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6 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.

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By The New York Times

CRITIC’S PICK

He’s got killer charisma.

Gary (played by Glen Powell) is a reserved philosophy professor who finds himself posing as a hit man for a sting operation in this Richard Linklater comedy. While in disguise, he falls for one of his clients (Adria Arjona).

From our review:

If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.

In theaters. Read the full review .

It’s worse than Mondays.

‘the garfield movie’.

The grouchy tabby gets another big-screen adaptation, this time following an unexpected reunion with his father.

The film, directed by Mark Dindal, is an inert adaptation that mostly tries to skate by on its namesake. In other words, it’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all. Part of this can be attributed to the voice — Chris Pratt, an overly spunky casting choice that was doomed from the start — but there’s also a built-in defect to the very concept of the big-screen Garfield treatment. An animated, animal-centric children’s movie tends to require a narrative structure of action-packed adventure — the antithesis of Garfield the cat’s raison d’être.

An A.I. movie that sticks to the script.

In this sci-fi thriller, Jennifer Lopez plays Atlas, a data analyst with a distaste for artificial intelligence, who must help capture an A.I. robot that wants to destroy humanity.

Lopez, who was also a producer on the movie, flings herself into the role with abandon, the kind of performance that’s especially impressive given that she’s largely by herself throughout. … At times “Atlas” feels like pure pastiche, and it looks, in a fashion we’re getting used to seeing on the streamers, kind of cheap, dark, plasticky and fake, particularly in the big action sequences. Science fiction often earns its place in memory by envisioning something new and startling — but with “Atlas,” we’ve seen it all before.

Watch on Netflix . Read the full review .

The sorrow and the surreal.

‘kidnapped: the abduction of edgardo mortara’.

Based on a true story, this film follows a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, in 19th-century Italy who is kidnapped by the papal state and raised as Roman Catholic.

The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy. Political cartoons lambasting Pope Pius IX come to life through animation. During an especially sorrowful moment in the boy’s confinement, one of the figures of the crucified Christ in the Roman dormitory for child converts takes leave of his cross with the help of little Edgardo.

Shantay, you stay.

In Montreal, Simon (Théodore Pellerin) pursues a career as a drag queen and contends with two thorny relationships: a destructive crush on a fellow performer and a reunion with his absentee mother.

“Solo” is a subtle snapshot into a gay man’s profound yet familiar upheavals. Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.

Inspirational, not necessarily insightful

A man who endured a traumatic childhood during the Chinese Cultural Revolution becomes a world-renowned eye surgeon in this fictionalized account of the life of Dr. Ming Wang.

As is the custom with inspirational medical movies, however, the new film “Sight,” directed by Andrew Hyatt, leans hard into uplift — it provides only the narrative-necessary minimum of the science. Wang’s achievement in developing innovative technology is central to one of the stories here, yes. But the dominating narrative is one of personal growth.

Compiled by Kellina Moore .

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‘young woman and the sea’ review: daisy ridley in paint-by-numbers inspirational biopic.

The 'Star Wars' and 'Magpie' actress faces the seas in Joachim Ronning's portrait of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel.

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Gertrude Ederle loved the water. “To me, the sea is like a person — like a child I’ve known a long time,” she once said . “ I never feel alone when I’m out there.”  

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Like all trailblazers, Ederle’s story began with obstacles and hostility, many of which director Joachim Rønning accords appropriate levels of respect in Young Woman and the Sea . The serviceable feature, whose screenplay is written by Jeff Nathanson, based on the book of the same name by Glenn Stout, traces Ederle’s inspiring journey from childhood swims around the Coney Island pier to her defining confrontation with the English Channel waves. 

Rønning, a frequent Disney director whose credits include Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (with Espen Sandberg), leans hard into the uplifting notes of the film. A soaring, string-heavy score composed by Amelia Warner assumes the role of emotional supervisor early on, calibrating our mood to triumph and tragedy.

There’s no shortage of shots (DP Oscar Faura) of Ridley, staring across bodies of water with awe and severity. Her shoulders rounded, poised to dive at a moment’s notice. While there’s some poignancy to these bits, most of the emotional profundity is undercut by Nathanson’s by-the-book screenplay. The delicate dramatic threads and subtext of Ederle’s life, then, like Netflix’s recent Nyad , become subsumed by Young Woman and the Sea ’s blunt approach to storytelling.

The action in Young Woman and the Sea properly kicks off when Gertrude enrolls Trudy and her sister Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) in competitive swim lessons as soon as women are allowed. A critical thread throughout Rønning’s film is the instrumental role Trudy’s mother had in her life. The two share a similar kind of determination, with neither of them willing to take no for an answer.

Trudy doesn’t give up when Charlotte Epstein (Sian Clifford), the women’s swim coach who goes by Eppy, initially doesn’t let her practice with the other girls. Instead, she petitions for an opportunity and eventually becomes the best swimmer on the team.

Ridley holds her own as Trudy. She plays the character’s awkwardness and introversion in a way that recalls the protagonist of Sometimes I Think About Dying . The actress gives a convincing physical performance, too, both in the water (with the help of some doubles) and on land. 

The accolades soon start coming. Trudy wins local competitions and national ones. Eventually, she’s invited to join the U.S. women’s Olympic team and compete in Paris. These experiences sharpen her own visions for herself. As Trudy nurses a dream of swimming the English Channel, her sister Meg conforms to expectations of her time. She stops swimming, agrees to an arranged marriage and begins working at the family butcher shop.

The movie maintains a steady pacing, but it really picks up once Trudy embarks on her record-breaking journey. Her first attempt to cross the rough expanse is thwarted by a jealous coach (Jabez Wolffe) and the sexist president of the athletic union (Glenn Fleshler). Trudy finds a partner in Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham), an eccentric man who successfully crossed the Channel. There’s a spark when Ridley is on screen with Graham. Their shared moments clarify different layers of Trudy’s personality, especially the part of her that embraces challenge.

Those scenes are among the few times when Young Woman and the Sea overcomes its wooden narrative. The overworked screenplay doesn’t strip the film of all its merits — there’s plenty here in terms of uplift and inspiration for most audiences — but it does make one wonder about a version of this project that embodied the fluidity Ederle felt in the water.

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Never Mind the Bollocks Plot of ‘The English.’ This Show Is All About the Acting

• By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

In the final days of 2014, my wife and I both came down with a nasty case of the flu. Unable to do much but alternately shiver and sweat in bed together, we attempted to distract ourselves with a miniseries I had heard good things about earlier in the year: The Honourable Woman . Written and directed by Hugo Blick, the thriller starred Maggie Gyllenhaal as an Anglo-Jewish businesswoman caught up in a web of intrigue that involved, among other things, a kidnapping, Israeli intelligence officers, and, I think, fiber optic cables? To be honest, while we loved Gyllenhaal’s performance, along with the sense of mounting tension and the visual style, we had a lot of trouble following the plot, frequently pausing episodes to ask each other exactly what was happening. We just couldn’t tell if this was a side effect of our temporary delirium, or a flaw in Blick’s storytelling.

The experience of watching The English while healthy, though, proved roughly the same as bingeing The Honourable Woman from a sick bed. Blunt is fantastic, as are many of her co-stars. The whole thing looks gorgeous, and it has some thoughtful variations on Blick’s pet theme about what happens when people from one culture get mixed up in the affairs of another. But despite a seemingly straightforward revenge plot, its storytelling frequently turns too complicated for its own good.

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But this turns out to be a Trojan Horse situation where the horse winds up being more useful than the soldiers hiding inside it. Blunt and Spencer are just so charismatic, both together and in the stretches of the season when they are separated, that the show’s loftier ambitions begin to feel besides the point. Blick and cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer also place their two leads into a series of gorgeous compositions. (Sometimes, it’s literally painterly, like making Cornelia appear to be in a watercolor as she arrives at Watts’ place, or turning Cornelia and Eli’s discussion of constellations into something very much meant to evoke Van Gogh’s Starry Night .) The whole thing is great to look at.

It is also, though, a great headache to follow much of the time. While many of the supporting players are colorfully drawn and well played by the likes of Guerrero or (as a frightening bandit queen with a very specific grudge against indigenous people) Nichola McAuliffe, it becomes challenging in a hurry to keep track of everyone’s true motivations — or, at times, even how Cornelia or Eli get from one point of the story to the next. While many streaming shows suffer from not having enough story to fill the allotted episodes, The English often plays as if Blick wrote 12 episodes, then had to squeeze everything into half that, not always gracefully.

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Review: In ‘Young Woman and the Sea,’ a true story of perseverance gets the epic treatment

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After distance swimmer Trudy Ederle swam the English Channel in 1926, she had the biggest parade for an athlete in New York City — ever. As the first woman to swim the channel, she effectively paved the way for the future of women’s sports. So why isn’t she more of a household name? The new biopic “Young Woman and the Sea” seeks to change that, re-establishing Ederle as a world-changing icon.

This rousing sports biopic is a throwback to the kinds of inspiring underdog stories we love, like “Rudy” but with a girl-power feminist bent and a woman-against-nature theme. Daisy Ridley plays the sunnily determined Trudy, and the film is filled with a supporting cast of charming characters who offer pops of humor and heart. Produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, it’s a triumphant, emotional sports movie akin to his “Remember the Titans” and “Glory Road.”

Norwegian director Joachim Rønning tackles Trudy’s life story with a script by Jeff Nathanson, adapted from the 2009 account “Young Woman and the Sea: How Trudy Ederle Conquered the English Channel and Inspired the World” by Glenn Stout. (Rønning and co-director Espen Sandberg also made the oceanic adventure film “Kon-Tiki,” which could have been titled “Young Men and the Sea.”) These filmmakers clearly have a knack for capturing nautical adventure and the delusional yet undeniably human desire to conquer the seas.

But plunge below the surface, and there’s so much more to this story than just that of a strong young woman who completed an incredibly dangerous and challenging feat of athleticism and mental fortitude against all odds. While she’s stroking across the channel, there’s an ingenious subplot that speaks to larger ideas and movements that are animated by Trudy’s story. Boats filled with reporters chase after her, tossing back bottles filled with their missives written on slips of paper, which are fished out of the water and attached to messenger pigeons that deliver them to a French hotel in Cap Gris-Nez and read aloud, then reported via telegram to radio stations around the world, who broadcast the news all the way back to Trudy’s anxious family in New York City. This isn’t just the story of a young woman doing the seemingly impossible — it’s a mass media story taking place in a newly globalized world that’s collectively listening with bated breath.

That representational burden is a continually simmering undercurrent in “Young Woman and the Sea.” Trudy knows it’s her visibility that will change the world, not just the simple act of swimming the channel. Her coach, Jabez Wolffe (Christopher Eccleston), pushed upon her by her sponsor, James Sullivan (Glenn Fleshler), forces her to diet, concerned with how she’ll look in photographs; her two-piece swimsuit, redesigned for comfort, causes a sensation among the French press. But it’s her stardom that makes her a hero to the young girls who ask for her autograph among the crowds of journalists, and has the potential to change the trajectory of women’s sports.

Trudy’s swim inspires the whole world, including her hometown of New York City, the tenement buildings filled with immigrants listening to her journey on the radio. It’s a reminder of how we are compelled by narratives of human striving and triumph. From Sunday football to the Olympic Games, collectively watching and sharing these stories knits us together. The Paris Olympics this summer are, in fact, the centennial anniversary of the Games in which Trudy competed in 1924.

The broad storytelling calls back to a kind of retro filmmaking based on pure sensation and emotion, in which we cheer for the heroes and jeer for the villains. There isn’t a whole lot of nuance in some of the characterizations. Eccleston and Fleshler essentially play dastardly mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, their characters’ nakedly evil motivations for sabotaging Trudy unexplored. But not all men who are threatened by her endeavor. She wins over other swimmers with her moxie, including iconic channel swimmer Bill Burgess (a standout Stephen Graham), who eventually coaches her.

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Among the terrific supporting characters are Trudy’s German immigrant parents, with Danish actor Kim Bodnia playing Trudy’s father, a gruff, protective but ultimately supportive butcher, and German actor Jeanette Hain, who nearly steals the whole movie as Trudy’s steely, ethereal mother Gertrud. She insists that her girls, Trudy and her sister, Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), learn to swim in the wake of a steamboat tragedy in which hundreds of women died, saying that her daughters will never “stand on a burning ship.” But Gertrud also discovers that empowering them leads to glories — and dangers — she never imagined.

There is an old-fashioned yet modern beauty and grandeur to Rønning’s style here, which is meticulously produced and costume-designed, and shot with sweeping, epic camera movements by Oscar Faura, yet edited with a swift narrative efficiency by Úna Ní Dhonghaíle. Set to a triumphal score by Amelia Warner, there’s a hint of Bruckheimer’s “Pirates of the Caribbean”-style jauntiness to the powerful orchestration that adds to the sense of melodrama at play.

Ultimately, this is a tale of one young woman and the sea, and it’s Trudy’s experience that Ridley capably inhabits. Take away all the reporters, the doubters, the concerned family members, the coaches, her beloved sister and everyone watching around the world. In the dark of night it’s just Trudy, alone in the ocean, and that story of determination is worth celebrating and remembering.

'Young Woman and the Sea'

Rating: PG, for thematic elements, some language and partial nudity Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes Playing: In wide release

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The dead don't hurt, common sense media reviewers.

Mortensen's elegant Western has strong violence, language.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

This movie is, in the end, about revenge, but it's

Vivienne is a victim of brutal sexual violence, as

Most characters are White men, though the movie al

Sexual assault: A man chokes a woman and slaps her

A woman's bare breasts are shown when she's bathin

Sporadic language includes "f--k," "s--t," "horses

Characters drink in saloon. It's said that a chara

Parents need to know that The Dead Don't Hurt is a Western written and directed by Viggo Mortensen, who also stars alongside Vicky Krieps. It has a scene of sexual violence that includes slapping, choking, and offscreen rape, with graphic injury detail. People are also shot and killed, with lots of blood, and…

Positive Messages

This movie is, in the end, about revenge, but it's also about war, i.e. discovering its futility.

Positive Role Models

Vivienne is a victim of brutal sexual violence, as well as the aftermath of that, but she refuses to let that define her. She musters incredible strength just to show up and to hold her head high. Olsen is a more flawed character, choosing to go to war (and, hence, endangering Vivienne) and then seeking revenge, although he's also kind and respectful in many ways. Women here seem to have to fight for their very right to exist as people.

Diverse Representations

Most characters are White men, though the movie also gives a lot of time/attention to a woman, Vivienne, who's an uncharacteristically strong female character in a genre that's usually dominated by men. Some characters of color are seen in background roles. A character who's cruel to a Mexican woman says "someone should learn her some English… I've had about as much of that Mexican cluckety-cluck as I can stand." A character with a stutter is bullied and then hung for a crime he didn't commit. In one scene, a flower seller of Asian descent speaks in somewhat stereotypical broken English ("I will bring.").

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Sexual assault: A man chokes a woman and slaps her; she wakes up bloody and bruised, with a split lip and black eye. (Later it's revealed that she's pregnant after having been raped.) A woman punches a man, man slaps woman. Characters are shot and killed in cold blood, with pools of blood. Guns used to threaten. Character stabbed in throat with thrown knife. Character who's convicted of a crime and is hung from the neck until dead; the hanging goes badly, and he chokes and suffers slowly. One character beats another harshly, slamming his victim's face into piano keys, throwing him onto the floor and repeatedly kicking him; blood dribbles onto the piano keys. Rifle butt to face leads to bloody nose and mouth. Character hangs from noose, blood on face. Bullying. Sexual threat. Person shoots gun in the direction of a young child. Character shoots and kills bird, blood shown. Huge wound on character's face. A character dies in bed; her husband digs a grave and buries her. (Its later revealed that she died of syphilis.) Violent dialogue. Woman groped in saloon.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

A woman's bare breasts are shown when she's bathing in a creek. Two characters insert their hands into each other's trousers and move them about; there's passionate kissing, and a woman climbs on top of and straddles a man. Dialogue about setting up a brothel. Man hangs out in a saloon with his arms around two women. Man playfully, lovingly pulls woman down into pile of dirt where he's working.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sporadic language includes "f--k," "s--t," "horses---," "bulls--t," "goddamn," "bastard," "son of a bitch," "ass," "damn," "idiot," "stupid," "cretin," "shut yer hole."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters drink in saloon. It's said that a character "went on a bender" and became "dead drunk." Casual drinks in restaurant. Character passed out in alley. Cigar-smoking.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Dead Don't Hurt is a Western written and directed by Viggo Mortensen , who also stars alongside Vicky Krieps . It has a scene of sexual violence that includes slapping, choking, and offscreen rape, with graphic injury detail. People are also shot and killed, with lots of blood, and a character is stabbed in the throat with a thrown knife. People are hung, with one man struggling and suffering when the hanging fails. A man is brutally beaten and kicked, and other characters are bullied. Sexual content includes a woman straddling a man: They kiss passionately, and reach down each other's trousers. A woman's bare breasts are also seen briefly, and there's sex-related dialogue. Sporadic strong language includes uses of "f--k," "s--t," "goddamn," "bastard," "son of a bitch," "ass," "damn," and more. Characters drink socially/in saloons and smoke cigars. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

Viggo Mortensen's Western masterpiece

What's the story.

In THE DEAD DON'T HURT, pioneer Olsen ( Viggo Mortensen ) buries his wife near their small homestead, then packs up and leaves with his young son. In flashback, viewers learn about how the relationship between Olsen and Vivienne ( Vicky Krieps ) began, grew, and changed. He's Danish, and she's a French-speaking immigrant from Canada. They meet in San Francisco and immediately connect, heading to Nevada to start a life together on Olsen's small ranch. But in the nearby town of Elk Flats, the crooked Mayor Rudolph Schiller ( Danny Huston ) -- along with powerful, wealthy rancher Alfred Jeffries ( Garret Dillahunt ) -- rules with an iron fist. Even worse is Jeffries' son, Weston (Solly McLeod), who's entitled and violent. Weston sets his sights on Vivienne, who handily rebuffs his advances. But when the Civil War looms and Olsen feels the pull to enlist for the Union, Vivienne is left to fight her own war at home.

Is It Any Good?

Mortensen's Western has a slightly unwieldy structure, but it also has elegance and a sense of patience, and its cast gives strong, touching performances. Mortensen -- who not only wrote and directed The Dead Don't Hurt , but also stars in it and even composed the music -- gives the film an unusual timeline. Sometimes it works great, such as in the opening sequence, a violent killing spree that creeps over the rest of the movie like a shadow. But other times, viewers flash to Vivienne's childhood, which can be disorienting, as well as distracting from the main story thread.

On the other hand, there's a kind of dignity here, in that the characters all seem to know who they are. Olsen's little ranch is humble, but it suits him and Vivienne perfectly. Even the villains -- except for loose-cannon Weston, who's a little too generic -- behave with an air of quiet confidence. Best of all is Vivienne, an uncharacteristically strong female character in a genre that's usually dominated by men. Her inner strength puts her on equal footing with everyone she encounters; she won't be intimidated or invalidated. In an early scene, she dines with a blabbermouth bore; fed up, she just gets up and walks out. Moments like that help ensure that when The Dead Don't Hurt turns, inevitably, to vengeance, it feels somehow earned; it's not the only thing this movie is actually about.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about The Dead Don't Hurt 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

Do you consider Vivienne a role model ? Why, or why not?

How is bullying depicted? How is the person who does the bullying dealt with? What are some better ways of handling those who bully others?

What's interesting about the Western genre? In what ways does it use the past to tell stories about the present?

How are drinking and smoking depicted? Are they glamorized? Are there consequences? How does the time and setting affect the way substance use is portrayed (and the impact of seeing it)?

Movie Details

• In theaters : May 31, 2024
• Cast : Viggo Mortensen , Vicky Krieps , Solly McLeod
• Director : Viggo Mortensen
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Shout! Studios
• Genre : Western
• Run time : 129 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : violence, some sexuality and language
• Last updated : May 31, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

The Homesman

Dead for a Dollar

The Old Way

Westerns for kids and teens, movies with strong female characters.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

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Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, the english patient.

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Backward into memory, forward into loss and desire, “The English Patient” searches for answers that will answer nothing. This poetic, evocative film version of the famous novel by Michael Ondaatje circles down through layers of mystery until all of the puzzles in the story have been solved, and only the great wound of a doomed love remains. It is the kind of movie you can see twice--first for the questions, the second time for the answers.

The film opens with a pre-war biplane flying above the desert, carrying two passengers in its open cockpits. The film will tell us who these passengers are, why they are in the plane, and what happens next. All of the rest of the story is prologue and epilogue to the reasons for this flight. It is told with the sweep and visual richness of a film by David Lean , with an attention to fragments of memory that evoke feelings even before we understand what they mean.

The “present” action takes place in Italy, during the last days of World War II. A horribly burned man, the “English patient” of the title, is part of a hospital convoy. When he grows too ill to be moved, a nurse named Hana ( Juliette Binoche ) offers to stay behind to care for him in the ruins of an old monastery. Here she sets up a makeshift hospital, and soon she is joined by two bomb-disposal experts and a mysterious visitor named Caravaggio (Willem Dafoe).

The patient's skin is so badly burned it looks like tortured leather. His face is a mask. He can remember nothing. Hana cares for him tenderly, perhaps because he reminds her of other men she has loved and lost during the war. (“I must be a curse. Anybody who loves me--who gets close to me--is killed.”) Caravaggio, who has an interest in the morphine Hana dispenses to her patient, is more cynical: “Ask your saint who he's killed. I don't think he's forgotten anything.” The nurse is attracted to one of the bomb disposal men, a handsome, cheerful Sikh officer named Kip ( Naveen Andrews ). But as she watches him risk his life to disarm land mines, she fears her curse will doom him; if they fall in love, he will die. Meanwhile, the patient's memories start to return in flashes of detail, spurred by the book that was found with his charred body--an old leather-bound volume of the histories of Herodotus, with drawings, notes and poems pasted or folded inside.

I will not disclose the crucial details of what he remembers. I will simply supply the outlines that become clear early on. He is not English, for one thing. He is a Hungarian count, named Laszlo de Almasy ( Ralph Fiennes ), who in Egypt before the war was attached to the Royal Geographic Society as a pilot who flew over the desert, making maps that could be used for their research--which was the cover story--but also used by English troops in case of war.

In the frantic social life of Cairo, where everyone is aware that war is coming, Almasy meets a newly married woman at a dance. She is Katharine Clifton ( Kristin Scott Thomas ). Her husband Geoffrey ( Colin Firth ) is a disappointment to her. Almasy follows her home one night, and she confronts him and says, “Why follow me? Escort me, by all means, but to follow me . . .” It is clear to both of them that they are in love. Eventually they find themselves in the desert, part of an expedition, and when Geoffrey is called away (for reasons which later are revealed as good ones), they draw closer together. In a stunning sequence, their camp is all but buried in a sandstorm, and their relief at surviving leads to a great romantic sequence.

These are the two people--the count and the British woman--who were in the plane in the first shot. But under what conditions that flight was taken remains a mystery until the closing scenes of the movie, as do a lot of other things, including actions by the count that Caravaggio, the strange visitor, may suspect. Actions that may have led to Caravaggio having his thumbs cut off by the Nazis.

All of this back-story (there is much more) is pieced together gradually by the dying man in the bed, while the nurse tends to him, sometimes kisses him, bathes his rotting skin, and tries to heal her own wounds from the long war. There are moments of great effect: One in which she plays hopscotch by herself. A scene involving the nurse, the Sikh, and a piano. Talks at dusk with the patient, and with Caravaggio. All at last becomes clear.

The performances are of great clarity, which is a help to us in finding our way through the story. Binoche is a woman whose heart has been so pounded by war that she seems drawn to its wounded, as a distraction from her own hurts. Fiennes, in what is essentially a dual role, plays a man who conceals as much as he can--at first because that is his nature, later because his injuries force him to. Thomas is one of those bright, energetic British women who seem perfectly groomed even in a sandstorm, and whose core is steel and courage.

Dafoe's character must remain murkier, along with his motives, but it is clear he shelters a great anger. And Andrews, as the bomb-disposal man, lives the closest to daily death and seems the most grateful for life.

Ondaatje's novel has become one of the most widely read and loved of recent years. Some of its readers may be disappointed that more is not made of the Andrews character; the love between the Sikh and the nurse could provide a balance to the doomed loves elsewhere. But the novel is so labyrinthine that it's a miracle it was filmed at all, and the writer-director, Anthony Minghella , has done a creative job of finding visual ways to show how the rich language slowly unveils layers of the past.

Producers are not always creative contributors to films, but the producer of “The English Patient,” Saul Zaentz , is in a class by himself. Working independently, he buys important literary properties (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,” “ Amadeus ,” “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being ,” “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”) and savors their difficulties. Here he has created with Minghella a film that does what a great novel can do: Hold your attention the first time through with its story, and then force you to think back through everything you thought you'd learned, after it is revealed what the story is *really* about.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The English Patient (1996)

Rated R For Sexuality, Some Violence and Language

160 minutes

Colin Firth as Geoffrey Clifton

Ralph Fiennes as Almasy

Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine Clifton

Juliette Binoche as Hana

Willem Dafoe as Caravaggio

Naveen Andrews as Kip

Written and Directed by

• Anthony Minghella

Based On The Novel by

• Michael Ondaatje

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Haikyuu!! The Dumpster Battle

Despite a strong field, the Karasuno High volleyball team advances past the preliminary round of the Harutaka tournament in Miyagi prefecture to reach the third round. Despite a strong field, the Karasuno High volleyball team advances past the preliminary round of the Harutaka tournament in Miyagi prefecture to reach the third round. Despite a strong field, the Karasuno High volleyball team advances past the preliminary round of the Harutaka tournament in Miyagi prefecture to reach the third round.

• Susumu Mitsunaka
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Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 25 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track

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