Jurassic World: Rebirth (Gareth Edwards, 2025)

Jonathan Bailey and Scarlett Johansson in Jurassic World: Rebirth

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, Luna Blaise, David Iacono, Audrina Miranda, Philippine Velge, Bechir Sylvain, Ed Skrein. Screenplay: David Koepp. Cinematography: John Mathieson. Production design: James Clyne. Film editing: Jabez Olssen. Music: Alexandre Desplat. 

Director Gareth Edwards and writer David Koepp try nothing new in Jurassic World: Rebirth, delivering what we expect from the franchise: an intrepid heroine, a nerdy but resourceful scientist, a villain, a cute kid, scary critters, hair's-breadth escapes, and a few deaths that aren't so bloody that they'll tip the rating from PG-13 to R. Suffice it to say that the formula is getting stale. Its chief virtue is that you know what you're in for, and the movie provides it even if you won't remember a thing about it the next day. 

City on Fire (Ringo Lam, 1987)

Chow Yun-fat in City on Fire

Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Sun Yueh, Danny Lee, Carrie Ng, Roy Cheung, Maria Cordero, Fong Yau, Victor Hon, Lau Kong, Elvis Tsui, Tommy Wong Kwong-leung, Cheng Mang-ha, Parkman Wong. Screenplay: Tommy Sham, Ringo Lam. Cinematography: Andrew Lau. Production design: Chi Fung Lok. Film editing: Wong Ming-lam. Music: Teddy Robin Kwan. 

In Ringo Lam's City on Fire, Chow Yun-fat plays Ko Chow, an undercover cop who wants to leave the force for a less perilous life. An easygoing, antic guy, Chow knows his days are probably numbered in the job and he wants to spend more time with his girlfriend, Hung (Carrie Ng), who keeps threatening to leave him. But his superior officer, Inspector Lau (Sun Yueh), chafing because he's being passed over on the force by a younger inspector (Roy Cheung), persuades Chow to go along with the gang of robbers he's infiltrated for one more heist. City on Fire is a solid cops-and-robbers movie with more characterization and less stylized action than many Hong Kong thrillers, and it helped establish Chow Yun-fat as a star in the genre. 

Northern Lights (John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, 1978)

Joe Spano, Helen Ness, and Robert Behling in Northern Lights

Cast: Robert Behling, Susan Lynch, Joe Spano, Marianna Åström-De Fina, Ray Ness, Helen Ness, Thorbjörn Rue, Nick Eldredge, Jon Ness, Gary Hanisch, Melvin Rodvold, Adelaide Thorntveidt. Screenplay: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson. Cinematography: Judy Irola. Film editing: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson. Music: David Ozzie Ahlers. 

Northern Lights is a tribute to endurance and persistence, not only that of the North Dakota immigrant farmers whose story it tells, but also to writer-director-editors John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, and cinematographer Judy Irola, who endured the hardships of the northern plains in winter to tell it. The story is not a commercial one, dealing as it does with a populist movement seeking solidarity of farmers against capitalists in the early years of the 20th century, but Hanson and Nilsson were determined to make it. It works, too, a moving portrait of unsung lives. 

Teeth (Mitchell Lichtenstein, 2007)

Jess Weixler in Teeth

Cast: Jess Weixler, John Hensley, Josh Pais, Hale Appleman, Lenny von Dohlen, Vivienne Benesch, Ashley Springer, Laila Liliana Garro. Screenplay: Mitchell Lichtenstein. Cinematography: Wolfgang Held. Production design: Paul Avery. Film editing: Joe Landauer. Music: Robert Miller. 

Poised in the gap between exploitation and satire, Mitchell Lichtenstein's Teeth doesn't quite make the grade as either. The title refers to legend of the vagina dentata, a physiological anomaly somehow possessed by Dawn (Jess Weixler). a teenage advocate for the save-it-for-marriage movement. When she lets herself and her boyfriend, Tobey (Hale Appleman), give into their urges, he gets a little too aggressive in satisfying them and suffers the bloody consequences. Teeth never really overcomes its sensational premise, an obvious one for a body horror movie with feminist overtones. Lichtenstein, making his feature debut as writer and director, hasn't yet mastered some of the skills he needs to make it work. The pacing feels off and some of the exposition is muddled. When the film succeeds, it does so because of a sly performance by Weixler, who makes Dawn's confusion and eventual determination more plausible than the script does. 

Black Angel (Roy William Neill, 1946)

June Vincent and Dan Duryea in Black Angel

Cast: Dan Duryea, June Vincent, Peter Lorre, Broderick Crawford, Constance Dowling, Wallace Ford, Hobart Cavanaugh, Freddie Steele, John Phillips, Ben Bard, Junius Matthews, Marion Martin. Screenplay: Ray Chanslor, based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. Cinematography: Paul Ivano. Art direction: Martin Obzina, Jack Otterson. Film editing: Saul A. Goodkind. Music: Frank Skinner.

What Black Angel has going for it is Dan Duryea in a role that departs from his usual villainy, and a setup derived from a novel by Cornell Woolrich, a writer given to nasty surprises. It takes place in a noir milieu that largely consists of bars and nightclubs, the main one presided over by a sinister Peter Lorre with a cigarette constantly dangling from his lip. The result is a solid B-picture that could have been better than that with a more capable leading lady than June Vincent and more imaginative direction than Roy William Neill gives it.

Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino, 2022)

Timothée Chalamet and Taylor Russell in Bones and All

Cast: Taylor Russell, Timothée Chalamet, Mark Rylance, André Holland, Michael Stuhlbarg, Jessica Harper, Chloë Sevigny, Anna Cobb, David Gordon Green. Screenplay: David Kajganich, based on a novel by Camille DeAngelis. Cinematography: Arseni Khachaturan. Production design: Elliott Hostetter. Film editing: Marco Costa. Music: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross. 

A horror movie from the point of view of the monsters, Luca Guadagnino's Bones and All features three remarkable performances. Taylor Russell is revelatory as Maren, the young woman who discovers that her compulsion to eat human flesh is not just an idiosyncrasy; Timothée Chalamet once again proves that he's not just a pretty face as Lee, a fellow "eater"; and Mark Rylance skillfully disappears into another role as Sully, Maren's mentor and nemesis. There's enough gore to satisfy sanguinary horror devotees, but the film focuses mainly on the psychology of people whose desires put them on the fringes of society, doing so without becoming heavily allegorical. Released during the ravages of the covid pandemic, Bones and All underperformed at the box office, but although it transcends the horror genre, its subject matter meant was probably never going to achieve a higher status than cult film.    
 

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (Werner Herzog, 2009)

Grace Zabriskie, Michael Shannon, and Chloë Sevigny in My Son, My Son, What Ye Done

Cast: Michael Shannon, Willem Dafoe, Chloë Sevigny, Michael Peña, Grace Zabriskie, Brad Dourif, Irma P. Hall, Loretta Devine. Screenplay: Herbert Golder, Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Production design: Danny Caldwell. Film editing: Joe Bini, Omar Daher. Music: Ernst Reijseger. 

It took Werner Herzog a long time to get the backing for this odd duck of a film before the exactly right producer, David Lynch, took it on. It's a "true crime" story filtered through Greek myth and the Herzogian imagination with a touch of the Lynchian sensibility, so that it becomes a darkly comic mock tragedy, with Michael Shannon as Orestes and Grace Zabriskie as Electra. There are pet flamingos in the mix, with Brad Dourif in a cameo as a racist and homophobic ostrich farmer and a deadpan performance by Willem Dafoe as the detective trying to make sense of it all. Unfortunately, though fascinating in concept, it gets a little slow in delivery and might easily be dismissed as quirk for quirk's sake. 

Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Bruce Dern and Will Forte in Nebraska

Cast: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, June Squibb, Stacey Keach, Bob Odenkirk, Mary Louise Wilson, Rance Howard, Tim Driscoll, Kevin Ratray, Angela McEwan, Glendora Stitt, Elizabeth Moore, Kevin Kunkel. Screenplay: Bob Nelson. Cinematography: Phedon Papamichael. Production design: J. Dennis Washington. Film editing: Kevin Tent. Music: Mark Orton. 

Like Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo (1996) and Martin McDonagh's Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), Alexander Payne's Nebraska takes place in the hollowed-out heartland of the United States. But where those movies went for satire and dark comedy, Payne is going for something tonally more subtle. Pathos nudges up against humor in Nebraska's story of cantankerous old Woody Grant (Bruce Dern), whose emerging dementia persuades him that he has won a million dollars from one of those dodgy but legal magazine subscription promotions like Publishers Clearing House, which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year. Despite the protests of his long-suffering wife, Kate (June Squibb), and his sons, David (Will Forte) and Ross (Bob Odenkirk), he continues to insist on going from his home in Billings, Montana, to collect his winnings in Lincoln, Nebraska, even if he has to walk there -- he has lost his drivers license for DUI. After the highway patrol finds him walking along the freeway and brings him back, David finally gives up and agrees to take him to Lincoln, knowing that the trip won't end well but hoping it will put an end to the delusion. The film is longer than it should be -- the side trip to Mount Rushmore is unnecessary -- and there's a whiff of condescension in its portrayal of the residents of the decaying small towns of middle America, but it raked in Oscar nominations for picture, cinematography, and direction, and well-deserved ones for Dern and Squibb. 

The Criminal Code (Howard Hawks, 1931)

Phillips Holmes, DeWitt Jennings, and Walter Huston in The Criminal Code

Cast: Walter Huston, Phillips Holmes, Constance Cummings, Boris Karloff, DeWitt Jennings, Mary Doran, Ethel Wales, Clark Marshall, Arthur Hoyt, John St. Polis, Paul Porcasi, Otto Hoffman, John Sheehan. Screenplay: Fred Niblo Jr., Seton I. Miller, based on a play by Martin Flavin. Cinematography: James Wong Howe, Ted Tetzlaff. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Edward Curtiss. Music: Sam Perry. 

Howard Hawks's The Criminal Code is based on a stage play, and it shows. Although it begins with some Hawksian verve -- two guys arguing about 42 cents won in a pinochle game -- it eventually devolves into some rather inert and talky scenes in the office of prison warden Mark Brady (Walter Huston). Brady is a former district attorney who lost a bid for governor and wound up running a prison that houses a lot of the men he convicted. One of them is young Robert Graham (Phillips Holmes), who was persuaded to plead guilty of an accidental crime for which, as even Brady concedes, any good lawyer could have helped him beat the rap. Brady also has a pretty daughter, Mary (Constance Cummings), and when he turns Graham into a trusty responsible for chauffeuring her, you can guess the consequences. But just when it looks like Graham is going to get paroled, he becomes a witness to the murder of an inmate thought to be a stool pigeon. Graham fears that if he fingers the killer (Boris Karloff), he too will suffer the fate of a rat. There are some good scenes in the prison, and Hawks directs the camera more fluidly than is typical of early talkies, but he hasn't yet developed the facility with dialogue that became his hallmark. Huston, for example, keeps interjecting "yeah" into his lines, I think because directors of early talkies -- The Criminal Code was only Hawks's second -- liked to slow down scenes that had a lot of talk because they were afraid audiences used to title cards wouldn't be able to follow what was being said. The film is of interest mostly to Hawks completists, then, but it's good to see Karloff before Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) stereotyped him forever. Look for Andy Devine in a small role -- a convict slicing bread -- before he developed his raspy whine. 

A Chinese Ghost Story II (Ching Siu-tung, 1990)

Joey Wong and Leslie Cheung in A Chinese Ghost Story II

Cast: Leslie Cheung, Joey Wong, Michelle Reis, Jacky Cheung, Wu Ma, Lau Siu-Ming, Waise Lee, Ku Feng, Lau Shun, To Siu-chun. Screenplay: Edward Leung Yiu-ming, Lam Kei-to, Lau Tai-muk. Cinematography: Arthur Wong. Special effects: Nick Allder, David H. Watkins. Film editing: Marco Mak. 

A non-stop, no-holds-barred extravaganza of ghosts, demons, monsters, swordsmen, priests, princesses, and whatever else can be dredged up from Chinese myth and legend, Ching Siu-tung's followup to the 1987 original, A Chinese Ghost Story II does what the first film didn't: It makes the characters secondary to the special effects. Which is not to say it isn't entertaining, but the gifts of its attractive performers are almost incidental. The head-spinning plot follows Leslie Cheung's naive young tax collector Ning Choi San in the aftermath of his romance with a beautiful ghost (Joey Wong). Wrongfully imprisoned, he escapes with the aid of his fellow prisoner, the scholar Elder Chu (Ku Feng), on a horse he unwittingly -- Ning does most things by accident -- steals from a magician, Chi Chau (Jacky Cheung), and winds up in the company of two beautiful sisters, Ching Fung (Wong) and Yuet Chi (Michelle Reis), who mistake him for the real Elder Chu. They and their retinue are trying to free their father, Lord Fu (Lau Siu-Ming), who has also been wrongly charged with a crime and now faces execution. And as if all this weren't confusing enough, Ching Fung is an exact double for Ning's ghostly love -- a fact that astonishes Ning but the film doesn't bother to account for. Ning's old accomplice, the Taoist priest played by Wu Ma, returns too. Everything winds up in a welter of supernatural phenomena that features, among other things, a centipede the size of a subway train and much swooping and swirling of mysterious forces. It's a lot of noisy fun if you don't insist on logic and coherence.