Mehnificent

With a title that should promise whiplash-inducing emerald spectacle—witches crooning, spellbooks ablaze, and enough glitter to bankrupt a drag parade—I traipsed into Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” salivating for a good bewitching. Stacked with a director who once spun “Crazy Rich Asians” into a fuchsia daydream and fronted by the goddess-voiced Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and pop pixie Ariana Grande (Glinda), this screen adaptation had every excuse to split the difference between “The Wizard of Oz” and a Manhattan karaoke bar at four a.m. But you know the old line: Don’t judge a broomstick by its bristles. Within minutes, I could tell this wasn’t the yellow brick road—just a treadmill in Technicolor.

Is that a penis? No, really—is that Ralph Fiennes’s penis? I suppose we have to start there, because in Uberto Pasolini’s sepulchral take on the Odyssey, we’re given not just emotional bareness but the full-frontal variety—Ralph, exposed to the elements and the audience, and you do a little double-take in your seat. It’s the sort of unblushing exposure that might’ve stirred old Homer to put away his lyre and blink into the firelight. “They show you everything these days,” you can hear the gallery whisper—a groin-level “welcome home” that’s somehow more shocking than gods or monsters.

There’s something almost perversely frustrating about watching a film that’s desperate to be important but allergic to getting its hands dirty. Small Things Like These turns the Magdalene Laundries—a subject with the fury of a thousand scandals—into a very slow, very wet walk in the Irish mist. You...

There are movies made for adults, and then there are movies that confuse “adult” with “adolescent in a wet-dream stupor.” Anora, Sean Baker’s latest stumble masquerading as a comedy-drama, is a film with all of its clothes off and nothing to show but skin. The only thing less substantial than the threadbare plot is the flimsily clad pretense that we ought to care about this endless, joyless parade of nudity and nonsense.

Let’s start where the air gets thin and the coliseum fills with water: be honest—did you ever expect Ridley Scott, the master of “muscular history,” to burst gladiatorial combat wide open with the introduction of actual sharks? Gladiator II, for all its sweat-drenched howls of reverence toward the original, is less Maximus’s solemn march to myth than a glittering, full-throttle fever dream—part sequel, part spectacle, and not altogether sure which side it wants to fight for.

God help me, I got dirty thoughts watching this movie. That’s as fitting a confession as any because “It’s What’s Inside” operates on the queasy, ticklish nerve where comedy, anxiety, lust, and a weird species of social dread all mingle together in the trunk of an Uber, hungry for a fight or a kiss. I love when a film makes you wonder, in the cackling recesses of your mind, “What would I do if I were dropped inside someone else’s body for a night?” Not just the old switcheroo, but the real, squirming, terrifying, exhilarating thing—and not with anonymous ninnies, mind you, but your oldest, most untrustworthy friends.