28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Nia DaCosta, 2026)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman, Chi Lewis-Parry, Emma Laird, Sam Locke, Robert Rhodes, Ghazi Al Ruffai, Maura Bird, Connor Newall, Lewis Ashbourne Serkis, Mirren Mack, David Sterne, Cillian Murphy. Screenplay: Alex Garland. Cinematography: Sean Bobbitt. Production design: Carson McCall, Gareth Pugh. Film editing: Jake Roberts. Music: Hildur Guðnadóttir. 

A pandemic has swept the world, leaving the survivors at the mercy of the worst among them. Good thing it's just a movie, right? I won't say that Alex Garland, who gave us Civil War (2024), about an American citizenry at odds with its government, didn't have something more in mind than a post-apocalyptic Britain, so let's just keep in mind Oscar Wilde's pronouncement: "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril." On the surface, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a worthy successor to, maybe even an improvement on, Danny Boyle's 2025 film 28 Years Later, which introduced Dr. Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), a solo survivor fending off those infected by the Rage Virus we first encountered in Boyle and Garland's 28 Days Later (2003). Film series usually peter out after one or two sequels, but this one has somehow gotten stronger. (I'm not going to say it's because life has copied art, to invoke another Wilde aphorism.) Nia DaCosta's direction is sure-handed, and the cast is more than up to the often gruesome demands of the script. The ending, reintroducing Cillian Murphy as Jim, the survivor from 28 Days Later who hasn't aged much in 28 years, lets us know a sequel is on the way, and for once I don't mind. 

Four Nights of a Dreamer (Robert Bresson, 1971)

Isabelle Weingarten and Guillaume des Forêts in Four Nights of a Dreamer

Cast: Guillaume des Forêts, Isabelle Weingarten, Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Giorgio Maulini, Lidia Biondi, Patrick Jouané, Jérôme Massart. Screenplay: Robert Bresson, based on a story by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Cinematography: Pierre Lhomme. Production design: Pierre Charbonnier. Film editing: Raymond Lamy. Music: F.R. David, Louis Guitar, Chris Hayward, Michel Magne. 

Robert Bresson's spare, terse Four Nights of a Dreamer is not for those who want their love stories lush and passion-filled. It's about the accidental and fragile nature of mutual attraction. Jacques (Guillaume des Forêts) is an artist whom we first see thumbing a ride out of Paris into the country, where he does somersaults and annoys a promenading family by briefly bursting into song. Then he returns to the city where, out walking at night, he sees a young woman on the verge of flinging herself into the Seine. She is Marthe (Isabelle Weingarten), who is distraught because she thinks she has been abandoned by the man she loves. For four nights, Jacques tries to help her reconnect with him, and just when they seem to be forming their own connection, they encounter her lover on the street and she goes off with him. Jacques  returns to his apartment and resumes work on his painting and his dreams. The Parisian night's soft colors and shadows and the music of street performers provide the emotional content of this understated romance, which shows the steady hand of its director without his frequently harsh view of human attempts to connect with one another. 

Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)

Jacques Dutronc in Van Gogh

Cast: Jacques Dutronc, Alexandra London, Bernard Le Coq, Gérard Sèty, Corinne Bourdon, Elsa Zylberstein, Leslie Azzoulai, Jacques Vidal, Chantal Barbarit, Claudine Ducret, Frédéric Bonpart. Screenplay: Maurice PIalat. Cinematography: Gilles Henry, Jacques Loiseleux, Emmanuel Machuel. Production design: Philippe Pallut, Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet, Nathalie Hubert, Hélène Viard. 

Maurice Pialat's avoidance of melodrama, sentimentality, and biopic clichés makes his Van Gogh an exceptional contribution to the flood of films about the life and death of the artist. Pialat even avoids the one fact that everyone seems to know about Vincent Van Gogh: the mutilation of an ear. There's a passing reference to it, but no prosthetic has been attached to Jacques Dutronc's head to represent it. Pialat is as much concerned with the milieu, the village of Auvers-sur-Oise and the vie bohème of Paris, as he is with the facts of Van Gogh's last days. And by casting Dutronc, better known as a singer, in the role, he avoids the "movie star syndrome" that tainted the characterization when the part was played by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2016), and Tim Roth in Vincent & Theo (Robert Altman, 1990): We don't have to filter Van Gogh through our familiarity with the actor. Pialat also avoids focusing on the pictures themselves: He wants us to see the man more than the paintings. The result is occasionally frustrating. Pialat is fond of jump cuts that leave us momentarily trying to figure out where and when we are, and though the scene set in a Montmartre brothel that serves as a kind of climax to the film is exhilarating, it feels like an overextended set piece rather than an integral part of Van Gogh's story. But I know of no film that gives a richer sense of the world in which Van Gogh and his contemporaries -- the movie verbally and visually invokes Cézanne, Renoir, Lautrec, and others -- lived and worked. 

The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022)

Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattinson in The Batman

Cast: Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Colin Farrell, Paul Dano, John Turturro, Andy Serkis, Peter Sarsgaard, Barry Keoghan, Jayme Lawson. Screenplay: Matt Reeves, Peter Craig. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: James Chinlund. Film editing: William Hoy, Tyler Nelson. Music: Michael Giacchino. 

No, we didn't need a Batman reboot, and certainly not one at an epic length. But I appreciated Matt Reeves's visually and tonally dark The Batman for its coherent and sometimes original reworking of too-familiar material. If we must have billionaire vigilantes, let them be like Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne, at least a little tormented by self-doubt. Batman has always seemed to me the weirdest of superheroes, Wayne's role-playing being just this side of psychosis, and Pattinson gives the part some of that quality. I also like the transformation of the Penguin into a crippled mob henchman who hates his nickname, and I'm grateful that it gave Colin Farrell a chance to show what a protean actor he is, here and in the TV series that was spun off from the film. The considerable talents of Zoë Kravitz, Jeffrey Wright, Paul Dano, and Andy Serkis are well-used too, and I liked Michael Giacchino's melancholy score, with its variations on Schubert's "Ave Maria." But really, the best I can say for the movie is that as insults to my intelligence go, it was a well-made one. 

Who Killed Teddy Bear (Joseph Cates, 1965)

Sal Mineo in Who Killed Teddy Bear

Cast: Sal Mineo, Juliet Prowse, Jan Murray, Elaine Stritch, Margot Bennett, Daniel J. Travanti, Diane Moore, Frank Campanella. Screenplay: Leon Tokatyan, Arnold Drake. Cinematography: Joseph C. Brun. Art direction: Hank Aldrich. Film editing: Angelo Ross. Music: Charles Calello. 

Who Killed Teddy Bear is about kinks, and it has one of its own: the fetishization of Sal Mineo's body. The film takes every opportunity to explore it, showing the actor in his underwear or swim suit whenever possible. But this is only one of the peculiarities of a very odd film that falls somewhere between exploitation flick and serious exploration of a culture, that of New York City, poised between the repressions of the 1950s and the frenzy of the 1970s. Mineo plays Larry Sherman, who lives with his sister (Margot Bennett), mentally handicapped since a trauma that occurred when she was a child. He works as a busboy in a discotheque -- not one of the mirror-balled hothouses of the next decade, but a well-lighted place that looks like a suburban rec room. Juliet Prowse plays Norah, a DJ at the club, which is managed by the tough-talking Marian (Elaine Stritch). When Norah starts getting creepy phone calls, she contacts the police, and Lt. Dave Madden (Jan Murray) takes charge of the case. Madden is obsessed with sex crimes, and in his off time he studies his extensive collection of literature on the subject and listens to tapes of the victims he has interviewed, undisturbed that his 10-year-old daughter can also hear them. Norah is at first grateful for Madden's help, but eventually repulsed by his obsessions. Unfortunately, neither director Joseph Cates nor screenwriters Leon Tokatyan and Arnold Drake seem to know what to do with this assortment of characters and what might have been a solid thriller veers off into incoherence. 

Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925)

Belle Bennett in Stella Dallas

Cast: Belle Bennett, Ronald Colman, Lois Moran, Alice Joyce, Jean Hersholt, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Screenplay: Frances Marion, based on a novel by Olive Higgins Prouty. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Film editing: Stuart Heisler. 

Although eclipsed by the 1937 version directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, the first filming of Olive Higgins Prouty's lachrymose novel Stella Dallas is well worth seeing, chiefly because of Belle Bennett's blowsy, undaunted Stella. It's hard to see why suave Ronald Colman's Stephen Dallas  would fall so completely for Stella's unkempt charms that he's willing to marry her, except as a kind of penance for his father's criminality and loss of the family fortune, but this is not a story for skeptics or realists. This is domestic melodrama of the purest sort, in which conventional psychology plays only the faintest role. It's a tale that requires you to believe that there's a maternal instinct that overcomes all, even the disapproval of polite society, and that it will be rewarded by seeing your daughter married to a product of that society, even if you have to do it standing in the rain outside the wedding. Bennett is grand in the role, even if her character doesn't have the complexities that Stanwyck brings to it. 

A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)

Nelly Frijda, Edda Barends, and Henriëtte Toll in A Question of Silence 

Cast: Edda Barends, Nelly Frijda, Henriëtte Toll, Cox Habbema, Eddie Brugman, Hans Croiset, Erik Plooyer. Screenplay: Marleen Gorris. Cinematography: Frans Bromet. Art direction: Harry Ammerlaan. Film editing: Hans van Dongen. Music: Lodewijk de Boer, Martijn Hasebos.

Janine (Cox Habbema), a court-appointed psychiatrist, examines three women on trial for a mysteriously random murder of the owner of a boutique. The women were strangers to each other before they assaulted the man, who accused one of them of shoplifting. Janine's task is to determine whether the women were insane when they committed the crime, and she comes to feel empathy for them when she examines the ways in which they were discriminated against by the men in their lives. Marleen Gorris crafts an intriguing courtroom drama that has been dismissed by some as feminist agitprop, but deserves praise for the way Gorris manipulates our attitudes toward the issues it raises.   

Love Letter (Kinuyo Tanaka, 1953)

Masayuki Mori in Love Letter

Cast: Masayuki Mori, Juzo Dosan, Yoshiko Kuga, Jukichi Uno, Kyoko Kagawa, Shizue Natsukawa, Kinuyo Tanaka, Chieko Seki, Ranko Hanai, Chieko Nakakita, Keisuke Kinoshita. Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita, based on a novel by Fumio Niwa. Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki. Art direction: Seigo Shindo. Film editing: Toshio Goto. Music: Ichiro Saito. 

Struggling to get by in postwar Japan, Reikichi Mayumi (Masayuki Mori) spends his idle time searching for his childhood sweetheart Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga). Then one day he finds her and berates her for what she did to survive: become the mistress of an American soldier. That is the crux of the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka's first film as a director, Love Letter. The letter itself is the giveaway to Michiko's secret. Reikichi overhears her dictating it to his friend Naoto Yamaji (Jukichi Uno), who ekes out a living by writing letters for women whose GI boyfriends have left them behind when they returned to the States. Michiko bore the soldier's child, but it died, and now she urgently seeks his financial aid, fearing that she will have to prostitute herself to live. Tanaka creates a vivid portrait of a wounded country where regret about the past is secondary to the need to survive. In this context, Reikichi's rigid morality seems out of place. Alive with secondary characters, the film gives us more than just a tortured romance, and although it contains a soap opera crisis, Tanaka wisely avoids a pat reconciliatory ending.    

War Machine (Patrick Hughes, 2026)

Alan Ritchson in War Machine

Cast: Alan Ritchson, Stefan James, Blake Richardson, Dennis Quaid, Esai Morales, Jai Courtney, Alex King, Keiynan Lonsdale, Jack Patton, James Beaufort, Joshua Diaz, Jacob Hohua, Daniel Webber. Screenplay: Patrick Hughes, James Beaufort. Cinematography: Aaron Morton. Production design: Enzo Iacono. Film editing: Andy Canny. Music: Dmitri Golovko. 

I think I would have enjoyed War Machine more if it didn't feel like the kind of movie Pete Hegseth would love. At the beginning it's a straightforward celebration of military machismo, but then it turns into an invasion from outer space sci-fi movie while still retaining its conviction that the warrior ethos of muscle and grit is what will save us. Granted, it does give a nod to intelligence, as the hero manages to conquer the alien war machine with his knowledge of applied physics. The movie doesn't give Alan Ritchson much of an opportunity to play anything but Reacher gone Ranger, but he demonstrates the kind of presence that should ensure his continuance in action flicks, including the franchise that War Machine seems likely to produce.    

Every Man for Himself (Jean-Luc Godard, 1980)

Jacques Dutronc in Every Man for Himself

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Dutronc, Nathalie Baye, Cécile Tanner, Paule Muret, Anna Baldaccini, Roland Amstutz. Screenplay: Anne-Marie Miéville, Jean-Claude Carrière. Cinematography: Renato Berta, William Lubtchansky, Jean-Bernard Menou. Art direction: Romain Goupil. Film editing: Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville. Music: Gabriel Yared. 

Jean-Luc Godard's Every Man for Himself is about transactional lives: Everyone in the film is trying to get something from someone else. Naturally, the key figure is a prostitute, Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert), who eventually gets involved in the lives of a couple dissolving their relationship: the filmmaker Paul Godard (Jacques Dutronc) and his girlfriend, Denise (Nathalie Baye). It's a droll, talky, and sometimes bitterly funny film with a melancholy undertone reinforced by several reprises of the aria "Suicidio" from Ponchielli's opera La Gioconda. For the real-life Godard it represented a return to more or less conventional filmmaking after the late '60s and '70s immersion in politics and experimentation, and it shows his mastery of creating vivid characters with problems of their own self-centered making.