Mehnificent

There’s a kind of tourist satisfaction, I imagine, in donning your stone-washed jeans and slouching into Green Street Hooligans like an American exchange student ordering a pint in a smoky East London pub and hoping nobody notices his accent, except of course that’s the whole point. For the length of two hours, you can be inducted into the sacred rituals of football fandom, which, in this film, are less about the beautiful game than the less beautiful art of knocking a rival’s teeth out on the pavement. In the annals of cinematic culture clash, this film gives us Elijah Wood, yes, Frodo, the most cherubic of hobbits, stumbling into the maw of West Ham United’s Green Street Elite and coming out shouting “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” Beware the man who sings showtunes after breaking someone’s nose.

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.

Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory wants very badly to be that scalding, claustrophobic plunge into America’s penal underbelly—shadows slithering across dank concrete, sorrow corroding the air, all the usual tropes rattling their chains. But what you actually get is a drab shuffle through the same old cellblock, a movie so enamored of its own grimy surfaces that it forgets to find something compelling lurking beneath. It postures as neo-noir, but it might be the most ordinary thing ever dragged through a barred window.