A Star Is Reborn: Julianne Moore Powers Jesse Eisenberg’s Latest With Peanuts & Monkey Blood
Dreams of stardom can strike like lightning at any time. It’s not just a curse reserved for the young and naive. In Jesse Eisenberg’s mashup of The Simpsons episode “A Streetcar Named Marge” and Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman, a middle-aged housewife suddenly becomes starry-eyed and stage bound. But The Debut, led by a full-tilt performance by Julianne Moore, can never quite decide if it’s on the side of its daydreamers or mocking them from afar.
In a podunk town in New Jersey, Mona Friedman’s (Moore) utility in her family has dried up.… Read the rest
While it never explicitly dwells on the feeling that the film’s patriarch may have been dealt the ultimate short end of the stick, Tommaso Landucci’s fiction debut is the portrait of a father who momentarily allows himself to inhabit the mentor and lineage-making side of fatherhood (something impossible with his cerebral palsy afflicted son) feels emotionally sincere and powerfully authentic, largely thanks to a beautifully restrained Riccardo Scamarcio. Children of the Monkey (I figli della scimmia) sees a main performance that captures the complicated mixture of love, guilt, longing and projection that makes a father’s attachment to his boy feel less like a betrayal than an unsettling glimpse of the guardian he imagined he might become.… 
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother is an ambitiously rich, arthouse flavored action film that marks a step up for filmmaker Bassam Tariq and is easily Mahershala Ali’s best role and performance since Moonlight. After revealing a striking command of form and feeling with Mogul Mowgli, we find the familiar machinery of the hitman movie but this is something far more intimate and spiritually searching.
The title for Argentinian director Marco Bechis’ latest title, Back to Buenos Aires, is apt in several ways. A return to his native country after fifty-five years, Bechis utilizes a fictionalized account about a prodigal native going back to testify about the tortures he endured in the late 1970s during Videla’s dictatorship. Bechis himself survived abduction during this regime, and once again, as he did with his 1999 title Garage Olimpo, returns to the infamous car repair shop retrofitted as a torture center during this period. It’s a quiet film reflecting on self-reconciliation and atonement, focusing as much on what’s not being said rather than delving into the gruesome details customary during explorations of those crushed by the brutality of these disastrous eras.… 
Ali Asgari
When he’s not exploring intimate relationship melodramas, French director Stéphane Brizé has been one of the most prominent contemporary voices exploring toxic workplace scenarios of late stage capitalism and the despairing occupational realities somehow normalized as commonplace. Usually, he’s dealing with dramatic, life changing tragedies, often led by his frequent collaborator Vincent Lindon (who won Best Actor at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival for The Measure of a Man). Brizé returns to the executive realm he previously dipped his feet into with 2021’s Another World (also focused on Lindon), but this time focuses on a female lead in A Good Little Soldier, reuniting him with Alba Rohrwacher (star of his lovely and masterful 2023 romantic drama Out of Season).… 
