwigoff also supply a romance, when Jerome falls for Audrey (Sophia Myles), a pretty model who poses nude for his class, and a subplot about a serial killer. Eventually, Jerome becomes a successful artist, but in a heavily ironic way. Art School Confidential has some bite, but it's messily put together, with a few too many irrelevant bits. One of Jerome's roommates, for example, is a closeted gay man whose coming out is tossed into the movie for cheap laughs. An unbilled Steve Buscemi has a pointless role as a cafe owner, and Anjelica Huston and Adam Scott are wasted in bit parts. 

Father Amin (Youssef Chahine, 1950)

Mary Mounib, Esam Abdu, Hussein Riad, and Faten Hamama in Father Amin

Cast: Hussein Riad, Faten Hamama, Kamal El-Shinnawi, Mary Mounib, Farid Shawqi, Hind Rostom, Mohammed Tawfik, Hasan Kamel, Esam Abdu. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Ali El Zorkani, Hussein Helmi El-Mohandes. Cinematography: Massimo Dellamano. Art direction: Abdel Monem Shoukry. Film editing: Kamal Abul Ela. 

Youssef Chahine's first feature film, Father Amin (aka Baba Amin and Daddy Amin), is an amusing mashup of family drama, screwball comedy, musical, romance, and fantasy. Amin (Hussein Riad) dies suddenly but comes back in ghostly form to watch the consequences of an imprudent investment he made just before his death. His wife (Mary Mounib) is forced to sell the furniture in an attempt to pay the installment due on the house she shares with their daughter, Huda (Faten Hamama), and young son, Nabil (Esam Abdu). Huda is being courted by a shy, studious young man, Ali (Kamal El-Shinnawi), who is just about to leave for Alexandria when Amin dies. In his absence, she tries to earn money as a singer in a nightclub, though she's too embarrassed to tell Ali and the family of her job, claiming that she's a nurse. Hovering through this hubbub, Amin learns a few lessons that he will try to put into practice when, you guessed it, he turns out not really to be dead. Chahine deftly blends Hollywood movie tropes with Egyptian style. 

Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein, 1996)

Regina Orozco and Daniel Giménez Cacho in Deep Crimson

Cast: Regina Orozco, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Sherlyn, Giovani Florido, Fernando Soler Palavicini, Patricia Reyes Spindola, Alexandra Vicencio, Julieta Egurrola, Marisa Paredes, Rosa Furman, Verónica Merchant, Juan de la Loza. Screenplay: Paz Alicia Garciadiego. Cinematography: Guillermo Granillo. Production design: Mónica Chirinos, Macarena Folache, Antonio Muño-Hierro, Nava, Marisa Pecanins. Film editing: Rafael Castanedo. Music: David Mansfield. 

Arturo Ripstein's Deep Crimson carries a dedication in its credits to "Leonard, Martha, and Raymond," the director and protagonists of The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1970). Ripstein has moved the events of Kastle's film to Mexico, and the actual "lonely hearts killers" Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez have become Coral Fabre (Regina Orozco) and Nicolás Estrella (Daniel Giménez Cacho), but the sequence of events follows pretty much the same brutal line as Kastle's film. Ripstein's is the more sophisticated version of the story, enhanced by the Sonoran Desert setting of much of the film and by the intense color of Guillermo Granillo's cinematography. The protagonists of Deep Crimson are perhaps even more psychotic than those of Kastle's, and the justice served up to them is ironically almost as corrupt as they are. In the end, it's a question of whether you prefer the low-budget earnestness of Kastle's treatment or the sardonic tone of Ripstein's.    

Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1962)

Cast: Salvo Randone, Frank Wolff, Pietro Cammarata, Sennuccio Benelli, Giuseppe Calandra, Max Cartier, Fernando Cicero, Bruno Ukmar, Cosimo Tonino, Federico Zardi, Francesco Rosi (voice). Screenplay: Francesco Rosi, Suso Cecchi D'Amico, Enzo Provenzale, Franco Solinas. Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo. Production design: Sergio Canevari, Carlo Egidi. Film editing: Mario Serandrei. Music: Piero Piccioni. 

Francesco Rosi's docudrama Salvatore Giuliano is remarkable for not making the title character, a charismatic Sicilian Robin Hood, the focus of the film. Instead, Giuliano, played by a non-professional actor, Pietro Cammarata, is seen only in long shots and in death. The film is about the milieu, post-war Sicily, rather than the man. Rosi, who serves as voiceover narrator in the few moments of the film that try to make it more comprehensible to those not versed in the biographical and historical backstory, is concerned not to make Giuliano into a glamorous figure. Instead he wants us to feel caught up in the political currents, with a masterly use of crowds massing and meeting. Only two figures stand out from these crowds: Gaspare Pisciotta (Frank Wolff), who followed and betrayed Giuliano, and the judge (Salvo Randone) presiding over the trial of Pisciotta and his accomplices. Even the most melodramatic moments in the film, as when Giuliano's mother (an uncredited performer chosen from the local people where the film was made) weeps and fondles her son's corpse, are viewed with detachment. Yet the film works with a masterly display of technique, especially Mario Serandrei's editing and Gianni Di Venanzo's views of the Siciilian landscape. It's a film that asks you to do your homework, but it rewards you for it.  

The Honeymoon Killers (Leonard Kastle, 1970)

Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco in The Honeymoon Killers

Cast: Shirley Stoler, Tony Lo Bianco, Mary Jane Higby, Doris Roberts, Kip McArdle, Marilyn Chris, Dortha Duckworth, Barbara Cason, Ann Harris, Mary Breen. Screenplay: Leonard Kastle. Cinematography: Oliver Wood. Film editing: Richard Brophy, Stanley Warnow. Music: excerpts from Symphonies No. 5, 6, and 9 by Gustav Mahler. 

The Honeymoon Killers was Leonard Kastle's only outing as a director and it shows. Some scenes are framed badly, lopping off characters' heads or bodies, and many of the performers, actors never to be seen again, are awkward and wooden. The set decor is thrift-store cheap, the sound is often tinny, and the music cues hacked out of Mahler symphonies are jarring. It's easy to laugh at the opening title, which hammers home the message that what you're about to see is shocking. But at some point I stopped laughing. It's an undeniably effective movie perhaps because its low-budget cheesiness feels appropriate to the subject matter: a mismatched pair of con artists who prowl American suburbia in search of lonely women whom they can fleece for their sometimes paltry savings. Martha (Shirley Stoler) and Ray (Tony Lo Bianco) squabble and reconcile as they go about their spree of originally unintended murders. The director first hired for the movie was the young Martin Scorsese, who was fired for being too slow. Scorsese, who at that point had made only one feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), later admitted that the firing was probably justified. You have to wonder what the movie would be like if Scorsese decided to remake it today and if it would be nearly so sleazily effective. The Honeymoon Killers will never be what François Truffaut called it, "my favorite American film," but it's in some way an essential one.     

Two Prosecutors (Sergei Loznitsa, 2025)

Aleksandr Kuznetsov in Two Prosecutors

Cast: Aleksandr Kuznetsov, Aleksandr Filippenko, Anatoliy Beliy, Andris Keiss, Vytautus Kaniusonus, Nerijus Gadliauska, Valentin Novopolskij, Demitrijus Denisiukas. Screenplay: Sergei Loznitsa, based on a novel by Georgy Demidov. Cinematography: Oleg Mutu. Production design: Yuriy Grigorovich, Aldis Meinerts. Film editing: Danielius Kokanauskis. Music: Christiaan Verbeek. 

Sergei Loznitsa's Two Prosecutors is a movie that makes you wait, an ordinarily boring experience that gets its mounting suspense from the awareness of its setting: the Soviet Union in 1937, the era of murder and torture and imprisonment as Stalin consolidated his power. The man who waits is Kornyev (Alexsandr Kuznetsov), a young lawyer who is sent to interview a prisoner. Kornyev is led through a labyrinthine series of doors that are unlocked and locked behind him, just to see a prison official who makes him wait until he can see the prison governor, who also makes him wait as he provides a number of reasons why Kornyev shouldn't see the prisoner. Finally, he is led through another labyrinth of unlocked and locked doors to Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), a hunched and haunted man who shows Kornyev his scars and tells his harrowing tale. It's hard not to breathe a sigh of relief once Kornyev is out of this awful place. But then he goes to another awful place, another kind of labyrinth, a Moscow government office building swarming with people on the business of bureaucracy. There he waits and waits again to put Stepniak's case before the Soviet procurator general, Andrey Vyshinsky, now known to history as the man who made Stalin's purge trials work, encouraging any means necessary to extract confessions from the accused. Vishinsky is played with a chilling narrow-eyed stare by Anatoliy Beliy, and though he assures Kornyev that justice will be done in Stepniak's case, we know what that means. We also know that Kornyev is doomed for even suggesting that Stepniak's charges against the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, might be valid. From there on, it's just a matter of watching Kornyev's fate play out. Two Prosecutors is not a subtle film, but it gathers great power from the performers, especially Filippenko, who plays not only Stepniak but also an aging war veteran with one arm and a wooden leg, whom Kornyev meets on the train in a scene that serves as a kind of black comedy interlude. It's also superbly filmed by Oleg Mutu, using the Academy aspect ratio to add to the claustrophobic feeling that Kornyev is caught in a trap not of his own making. As for any application to current political trends toward authoritarianism, that's up to the viewer. 

May Fools (Louis Malle, 1990)

Cast: Michel Piccoli, Miou-Miou, Michel Duchassoy, Bruno Carette, François Berléand, Dominique Blanc, Valérie Lemercier, Paulette Dubost, Martine Gautier, Rozenne Le Tallec, Jeanne Herry, Renaud Danner, Marcel Bories. Screenplay: Louis Malle, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Renato Berta. Production design: Willy Holt, Philippe Turlure. Film editing: Emmanuelle Castro. Music: Stephane Grappelli. 

The matriarch of a large French family dies at an inconvenient time: It's May 1968 and France is in turmoil caused by student riots in Paris and sympathy strikes throughout the country. Gradually the Vieuzac family gathers at the estate, ostensibly to mourn but largely to figure out how to divide things up among themselves. Milou (Michel Piccoli), who has lived there with his mother in a life of pleasant idleness, is adamant about not leaving, while the rest of the family is eager to sell the place and take the profits. The resultant squabbling occurs against the background of a country at odds with itself. Louis Malle co-scripted May Fools with Jean-Claude Carrière, who took an earlier satiric look at the middle class in crisis with his screenplay for Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Malle's richly characterized and deftly performed film has some of the satiric edge of Buñuel's without its surreal touches, edging toward the farcical, with its darker moments lightened by the buoyant jazz score of Stephane Grappelli.