How's this for a set-up?: An embattled Disney princess, a steroid-addled bodybuilder and a trapped carjacker meet at the cineplex and chaos ensues, complicated by a traumatized actress and a mysterious semi-stranger.
Needs work, right? Here's the scoop on this week's most-talked-about movies.
Snow White
In theaters starting Friday
The new songs mostly land without being memorable, but Rachel Zegler's spunky, assertive Snow White proves a reasonably refreshing update on 1937's animated princess. CGI dwarfs, not so much. Snow's not waiting for her prince to come this time, she's crushing on a woodsy Robin Hood-type (Andrew Burnap) when she's not plotting to overthrow the evil Queen (Gal Gadot, singing up a storm). Gadot's the spitting image of her animated predecessor, but the character's presence as a petty tyrant interested only in flattery and wealth reads differently this time.
In the 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, there's maybe eight minutes of plot spread across 83 minutes of what at the time was truly groundbreaking animation. The new version ditches the animation and half the songs while stretching to 109 minutes, so director Marc Webb, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, and their teams needed to come up with a lot of story and texture. They've supplied backstory galore, some overdone spectacle, and given their heroine a spine. Even when she's just peering down the castle's wishing well, Zegler's Snow is all about being "fearless, fair, brave and true." By the time she's awakened by true love's kiss, she's morphed from a child princess into a cross between Maid Marian and Mary Poppins, and she still has her Eponine/Joan of Arc phase to go. Heigh-ho!
Locked
In limited theaters starting Friday
Eddie (Bill Skarsgård) is a well-meaning screw-up — sweet with his daughter even if he forgets to pick her up after school. But he's also light-fingered, and one day he tries the door of a black SUV that he should have left alone. It's a Dolus (a brand invented for the movie; Dolus is Latin for "fraud" or "deceit"), and it's owned by an angry widower (Anthony Hopkins) who's had his SUV stolen six times, and decided to seek retribution. This SUV is armored, soundproofed, and once Eddie's inside, locked tight. He can't get out. A screen on the dashboard starts berating him. The owner can torment him with excessive air conditioning, electric shocks, yodeling (a few hours is enough to have Eddie begging for mercy), and starvation. And after days of that, the car starts moving.
In this remake of the Argentinian movie 4x4, filmmaker David Yarovesky and writer Michael Arlen Ross have lots of tricks up their sleeves, including arguments about Marx and Dostoyevsky, not to mention actors who don't need to be in the same space to raise gooseflesh.
Being Maria
In limited theaters starting Friday
Jessica Palud's poignant if inconclusive biopic examines the turbulent career of Maria Schneider. Wide-eyed Anamaria Vartolomei plays the inexperienced actress, who got the break of her dreams only to suffer serious trauma when she was cast at 19, opposite 48-year-old American icon Marlon Brando in Last Tango in Paris. The first half of Being Maria lays out Schneider's troubled family relationships, then recreates Last Tango rehearsals including the scene in which Brando's character humiliates and rapes Schneider's using butter as lubricant.
The real-life Last Tango in Paris director Bernardo Bertolucci said years after filming that he didn't tell Schneider that butter would be used, and Schneider told the Daily Mail in 2007 that the scene itself wasn't in the script. Her cousin Vanessa Schneider wrote about it in a memoir that Palud has loosely adapted on screen in Being Maria.
Palud, who previously worked with Bertolucci (and, as she said in this Cannes interview, got ahold of a copy of Last Tango's original shooting script) does her most evocative work in the on-set sequences, with a coddled Brando (a terrific Matt Dillon) and an increasingly vulnerable Schneider. The film's second half feels more routine as the actress spirals into depression and drug use, and it all ends abruptly in 1980, some 30 years and almost as many roles before Schneider's death.
Misericordia
In limited theaters starting Friday
In Alain Guiraudie's twisty, quasi-comic tale of murder and repression (the title means mercy), Jeremie (Félix Kysyl) returns to his rural French hometown for a mentor's funeral and is soon stirring up all sorts of feelings. When the mentor's wife invites Jeremie to stay for a few days, her adult son unaccountably flies into a jealous rage, the son's best friend hardly knows what to make of Jeremie's flirtatious attention, and the local priest thinks he's figured out why the morel mushrooms (which he usually finds in graveyards) are suddenly growing in a clearing in the woods. As in his award-winning Stranger by the Lake, the director's penchant for blending queerness into Hitchcockian genre conventions keeps the story both compelling and enigmatic.
Magazine Dreams
In limited theaters starting Friday
Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) is a bodybuilder who has trouble connecting. Apart from looking after his grandfather and working in a grocery store, he spends every remaining waking hour lifting weights and practicing poses. He also practices smiling — it doesn't come naturally — and he goes at it all with scary intensity. Hopped up on steroids, he threatens hospital nurses, trashes a hardware store, and scares off a cashier he has a crush on by inviting her to dinner, then talking her ear off about delts and grievances while ordering steak, chicken and fish, and keeping the menu because he knows he'll want more. Writer/director Elijah Bynum forefronts Killian's vulnerability in a film that seems headed from the start for a violent explosion.
Magazine Dreams premiered at Sundance in 2023, and Jonathan Majors' performance as Killian generated Oscar buzz before his 2023 convictions for misdemeanor assault and harassment of an ex-girlfriend. The film's plans were derailed, as was Majors' career. Still, his committed performance — including oiled musculature reflecting light in rippling patterns — is what will rivet audiences.
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