There’s a moment at the end of the great Soviet World War II film The Cranes Are Flying where a soldier just home from victory addresses a celebrating crowd. He tells them they haven’t won in order to destroy, but so they could build a new life. It’s a rare moment of optimism for Russian or Soviet World War II movies—the Soviets lost somewhere around 25 million people in the war.

I was deeply sad to hear last Wednesday of the death of Indian actor Irrfan Khan from cancer at age 53. If you know his name, you already understand; if you’ve seen his face, you’ll likely never forget it.

If, as an American, you know anything about Ned Kelly, it’s probably that you’ve seen the massive suit of bulletproof armor he wore in a shootout, or that you remember his magnificent beard. The movie True History of the Kelly Gang , based on the Booker Prize-winning novel, does not include that beard, which at first I thought patently ridiculous. And then I realized that’s part of the point.

There are some reviews you dread writing. The bad movies, those are easy. It’s usually the totally average ones, where you have to come up with something interesting to say about a movie that’s completely unremarkable. But on very rare occasions, a movie touches you in such a deeply personal way it feels almost blasphemous to try to verbalize your experience.

In 1955, Patricia Highsmith introduced us to one of the strangest, most distasteful characters ever to anchor a book series—and somehow got us to root for him. Tom Ripley is a forger, murderer, and thief of identities, and he’s completely spellbinding. He appeared in five books, though, amazingly to me, only four movies in 65 years. Well, technically five movies, but one of those basically no one has ever seen.

The great German director Werner Herzog said, “Life in the oceans must be… a vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution, some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.”

There’s a moment in Saint Frances when the mother of our main character, Bridget, reveals something startling about how she felt when her daughter was a baby. Bridget’s shocked, but her mother expresses these are real feelings and thoughts women have, and they need to be talked about more so women know they’re normal, and that they’re not alone.

Last week, fans around the world celebrated what would have been the 100th b irthday of one of the greatest of movie stars, the Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire appeared on nearly every top 10 list from 2019 I can remember, but our local theaters never bothered to bring it to town, so I wasn’t able to see it until this last weekend. I usually work hard not to let my expectations get the better of me, but I failed—it was just receiving so much praise . And, well, it didn’t meet my expectations. It completely. Blew them. Away.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, a summer camp in the Catskills called Camp Jened operated for kids with disabilities. In the exceptional archival film footage from the early ‘70s in the documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution , we see it’s not just another place that would babysit those kids.