The madhouse of awards season and all its many, many controversies — not to mention an ongoing parade of natural and man-made disasters — has until now perhaps overshadowed some of the year’s lower-stakes joys. Case in point: the nine films below. The movies that studios reserve for the doldrums of the early months are rarely the ones that compete for Oscars later on. But that doesn’t mean they’re skippable, or uninventive (just look at what Steven Soderbergh gets up to in Presence), or any less pleasurable or ambitious — what else to call the spectacle of watching two guys mount a full-scale production of Hamlet inside the world of Grand Theft Auto? Vulture’s film critics have somehow kept abreast of it all. Here, they’ll guide you through the must-sees of the last few months.
All movies are listed by U.S. release date, with the most recent movies up top.
Last Breath
As soon as director Alex Parkinson starts walking us through the inner workings of the ship and the pressurization tools used by the deep-sea saturation divers in his new underwater-survival drama, we know we’re in sure hands. We are immediately placed in a tangible, tactile world, which is key to building any kind of suspense. Last Breath recreates a terrifying 2012 incident, in which a deep-sea diver was stranded on the sea floor without oxygen during an attempt to fix a North Sea gas pipeline. And thanks to Parkinson’s showing us all these systems beforehand, once things start to break down (and they break down quite quickly), we immediately grasp the gravity of the situation. After that, it’s heart-attack city as we watch the men underwater (and those on the surface) do all they can to save their downed comrade. There’s an artful elegance to this film’s suspense as well. It feels like a great throwback thriller, one of those movies viewers will still be discovering years from now. —Bilge Ebiri
➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Last Breath.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
The fourth Bridget Jones movie, which was sent directly to Peacock, in no way needed to be as good as it is. Renée Zellweger comes back for a meditation on grief, middle age, and searching for meaning in life after finding and losing someone you love (sorry to Mark Darcy, though Colin Firth does show up as a wistful memory). But what really makes this rom-com work isn’t Bridget’s fling with a younger man, played by Leo Woodall, as fun as it is. Rather, it’s her relationship with hopeless cad Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), who’s aged into a slightly tragic but still irrepressible roué who, against all odds, has become one of Bridget’s closest friends in a reminder that having history together has its own value. —Alison Willmore
➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy.
Parthenope
Paolo Sorrentino has seen all your takes about the male gaze and has decided to counter them with a movie about the life of a transcendently gorgeous woman. But in truth, Parthenope is less about one beautiful person than about our idea of beauty itself as it’s reflected and projected, embodied and perceived. Parthenope (played for most of the film by Celeste Dalla Porta, a newcomer), whose life we follow from her teen years into her 70s (when she is played, briefly, by the legendary Italian actress Stefania Sandrelli), is named for a mythical siren who once lent her name to the city of Naples, Sorrentino’s hometown. Over the course of this episodic film, she comes in contact with any number of figures: young lovers, a playboy who hovers above her in his helicopter, an aging actress, a gangster, a sleazy priest, and (in one odd and charming interlude) a very drunk John Cheever played by Gary Oldman. A few will covet her, a couple won’t dare to, but all will adore her on some level. As the film goes on, our protagonist comes to feel like an avatar of the very ideas of youth and possibility, which also makes her an avatar of the opposite of those things — the idea that life eventually passes us all by. In creating a film about one beautiful person, Sorrentino reminds us that, in our memories, we were all beautiful once. —B.E.
➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Parthenope.
Companion
Drew Hancock’s horror comedy opens by leading up to what is not a first-act twist so much as it’s an unveiling of the unexpected premise — that Iris (Sophie Thatcher) may believe she’s the devoted girlfriend to Josh (Jack Quaid), with whom she’s headed to a weekend getaway in a lakeside cabin, but that she’s actually a robot he rents for company and sex. The pleasure of Companion comes not just in how this first reveal is handled, but from the way that all the twists that follow are. As the film goes in increasingly, hilariously brutal directions, its construction becomes its own reward. —A.W.
➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Companion.
Presence
A haunted-house movie from the point of view of the ghost, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence combines the director’s ongoing formalist ambitions with stripped-down, boilerplate genre theatrics. A well-to-do family buys a new house, and soon, the daughter is sensing strange occurrences while the others remain oblivious. The story may be familiar, but there’s nothing familiar about the way Soderbergh has shot it. The camera drifts through spaces, hovers around actors, races up and down stairs, and looks out windows — usually in single takes that constitute the entirety of a scene. As usual, Peter Andrews, the credited cinematographer, is a pseudonym for Soderbergh himself, who operates his own camera, which makes the presence more than a presence; it’s the director as well. So the unseen figure of the ghost becomes an expression of the filmmaker’s power over the frame, evoking the sadistic-voyeuristic nature of cinema in general and genre cinema in particular. The director is a presence, but not a participant: He compels characters to do things and makes it look like they did it of their own free will. That may sound like a lot of film-theory hooey, but this idea of manipulation, of exerting unseen power over others who think they themselves have control, actually becomes a key plot point in the picture. It’s an art film that also works as a spellbinding horror film, and it might be the best thing Soderbergh has done in ages. —B.E.
➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Presence.
Grand Theft Hamlet
This genial doc-by-way-of-a-video-game may have been born out of the pandemic, which is what prompted out-of-work actors Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen to attempt a production of Hamlet staged entirely within Grand Theft Auto Online. But at its core, it’s a film about the internet, and about how genuine connection and human ingenuity can yield wonderful things even within the corporate confines of an online world intended only as a playground for wreaking mayhem. Crane, who co-directed the film with his wife Pinny Grylls, and Oosterveen become surprisingly poignant figures even as digital avatars, as they, like the Danish prince, contemplate the nature of existence — while hoping not to get mowed down in an in-game hail of gunfire. —A.W.
➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of Grand Theft Hamlet.
One of Them Days
A sort of stoner flick in which no one actually gets around to getting stoned, this rollicking buddy movie (written by Rap Sh!t showrunner Syreeta Singleton) is a throwback to an era where studios actually made comedies and trusted the talents of their stars to carry them. It definitely helps that, in this case, one of those stars is Keke Palmer, who’s effervescent as Dreux, a server whose attempts to get ahead are imperiled when bestie/roomie Alyssa (SZA, in her acting debut) loses their rent money to her scrub of a boyfriend. But underscoring the very funny adventures that follow is an acknowledgment of how exhausting living in economic precarity can be. —A.W.
➼ Read Alison Willmore’s full review of One of Them Days.
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
If 2018’s Den of Thieves played like a meathead remake of Michael Mann’s Heat (1995), then the new Den of Thieves 2: Pantera plays like a meathead remake of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice (2006). Neither of these are bad things. Gone is the attention to process and scuzzy detail that made the first heist film notable, replaced here by a wild, drunken emotional energy that dispenses with story logic and clarity. That also makes it a fine showcase for star Gerard Butler, who has been for some years our most begrimed star — a man whose persona is manliness and brokenness in equal measure, a man who makes you wonder if manliness and brokenness might not in fact be the same thing. He is, in other words, a perfect figure to plunge into a chaotic and picturesque European robbery that is destined to go wrong. Pantera belongs in that long line of sequels that seem to lose patience with simply replicating an earlier film’s dynamics and opt instead to just let us bask in freewheeling character interactions. —B.E.
➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Den of Thieves 2: Pantera.
Every Little Thing
They say the measure of any society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. We could reverse-engineer the idea and arrive at another perhaps obvious, though rarely stated (and even more rarely practiced) truth: that healing a society, maybe even a civilization, begins with healing its most vulnerable members. That thought runs through one’s mind while watching Sally Aitken’s delicately beautiful documentary about the hummingbirds of Los Angeles and the woman who has made it her life’s mission to care for them. Terry Masear runs a rescue operation dedicated to rehabbing injured and orphaned hummingbirds from all over the greater Los Angeles area. The process requires a lot of patience and precision — some have to be taught or retaught to fly, and they can be quite hesitant and scared to do so. The birds are already minuscule and delicate, and many of the ones Masear works with are babies whose mothers have disappeared or died, which puts them in even greater peril. “When you see how vulnerable and helpless they are, you wonder how any of them make it,” we’re told. One could ask that of more than just hummingbirds. Before our eyes, Every Little Thing comes to embody the fragile yet uncontainable mystery of all life. —B.E.
➼ Read Bilge Ebiri’s full review of Every Little Thing.