Anyone but You, Zone of Interest

Jonathan Glazer’s masterpiece Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” picked up two Oscar wins last month for best international feature and best sound design. The film was also named one of Variety’s best movies of 2023 by chief film critic Owen Gleiberman, who wrote: “A movie that channels the horror of the Holocaust should hit you with the force of revelation. Yet too many movies with this subject matter do not; Jonathan Glazer’s quietly shocking drama assuredly does. It’s set in and around the stately German bourgeois home where Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), an SS officer, carries on a comfortable domestic existence with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and children. The catch is: He’s the commandant of Auschwitz — and the concentration camp is literally right over the wall next to their garden. Glazer creates an unnerving true-life fairy-tale nightmare of evil, using the distant sounds of Auschwitz (the fire from the ovens, the screams) to evoke a monstrousness we can’t see.”

“The Crown” may have ended last year, but Netflix has another royal drama in store. “Scoop” is the streamer’s feature-length dramatization of Prince Andrew‘s toe-curling interview with “Newsnight” anchor Emily Maitlis. Maitlis is played by Gillian Anderson in the film, while Andrew is played by “The Diplomat” star Rufus Sewell. Keeley Hawes is also on board as Amanda Thirsk, Andrew’s former private secretary, and Billie Piper stars as Sam McAlister, the “Newsnight” producer who secured the interview with Andrew. The interview with Maitlis in November 2019 was dubbed a “car crash” after the British royal, who settled a sexual assault suit with Virginia Guiffre two years ago, said he had no regrets about his friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Pedro Almodóvar’s lavish Western short film “Strange Way of Life” debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last year and pairs Pedro Pascal opposite Ethan Hawke as two aging cowboys who were once secret romantic partners. They are reunited after 25 years when Hawke’s Sheriff Jake seeks out his sister-in-law’s murderer. The tension of the present and the eroticism of the past converge. 

“This is a queer western in the sense that there are two men, and they love each other, and they behave in that situation in an opposite way,” said Almodóvar last year. “What I can tell you about the film is that it has a lot of the elements of the Western. It has the gunslinger. It has the ranch. It has the sheriff. But what it has that most Westerns don’t have is the kind of dialogue that I don’t think a Western film has ever captured between two men. And now I think I’m telling you too much.”

After becoming a surprise box office sensation with more than $215 million at the worldwide box office, Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell’s romantic-comedy “Anyone but You” makes its streaming debut on Netflix this month, where it’s bound to keep being a big hit. The actors play former flames who reluctantly pose as a couple during a wedding weekend in Australia to keep their friends and family off their backs. From Variety’s review: “It’s a gloss on ‘Much Ado About Nothing,’ but Will Gluck’s formula romantic comedy is most likable for the brash way it lets its two up-and-coming stars channel the age of antipathy… It is, in many ways, as prefab as a lot of the rom-coms of the ’90s and aughts, but there’s something zesty and bracing about how it channels the anti-romanticism of the Tinder-meets-MeToo generation.”

After breaking box office records for IFC Films, the horror movie “Late Night With the Devil” arrives on Shudder this month to keep the scares going. The third feature from Australia’s directing duo the Cairnes Brothers is a clever construct in which a late night network broadcast devolves into supernatural chaos on Halloween night. David Dastmalchian leads the film as the Johnny Carson-esque host, whose desire for big ratings leads to terrifying consequences when he invites an allegedly possessed girl onto the show. From Variety’s review: “This isn’t the scariest movie, but neither is it entirely a self-conscious joke. The Cairnes maintain an astute balance between pop-culture irony, familiar if not always predictable thrills (including some creature/gore FX), and a kind of hallucinatory mass-media surrealism.”

From the toon studio behind such widely appealing hits as “Minions” and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” comes “Migration,” a family comedy about a group of mallards struggling to find their way south. The movie was a box office sleeper hit over the holidays and should compete with Disney’s “Wish” as the top choice for families on streaming this month when it debuts on Peacock. The movie, written by “The White Lotus” creator Mike White, features the voices of Kumail Nanjiani, Elizabeth Banks, Keegan-Michael Key, Awkwafina and Carol Kane, among others.

Disney’s animated musical “Wish” did not exactly set the box office on fire last year, but the movie’s streaming debut on Disney+ is bound to increase viewership. Oscar winner Ariana DeBose voices Asha, who makes a wish so powerful that it is answered by a cosmic force — a little ball of boundless energy called Star. The two new friends team up to put a stop to the evil magic being conjured by King Magnifico (Chris Pine). From Variety’s review: “‘Wish,’ Disney’s lavish animated musical, doesn’t look like the studio’s other animated features. The images resemble softly drawn calendar-art paintings, without the usual splashes of kaleidoscopic color — here, a more muted palette of blue, green, gray, pink, and lavender creates a pleasing storybook texture. And Chris Pine’s punchy performance certainly gives you someone to root against.”

Critics be damned. Zack Snyder’s first “Rebel Moon” was widely panned when it debuted over Christmas, but the second part arrives this month in its continued CGI-heavy glory. The franchise follows a lone soldier named Kora (Sofia Boutella), whose quiet life and community on a farming moon called Veldt is threatened by the evil royal empire the Imperium. Kora’s new life is tragically interrupted and she’s thrust back into war when the menacing Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein) visits her planet on behalf of the Imperium’s leader, Balisarius (Fra Fee). Kora recruits a band of fighters, including Gunnar (Michiel Huisman), Darrian Bloodaxe (Ray Fisher), Kai (Charlie Hunnam) and a robot named Jimmy (voiced by Anthony Hopkins), to lead her resistance.

Disney is celebrating Earth Day this year with a new nature documentary, “Tiger.” Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jonas, the film “lifts the veil on our planet’s most revered and charismatic animal, inviting viewers to journey alongside Ambar, a young tigress raising her cubs in the fabled forests of India,” the film’s synopsis reads. “Curious, rambunctious, and at times a bit clumsy, the cubs have a lot to learn from their savvy mother who will do all she can to keep them safe from pythons, bears, and marauding male tigers.” The movie, directed by Mark Linfield and co-directed by Vanessa Berlowitz and Rob Sullivan, was shot over 1,500 days of filming and combines fast-paced action with remarkably intimate moments of the tigers.

Indie comedies have often come in one of two flavors: sincere or quirky. Rebecca Miller’s ardent ensemble comedy “She Came to Me” has the off-kilter deftness to be both at once. Its central figure is a celebrated composer of operas, played by Peter Dinklage at his most broodingly magnetic, who stops into a dive bar in the morning and gets picked up for an erotic adventure by a sexaholic tugboat captain, played with lived-in charm by Marisa Tomei. What follows is a cracked bedroom farce that’s really a story of salvation. Miller’s films, in their delicate humanity, are frail blossoms that have too often gotten lost. This one is worth finding.

A spiritual successor the 2020 Texas-set documentary “Boys State,” Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s “Girls State” follow teenage girls attending a week-long democratic camp in Missouri in which they work together to build a new kind of government in their image. The synopsis for the movie from Apple reads: “What would American democracy look like in the hands of teenage girls? A political coming-of-age story and a stirring reimagination of what it means to govern, ‘Girls State’ follows young female leaders — from wildly different backgrounds across Missouri — as they navigate an immersive experiment to build a government from the ground up.”

Pairing internet personality Rudy Mancuso with “Riverdale” favorite Camila Mendes, the romance “Musica” is billed by Prime Video as “a coming-of-age love story that follows an aspiring creator with synesthesia, who must come to terms with an uncertain future, while navigating the pressures of love, family and his Brazilian culture in Newark, New Jersey.” The film is written and directed by Mancuso. Mendes just had a Prime Video hit with the rom-com “Upgraded,” which debuted on the streaming platform during Valentine’s Day. Prime Video is surely hoping that success bleeds into “Musica,” which will keep the rom-com views coming on streaming this month ahead of the arrival of “Anyone but You” on Netflix.

Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers” arrives on Prime Video this month at no extra cost to subscribers after debuting on streaming last year courtesy of Peacock. The film won the Academy Award for best supporting actress thanks to the performance by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Paul Giamatti leads the period comedy-drama as an ornery school teacher who is forced to chaperone students staying over at his prep school during the holiday break. From Variety’s review: “Peer beyond the perfectly satisfying Christmas-movie surface, and ‘The Holdovers’ is a film about class and race, grief and resentment, opportunity and entitlement. It’s that rare exception to the oft-heard complaint that ‘they don’t make ’em like they used to.’”

With news that a sequel to “Happy Gilmore” is in the works, is it just a coincidence that Adam Sandler’s 1996 sports comedy classic returns to Netflix this month? The comedian plays the eponymous Happy Gilmore, a hockey player with anger management issues who discovers he’s also got a talent for golf. Happy joins the golf tour circuit to win money to save his grandmother’s house and faces off against an arrogant pro named Shooter McGavin, played by Christopher McDonald. The supporting cast includes “Modern Family” favorite Julie Bowen and the late Carl Weathers. “Happy Gilmore” opened in 1996 and made nearly $40 million at the worldwide box office. The movie helped Sandler become one of the biggest comedy stars of the decade along with titles like “Billy Madison,” “The Waterboy,” “The Wedding Singer,” “Big Daddy” and more.

“The Matrix” celebrated its 25th anniversary on March 31, and now it’s back on Netflix alongside sequels “The Matrix Reloaded” and “The Matrix Revolutions.” Variety calls it one of the greatest action movies ever made: “Synthesizing everything from cyberpunk sci-fi to video games to Hong Kong action movies, the Wachowskis rewired what had come before, introducing a sleek new aesthetic that not only represented the future, but influenced fashion and filmmaking codes for decades to come. After ‘Star Wars,’ this is the film franchise that has come the closest to establishing a religious cult in its own image, as fans seized on the movie’s quasi-spiritual/philosophical elements.”

Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy, the “Saturday Night Live” trio better known as Please Don’t Destroy, become movie stars in their Judd Apatow-produced feature “The Treasure of Foggy Mountain,” which arrives this month on Prime Video at no extra cost to subscribers after launching last year exclusively on Peacock. Here’s the official logline: “John Goodman narrates the adventure of Ben, Martin and John, three childhood friends turned deadbeat co-workers, who fend off hairless bears, desperate park rangers (played by Meg Stalter and X Mayo) and a hypocritical cult leader (Bowen Yang) in the hopes of finding a priceless treasure, only to discover that finding the treasure is the easiest part of their journey. Oh, and Conan O’Brien plays Ben’s dad in it.”

David Gordon Green’s “Exorcist” reboot was designed to kick off a new trilogy for Universal Pictures, but those plans are now iffy after the movie nosedived with critics and at the box office. The film, which made its streaming debut on Peacock last December, will be available for Prime Video subscribers at no extra cost starting this month. The sequel follows Victor Fielding (Leslie Odom Jr.), a photographer trying to find answers after his daughter and her friend go missing, only to return possessed by evil forces a few days later. Fielding seeks help from Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn), who experienced a similar possession 50 years earlier. The movie also stars Lidya Jewett, Olivia O’Neill, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Ann Dowd and others.

As a TV series based in the Wizarding World is in the works at Max, the “Harry Potter” movie franchise is back on the Warner Bros. Discovery streamer this month. All eight movies are now available to watch: “Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone Harry Potter,” “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets,” “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.”

With Alex Garland’s latest directorial effort “Civil War” set to be one of the buzziest theatrical releases of April 2024, it’s smart for distributor A24 to make their last Garland collaboration “Men” available to stream on Max this month. An eerie slice of folk horror, “Men” stars Jessie Buckley as a grieving woman whose isolated trip to the country takes a sinister turn. From Variety’s review: “The ‘Annihilation’ helmer puts the ‘men’ in ‘menacing,’ conjuring a town where the locals intimidate an emotionally traumatized woman trying to escape a bad marriage… audiences are all but guaranteed to leave this folk-horror bizart-house offering feeling disturbed, even if no two viewers can agree on what bothered them about it.”