Hamnet

Chloe Zhao, Paul Mescal, and Jessie Buckley

My reactions to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet find me in a sea of relativity. It is a fine literary adaptation, but fine can be a limiting adjective. It is a better film than Train Dreams, at least the characters in Hamnet have dirt under their fingernails, but Denis Johnson is a superior writer and storyteller compared to Maggie O'Farrell. Ms. O'Farrell collaborated with Ms. Zhao on the screenplay and it hews closely to the novel. The only thing that I especially missed was the opening chapter in which a ship docks in London and a rat escapes to gift Britain with the plague, but I can certainly understand why it was dropped. The film is well cast, it is refreshing to see a Anne Hathaway (here called Agnes, as in her father's will) who is actually older than her mate. Mescal is good with his readings, but I would have preferred more of a hint of rascality in his portrayal of the Bard of Avon. O'Farrell's book centers on Agnes, as does the film, and Jessie Buckley is up to the challenge. She is always capable and intelligent in her choices. What has earned her awards this time is that awards are given not to the best performance, but to the most performance. Buckley gets to howl at the moon in pain and grief twice in Hamnet, but I am a little dubious of the notion of trauma being alchemized into great art. 

Countering the calumnies visited upon her by Frank Harris and others, O'Farrell and Zhao turn Agnes into an Earth Mother Courage roaming the forest searching for wild herbs and roots with her pet hawk. Zhao is able to derive a chthonic pull from Agnes' journeys into the forest primeval. On the whole, though, this is Zhao's least distinctive film. Most of the flaws of this film stem from the book which suffers from the misperception that the Elizabethans were just like us. The concerns of Hamnet owe more to 2020. The technological and moral latitude of the Elizabethan age was a world apart from ours. If you want to get an idea of what is missing in Hamnet's portrait of this world, I'd two Elizabethan novels by Anthony Burgess: Nothing Like the Sun (in which Shakespeare is the protagonist) and A Dead Man in Deptford (in which Christopher Marlowe is the protagonist).

All the Moons

Haizea Carneros

One of only a hundred or so movies in the Basque language, Igor Legarreta's All the Moons is a vampire flick that spans seventy years of Spanish history from 1876 to 1936. It eschews many of the tropes of cheesier vampire flicks, like fangs and stakes through the heart. Though there is a little body horror, the film hews closer to magical realism than outright gore. The young Haizea Carneros plays Amaia, a prepubescent girl who we first meet living in a Church orphanage. Soon, as a result of a stray cannon ball produced by the Third Carlist War, Amaia is buried under rubble and looks like a goner. Amaia is saved or, rather, changed into an immortal by a middle aged female vampire (Itziar Ituño) desperate for a daughter. She acts as a surrogate mother and schools Amaia on the diet and nocturnal proclivities of her fellow vampires. Madre and daughter are soon separated by the requisite angry townsfolk with torches. 

Amai lives alone in the forests of Northern Spain for a time, slowly ameliorating the physical limits of her vampiric state. However, she reconnects with humanity in the form of a kindly dairy farmer named Candido (Josean Bengoetxea). Amaia steps on a wolf trap set by Candido to protect his flock, but ends up living with him until his inevitable demise. Amaia is introduced to his fellow villagers by Candido and initially embraced, but the two have to head for the hills after Amaia upchucks the Host during Mass. Anyway, at film's end, Amaia confronts her cave dwelling Madre who is all too willing to sacrifice all for her gal.

The Spain of this film is one where all relationships have been upended by civil unrest.There is not an intact family in the flick. All the Moons has gorgeous photography, but Leggarreta gives the film a palpable tang. From having Amaia peel off her dead skin to ending the film with her first period, Leggarreta foregrounds the physicality of this fable. This prevents the film from seeming too genteel or picturesque. All three leads are superb, particularly Ms. Carneros who is in every scene of the film. It is a testament to Mr. Leggarreta's skill with his players the he could get such a memorable performance from one so young. All the Moons was released in Spain in 2020, but was never released theatrically in the US. I viewed the Shudder disc and it is a handsome product. A good but not great film, All the Moons is available on many streaming platforms. 

              

Quick Takes, April 2026

Masaki Suda

One of the better thrillers released in the US in 2025, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cloud is the story of Ryôsuke (Masaki Suda), a small-time chiseler who resells dubious goods on the internet. Karma strikes back at Ryôsuke in the form of disgruntled buyers who unite online and then proceed to stalk him. The aura of paranoia and distrust is conveyed through the queasily sick grey/blue palette employed. As in classic noir, no one is to be trusted. When Ryôsuke finds an ally at the end of a classic finale, it is with the shared knowledge that they both are damned.

Jalmari Helander's Sisu: Road to Revenge is a worthy sequel to the 2022 film. This film is a pared down action and chase film, more akin to a graphic novel than to the mythos of the the first film. Jorma Tommila is back as the resilient protagonist. Stephen Lang, as Tommila's Soviet nemesis, lends his grizzled visage to the proceedings and is a snug fit. Like the original, this film is almost totally devoid of dialogue.

Given its subject matter, Paul McCartney and Wings' musical adventures in the decade following the break-up of The Beatles, Morgan Neville's Man on the Run is a relatively brisk and entertaining documentary. Neville wisely doesn't get bogged down into a rundown of the minutiae of Macca and company's various albums. No sane person wants the whole story on Wild Life or Red Rose Speedway or London Town. Instead, we see more of McCartney and the various iterations of his band onstage or frolicking backstage and in the studio. Despite inane lyrics and some of the worst haircuts of the 20th century, the doc does provide a good portrait of the pleasant, if dippy cute Beatle. Even though this is an authorized biodoc, I was happy that discordant notes were allowed, particularly Nick Lowe's putdown of Marry Had a Little Lamb; McCartney's second worst single.

I was a fan of the series, but the new film, Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man is a slight disappointment. Tom Harper's direction is spirited enough, but show runner and screenwriter Steven Knight seems bereft of new ideas. Cillian Murphy is always great as the stone-faced Tommy Shelby, but too many interesting characters are now dead and the new ones are not as memorable. Only Barry Keoghan as Tommy's Gypsy son strikes any sparks with Murphy. Rebecca Ferguson is disastrously cast as a palm reading Romani, but Knight's female characters have almost always been under drawn. The mystical aspects of this installment are beyond Mr. Knight. The film attempts to retell the pagan ritual of the new king dispatching and displacing an old one, but the tale is not as grounded as in previous installments. Start with the old episodes instead.

Danny Huston's Mr. North, from 1988, is an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's last novel, Theophilus North. North seemingly has the gift of healing and entrances Newport society of the 1920s. Huston captures Wilder's magically realistic tone, but also his vapidity. The result verges on Merchant/Ivory light, pleasant, but in no way memorable. Huston is most at sea in his direction of a comic chase sequence. However, he assembled a crack cast: Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum, Harry Dean Stanton, Angelica Huston, Virginia Madsen, David Warner, and Katharine Houghton. Acting laurels go to Mary Stuart Masterson. The booby prize goes to Tammy Grimes. The film includes rare appearances by Christopher Durang, Cleveland Amory, and Marietta Tree.

Pierre Morel's The Gunman, from 2015, is a feeble action film with Sean Penn as a contract killer. The picture is very loosely based on Jean-Patrick Manchette's The Prone Gunman, an icy and compact noir. Three listed screenwriters, including Mr. Penn, have added international settings and a romantic triangle. The bloat reduces this to a flashy vanity project. A good cast is largely wasted: Ray Winstone, Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem, Mark Rylance, and Idris Elba.

Cédric Jimenez's The Man with the Iron Heart is the umpteenth and worst rendition of the 1942 assassination of SS Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. Based on Laurent Binet's superb novel HHhH, the film offers a cursory and jumbled version of fascinating historical events. Key incidents, like the Night of the Long Knives, are presented without context or proper explanation. A fine cast is stranded in a waxworks. The story is fascinating, but interested parties are advised to read Binet's book or view such previous cinematic versions as Hangmen Also Die! or Anthropoid. The most compelling aspect of The Man with the Iron Heart is Stephen Graham's performance as Heinrich Himmler.

Cloud