"In Fjord, Mungiu’s first film made outside of his native Romania, the Romanian-born American actor Sebastian Stan and the Norwegian actress Renate Reinsve play Mihai and Lisbet Gheorghiu, a married couple with four school-aged children and a breastfeeding baby, who have newly relocated from Bucharest to the wife’s homeland: a Norwegian village that’s little more than a few small houses grouped around a harbor consisting of a single dock. Mihai and Lisbet are members of an evangelical sect—they met while…

"Acting has also become something like a perpetual classroom for him. Leung has repeatedly chosen projects that have required him to master difficult skills: he improved his Mandarin for Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007), trained rigorously in martial arts for The Grandmaster (Wong Kar Wai, 2013), and took piano lessons for Where the Wind Blows (Philip Yung, 2022). For Silent Friend, Leung has continued this tradition with gusto. He plays an accomplished neuroscientist named Dr. Tony Wong, who is stranded…

"While the first Space Jam was never more than a slick product designed to sell merchandise, the recent sequel, Space Jam: A New Legacy, starring LeBron James, is somehow even less compelling. LeBron, a much more polarizing cultural figure than Jordan, would have been well-advised to follow MJ’s playbook and center the film around his strengths as a performer. Where Jordan was a blank slate who allowed fans to project themselves onto him, LeBron’s larger-than-life celebrity has seen its ebbs…

"I always try to liberate the work from themes. For me, the power of a work of art is that it cannot be reduced to the subject it deals with. Here, of course, the topics are there, and what I see with this film is that it acts as a mirror. Depending on who holds the mirror, they perceive different things, and relate to different pieces that they collect throughout. If they are sensitive to the issue of trans identity,…

"When I interviewed the Esiri brothers, they told me that one studio executive to whom they had pitched the film thought that its depiction of a class of posh, British-educated Nigerians was “a fantasy.” It reminded me of my first month of college in the U.S., when an American classmate, clearly amazed at my English and other accoutrements of Western modernity, exclaimed, “But I thought Indians were poor!”

My classmate’s reaction was marked by racism and ignorance, but I couldn’t…