Our Critics' Picks for Spring Films

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 at 5:54 p.m.

Ted Soqui Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982–1992: How do you document in a film the crack-up of something as complex as a city a quarter-century past? In ABC's vigorous and illuminating Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982–1992, writer-director John Ridley (the creator of ABC’s American Crime and Showtime’s Guerrilla) weaves familiar news clips and on-the-street videos with many thorough interviews with men and women whose lives were invariably broken in two by what Ridley’s film calls “the uprising.” No matter their specific circumstances, these residents and police officers found their lives before the city burnt fully sundered from the lives they lived afterward: Now they had lost loved ones, lost themselves to violence, performed acts of heroism or made choices in the heat of the moment that we still debate today.

For more, read our review of Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982–1992. 1/17

Courtesy Amazon Studios/Bleecker Street The Lost City of Z: “I’ve been trained for this.” Those words — or some variation — come up several times throughout James Gray’s The Lost City of Z, and they serve as one key to this strange, sprawling, majestic film. In adapting the 2009 nonfiction book about the search for a fabled city in the Amazon, Gray has taken out much of the actual journalism, layering of perspective and even some of the mystery that New Yorker writer David Grann brought to the material. Grann’s book is at least partly concerned with a contemporary investigation into the fate of the obsessed British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared with his son in the Amazon in 1925; the film, less so. But in opting to tell a more linear story about the life of Fawcett, Gray has replaced all that with something else, something very much his own: a look at how society trains us to know our place in it, and how a confrontation with the unknown can completely upend our understanding of the world.

For more, read our review of The Lost City of Z. 2/17

Courtesy Adama Films Harold and Lillian: A lively documentary devoted to the kinds of folks about whom documentaries are almost never made, Daniel Raim’s Harold and Lillian looks at the life of storyboard artist and art director Harold Michelson and his wife, researcher and archivist Lillian Michelson. Though they lived modest lives and have rarely been celebrated outside the industry itself, both became institutions of a sort in Hollywood during the latter half of the 20th century, mentoring generations of artists and designers and helping some of the greatest filmmakers realize their visions.

For more, read our review of Harold and Lillian. 3/17

Courtesy Music Box Films A Quiet Passion: The sole authenticated photograph of Emily Dickinson (1830–86) was taken when she was 16 years old: The Daguerreotype revealing a slight young woman with a searching gaze and the slightest hint of a smile as she holds a floral spray on her lap stands as one of the most famous portraits of an American writer. Paradoxically, this instantly recognizable image depicts a homegrown genius about whom so little is verifiable — and one who rarely traveled past the grounds of her family’s home. How could such a life be dramatized for the screen? (Onstage, the Julie Harris–starring one-woman show The Belle of Amherst opened on Broadway in 1976; the actress toured with and revived the production into the ’00s.)

For more, read our review of A Quiet Passion. 4/17

Courtesy WELL Go USA Buster's Mal Heart: In Montana, where writer-director Sarah Adina Smith filmed small-town sci-fi flick Buster’s Mal Heart, the winter-inversion clouds hang heavy in valleys, trapping the sunlight that bounces off the snow. The effect is a perpetual, sullen twilight. Smith embraces that between-light-and-dark aspect of Big Sky Country to tell the story of Jonas (Rami Malek), a Hispanic night-shift “concierge” at a low-rent hotel in a resort town, who falls down a rabbit hole of Y2K conspiracy theories as he begins to suspect that the unfulfilling life he’s been dutifully trudging through may be a “bug in the system.” Maybe he was meant to be someone and somewhere else.

For more, read our review of Buster's Mal Heart. 5/17

Courtesy Lionsgate Aftermath: No matter your opinion of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a person, you can’t deny this: The man is a doer. And in Elliott Lester’s grief drama Aftermath, the ripped Renaissance man does a subtle, absorbing performance of despair so unlike his other work that his lined and laden face at times seems nearly unrecognizable on that bulging body. This is Arnold?

For more, read our review of Aftermath. 6/17

Courtesy Cinema Guild The Death of Louis XIV: The totemic power of Jean-Pierre Léaud extends far beyond the French New Wave, the film movement for which he will forever remain the most paradigmatic performer. In the éminence grise phase of his career, which began about two decades ago, Léaud has more than once played a filmmaker whose personal and professional struggles seem emblematic of France's own cinema history. In his most recent movie, Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV, the actor, as the ailing monarch of the title, would seem to stand in for the nation itself.

For more, read our review of The Death of Louis XIV. 7/17

Courtesy Bond/360 Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back: Once highly controversial, Maurizio Cattelan’s famed sculpture of Pope John Paul II felled by a meteorite is now so embedded in the popular imagination that an image of it appears, animated, in the opening titles of HBO's The Young Pope. But Cattelan himself is not as recognizable as his art; he’s private to a near-Pynchonian degree, and much of his work is engaged with themes of evasion and misdirection. But in this stylish documentary, Cattelan talks effusively on camera about his career, his work and his private life in unexpectedly candid interviews. The film’s title is derived from an early exhibition whose primary work was the gallery building itself, locked, with a sign on the door: "Be right back."

For more, read our review of Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back. 8/17

Courtesy Sundance Selects Graduation: Romanian director Cristian Mungiu’s Graduation is one of the best films I’ve ever seen about corruption. That’s true despite the fact that Mungiu underplays the typical elements found in tales about this subject: You won’t find many fast-talking crooks, sinister cops or elaborate sting operations here. Or a looming sense of justice and judgment, or even tragedy. You’ll just find mostly good people doing what they think is right, and then the acute mess that they find themselves in.

For more, read our review of Graduation. 9/17

Courtesy Rialto Pictures/Studiocanal A Kind of Loving: It's a habit of young people to believe that they have invented sex — that nobody got it so right before they did. John Schlesinger's frank, observant drama of horniness, courtship and disappointment, A Kind of Loving (1962), exposes the traps that kids fall into when left to figure out for themselves the intensely pleasurable acts that just happen to be key to the propagation of the species. The male lead (Alan Bates), a draftsman in drably beautiful Manchester, in Britain's Northwest, lights up when he finally wins the attentions of Ingrid (June Ritchie), an office worker.

For more, read our review of A Kind of Loving. 10/17

Courtesy FilmRise Truman: In Spanish director Cesc Gay's unsentimental weepie Truman, the passage of time becomes pliable. Tomás (Javier Cámara) arrives in Madrid with a deadline: four days to convince his oldest friend, Julián (Ricardo Darín), to resume treatment for the lung cancer that's spread throughout his body. Tomás' urgency is soon subsumed by Julián's relaxed pace. Before a key doctor's appointment, Julián makes sure his beloved bull mastiff Truman gets a good walk, and stops to ask his veterinarian how to help the geriatric dog cope with the grief to come.

For more, read our review of Truman. 11/17

Courtesy Universal Films The Fate of the Furious: Holy motors! Excuse me while I catch my breath. This is perhaps the fastest and, if not, certainly the most furious of the Fast & Furious movies. The goal with each new film seems to be to one-up the last, and if you’re wondering how one possibly one-ups 2015’s Furious 7, a movie in which cars fall out of planes and jump between skyscrapers in Abu Dhabi ... well, fasten your seat belts for the eighth installment of this increasingly bonkers series. These guys have driven on land, they’ve driven in air and — what’s even left? Oh yes, water — I kid you not, they actually go there.

For more, read our review of The Fate of the Furious. 12/17

Courtesy FUNimation Entertainment Your Name.: Japan's biggest hit in 2016 and the highest-grossing anime film of all time, Makoto Shinkai's lush mind-bender Your Name. has many elements that are familiar on their own but here combine to create something unique.

For more, read our review of Your Name. 13/17

Courtesy Kimstim Films By the Time It Gets Dark: In the spirit of master of mystery Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the languid Thai elliptical is now apparently a national house style. For hearty film geeks it can become an addiction: "slow cinema" observations that seem to ooze cosmic empathy, jungle greenery blazing with tropical sunshine, enigmas hidden in plain view, a sense of meditative Buddhist celebration about the need we don't have for contrived resolutions. Anocha Suwichakornpong has been toiling in these fields alongside Weerasethakul since the turn of the century, and her second feature has the exploratory, fragmented quality of a modern koan. Thai history, going back to the Thammasat University massacre of October 1976, lurks in the fabric, as does a film-within-a-film about the incident that may or may not have been made at all — or may actually be the film we're watching. But nothing is quite as vital as the sometimes only semi-contextualized present moment.

For more, read our review of By the Time It Gets Dark. 14/17

Courtesy Cohen Media Group Heal the Living: A catastrophic accident leaves one family in ruins and bestows another with precious hope in Heal the Living, a melodrama immeasurably enhanced by the piercing, poetic direction of Katell Quillévéré (Suzanne). On his way home from a dawn surfing trip, carefree teen Simon (Gabin Verdet) is involved in a car crash, leaving him physically intact but brain-dead. This shakes his estranged parents (Emmanuelle Seigner and Kool Shen) to the core. While grappling with this tragedy, they're forced to decide whether to donate his organs; across Paris, former orchestral violinist Claire (Anne Dorval) confronts her own worsening degenerative heart condition alongside her doting sons (Finnegan Oldfield and Théo Cholbi).

For more, read our review of Heal the Living. 15/17

Courtesy Lionsgate/Saban Films The Assignment: There's little room to talk about the ridiculous, pulpy noir plot of The Assignment, because the performances by Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez are such knockouts. But it's great: Hitman Frank Kitchen (Rodriguez, in a full-body man suit and resembling a very young Laurence Fishburne) kills the brother of a black-market surgeon, Dr. Kay (Weaver). The good doctor then kidnaps Frank and performs a revenge gender reassignment — now a hitwoman, Frank has to learn how to live in a female body, all while seeking her revenge. Rodriguez absolutely tears it up as a stomping, cussing nuclear core of male swagger, both before and after the surgery.

For more, read our review of The Assignment. 16/17

Courtesy of the Orchard All Those Sleepless Nights: Too propulsively aimless to be anything other than life, but too fluid in its photography and precise in its compositions to be documentary, Michal Marczak’s pulsing youth-right-now dazzler whirls with two real-life friends (Krzysztof Baginski and Michal Huszcza, playing themselves) and their occasional lovers through a year and a half of vivid Warsaw nights. As Marczak’s camera bobs and glides behind and around them, the young men dash through the streets, duck through subway tunnels, watch fireworks from an apartment, fall for and then shake off young women and occasionally even vault drug-fueled through the daytime world, so blissed out they say things like, “How cool would it be to say ‘good morning’ to everyone?”

For more, read our review of All Those Sleepless Nights. 17/17

Our Critics' Picks for Spring Films

Watching movies for a living is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it, and our film critics are up to the task. While they see plenty of stellar movies, they see some not-so-great ones, too. They've weeded through them all to give you their picks for the best films of April 2017. If a few haven’t opened in a theater near you just yet, don’t fret: There’s always a chance you’ll be able to stream them on your small screen, or they may go into wider release in the coming months.

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