english movie review in english

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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As the menacing Mr. Watts (Ciaran Hinds) — the first of many threats standing between Cornelia and her final target — puts it, she is “Not quite the woman I expected.”

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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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Blick remains a fascinating filmmaker. I would just like to see him try to make something that doesn’t require a Carrie Mathison conspiracy board to fully comprehend.

All six episodes of The English premiere Nov. 11 on Amazon Prime Video. I’ve seen the entire season.

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'The English' on Prime Video: The Ending Explained and Your Questions Answered

The Prime Video Western is a triumph, but a few parts of its narrative aren't explained in detail. Let's discuss in full-on spoiler territory.

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Emily Blunt plays Lady Cornelia Locke.

Just finished The English on Prime Video ? Amazon's Western brought home its moving story of Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt), a mother running the gauntlet to enact revenge on the man who caused her son's death. It also turned out to be a great love story with ex-Pawnee Scout Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), set in the most highly saturated desert landscape imaginable.

Amid the sweeping romantic music and gorgeous cinematography, some of the harder details about what rival businessmen David Melmont (Rafe Spall) and Thomas Trafford (Tom Hughes) were up to might have been lost across the show's two timelines. Let's clear up our understanding of everything that happened in the stunning action-packed, tension-laden limited series.

Spoilers ahead and a content warning: sexual violence, suicide

Who killed Lady Cornelia Locke's son?

It's clear from the outset that Cornelia, a fancily dressed Englishwoman with bags of money, has traveled to Kansas in 1890 on a revenge mission over her son's killer. We don't discover the actual identity of the man until midway through the series, when we meet the gnarly, immoral and lower class David Melmont, a business companion of Thomas Trafford, Cornelia's lover in England who had proposed to marry her.

What were Melmont and Trafford doing in Wyoming?

In 1875, 15 years before Cornelia arrives in Kansas, Trafford and his men land in Chalk River, Wyoming, with hopes of starting a cattle rearing business. In the Wild West, where just about anything goes, the party begins to turn against itself as Melmont acts out against his class superior. Melmont finds himself more at home among a cruel, independent splinter group of the American army: Corporal Jerome McClintock and cousins Billy Myers and Timothy Flynn. The group is going rogue in its search for Running Hawk, a prominent fighter from the Cheyenne Native American tribe, who had killed and mutilated Myers' brother Lonnie for trespassing on their lands.

What happened at the Massacre at Chalk River?

Against Trafford's wishes, Melmont informs the army of the whereabouts of the Cheyenne settlement and joins them in slaughtering all the men, women and children in what becomes known as the Massacre at Chalk River. Days later, the four men are arrested over engaging prostitutes at a brothel, a serious crime at the time. Yet Melmont and McClintock escape and travel to England. There, Melmont attempts to scam Cornelia into giving him money by claiming it was Trafford who had committed the heinous crimes and a huge bounty had been issued in exchange for his life.

David Melmont (Rafe Spall) commits many atrocities.

How did Melmont kill Cornelia's son?

Cornelia's doubts about Melmont's claims are confirmed in a letter from Trafford that reveals it was Melmont who was behind the abhorrent acts in America. When Melmont visits Cornelia's house again, she confronts him with the truth. Undeterred, Melmont rapes Cornelia and steals her money before returning to America with McClintock.

Cornelia's horror is compounded by several components: Trafford's letter also informs her that he's decided to stay in America, bringing their relationship to an end. At the brothel in America, Melmont and the army group contracted syphilis from a worker named Stella Shriver, who later became part of a "human freaks and oddities" business after the infection ravaged her appearance.

Melmont's act of sexual violence not only infects Cornelia with syphilis, but leaves her pregnant. Tragically, the sexually transmitted infection passes onto their son. In the picture Cornelia keeps of him in the locket around her neck, we see the boy's appearance shows signs of "erosion of the soft tissues and bone, particularly of the face," Cornelia says in episode 6. The other phase 4 effects of syphilis she describes are "blindness, deafness, heart defects, stroke, mental insanity, finally death." Cornelia raised her boy with unconditional love until he died at 14.

The events in Chalk River led to Melmont infecting his biological son with deadly syphilis. In a nutshell, Melmont's cold-blooded actions resulted in Cornelia's son's death. After many years, this led to Cornelia's rage-filled mission to confront Melmont with his crimes against her and her boy.

Thomas Trafford (Tom Hughes) travels to America to start a cattle rearing business.

What happened to Thomas Trafford?

In the past timeline, we see the difficulties Cornelia's lover goes through to set up a cattle breeding farm over the 15 years he spends in Wyoming. Companion Melmont abandoned Trafford and ended up striking gold in Colorado, using his business savvy to create a successful trading business. He built a new town called Hoxom on the very same land the Massacre at Chalk River took place. His success not enough, Melmont still sought to bring Trafford to failure and arranged the slaughters of his cows and calves.

After the massacre, army men Billy Myers and Timothy Flynn asked Trafford if they could join his cattle breeding outfit. Despising them and their crimes, Trafford refused and marked the men with his branding iron. Melmont later bought Myers and Flynn plots of land, and the pair formed a rival cattle rearing business to Trafford.

When Trafford tries to enlist the assistance of local Sheriff Robert Marshall in protecting his cattle from Melmont, Marshall becomes distracted by the deaths of Myers, Flynn and Flynn's wife. Like Melmont, Myers and Flynn also contracted syphilis. Fearing the effects of the infection, Myers hanged himself. Flynn shot his wife, who also exhibited marks of the infection, before turning the gun on himself.

Despite successfully opening a cattle rearing business in Caine County, near Chalk River, Trafford believes the land to bring bad luck. In episode 6, during the 1890 timeline, Trafford's manager, Clay Jackson, reports to Cornelia, Eli and the sheriff that Trafford drowned in a flash flood. The party attempted to save Trafford by throwing him a rope, but presumably realizing his herd and life's work was about to be destroyed, Trafford cut himself free and allowed himself to drown. Jackson says that this is what Trafford wants, to become a part of the place he opened.

In a bittersweet ending, Eli and Cornelia must part ways.

Why can't Eli and Cornelia be together?

Despite forming a close bond and sharing a kiss, Cornelia's infection prevents her from becoming too close to Eli. Eli must also go into hiding after fully taking the blame for Melmont's death, protecting Cornelia and Martha Myers. The sheriff releases Eli, who will surely be killed by the Hoxom townspeople if he becomes known as Melmont's murderer, on the condition he leaves and never returns. In departing, Eli might one day return home to Nebraska, where he was born, and reclaim "just a few acres" of land the government took from his Pawnee tribe. Thanks to the "Homestead Act," there's a chance the government will give Eli the land for his services to the army. Before he rides off, Cornelia gives Eli a phial of "the best" wheat seed, which he can potentially grow on his reclaimed land once he's safely out of hiding. Cornelia, meanwhile, must return to England and see out her next journey.

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What happens to Cornelia and the boy White Moon?

Cornelia inadvertently ends up saving a young boy named White Moon from bandit Black-Eyed Mog's camp. Eli recognizes the boy as the son of Running Hawk; in the opening scene of the show, on his last day in the American army, Eli witnessed soldiers kill Running Hawk, but didn't stop them. He did however play some part in preventing the army from shooting Running Hawk's wife and son, although the pair still feel betrayed by Eli, even though they originate from different tribes. When Eli takes Cornelia to a doctor, Cornelia convinces the doctor to take care of White Moon, handing over the last of her money. He accepts her money as backing into a new venture, "Flathead Jackson's Wild West Show: True Tales of America! Beyond the realistic."

In 1903, 13 years after her journey in America and Melmont's death, Cornelia is exhibiting the phase 4 effects of syphilis on her face, a "shame" she hides beneath a black veil. Before her imminent death, she visits the doctor's Wild West show when it travels to Berkshire, England. She meets with an older White Moon, who remembers her and knows that her "shame" isn't hers, but Melmont's. White Moon appreciates seeing the world and making a living in the "circus" by telling more authentic stories of Native Americans. He keeps the memories of Cornelia's beloved Eli alive by playing Major North and First Sergeant Eli Whipp who saved a "white woman."

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The English Review: Saddle Up and Enjoy This Compelling Chase Western

Emily Blunt, Chaske Spencer, and a stellar cast fuel creator Hugo Blick's passionate tale about survival, identity, and redemption.

Two beleaguered souls meet as if by chance while braving the western frontier. “Can you shoot?” asks a Pawnee ex-cavalry scout, Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer). Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt)—aristocratic, English, fish out of water, disheveled—replies: “If I have to.”

Eli doesn’t miss a beat. “Oh, you’ll have to.”

Welcome to 1890 middle America, a violent landscape inspired by big dreams and filled with plenty of bloodshed. It’s the captivating setting of The English , the new Amazon Studios epic chase Western from award-winning writer and director Hugo Blick ( The Honourable Woman, Black Earth Rising, The Shadow Line ). The six-episode limited series, which hits Amazon Prime on November 11, also happens to be one of the most captivating Westerns to hit the small screen in some time—that’s code for “temporarily pause what you’re currently streaming, folks, and dive into this exceptional experience.”

The English follows Cornelia’s entry into the daunting and dangerous new landscape of the West. She’s determined to get revenge on an unruly gent she blames for the death of her son. Fate bumps her into Eli, a member of the Pawnee Nation by birth and a guy with his own dilemmas. It takes a lot to survive the treacherous souls occupying the West, after all. This series spares no details in showing how gruesome the late-1800s were, in fact. Suddenly joined together, Cornelia and Eli discover a shared history that they must defeat if either of them is to survive.

The stellar cast includes Rafe Spall ( The Salisbury Poisonings, Trying ) and Nichola McAuliffe ( Tomorrow Never Dies, Doctor Who ) in standout roles. Tom Hughes ( A Discovery of Witches, Victoria ), Stephen Rea ( The Shadow Line, The Honourable Woman ), Valerie Pachner ( A Hidden Life, The Kingsman ), Toby Jones ( Marvellous, Detectorists ), Ciaran Hinds ( The Terror, The Woman in Black ), Malcolm Storry ( The Princess Bride, Doc Martin ), Steve Wall ( Raised by Wolves, The Witcher ), Sule Rimi ( Black Earth Rising, Strike Back ), and Cristian Solimeno ( Avenue 5, Guilt ) are also on board.

When the series was being prepped for production, Blick noted: "The chance to make a Western with Emily Blunt and the cast is so delicious I’m still wondering if it’s one of those weird dreams we were all having during lockdown. If not, a thrilling, romantic, epic horse-opera is heading to your screen… and I couldn’t be more excited.”

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The Acting in The English

Blick has a good reason to be jazzed about Blunt ( A Quiet Place, Jungle Cruise, Mary Poppins Returns .) Always a joy to watch, the actress delivers a powerhouse performance as Cornelia, balancing the character’s vulnerability with her fierce determination to right a horrible wrong, even though she’s not fully equipped—at least in the beginning—to do so. An Emmy nod is in order for Blunt next year. The same can be said for Spencer ( Blindspot , Barkskins ), a rare on-screen presence—deep, grounded, often hypnotic. You don’t experience many actors like Spencer and together, he and Blunt give viewers two memorable characters worthy of our investment. What on-screen magic they create.

Cornelia arrives at a Kansas outpost circa 1890 carrying far too much—literally and figuratively. She’s got trunks galore and frothy gowns, and perhaps way too much cash for an English lady to be toting around out on the frontier. But avenge her son’s death she must. So onward she goes even though a gaggle of bad fellas have anticipated her arrival.

Eli, Pawnee-born and now a defunct U.S. Army calvary, is a lone wolf. Natives raise their eyebrows over his Calvary involvement. White folks discriminate based on his skin color. Eli’s wish? To grab a couple of acres somewhere safe.

But Cornelia and Eli’s futures are connected. And so are their pasts. “You and I have met,” Cornelia tells Eli. “It was in the stars.”

The first three episodes of The English do well in creating the vast landscape and wicked danger of the Western world. The cinematography here is wonderful eye-candy—the series was shot overseas so Spain fills in for the Wild West.

Mostly, viewers will be intrigued by some of the characters in this Western territory. Anybody that knows much about the period realizes that getting hanged or shot over a simple misunderstanding isn’t that far-fetched. More gruesome, perhaps, is the havoc white men inflicted, particularly on entire Native communities. Spall’s David Melmont comes to mind. His character is, literally, the heart of darkness. Still, it gives Spall plenty of scene-stealing opportunities and his bone-chilling performance in The English is one for the books.

McAuliffe’s Black Eyed Mog, a hardened frontier woman, appears less frequently, but she’s bound to give you the spooks. Collectively, Blick and the creative team have introduced a fascinating array of characters and the actors embodying them are pitch-perfect. But what about the actual story of The English ? Does it get the job done?

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Is The English Worth the Investment?

The short answer is: Yes. Episode 4 takes place 15 years before the events we’re initially introduced to in Episode 1, and it does a fine job of connecting the creative dots. This backstory helps us understand what’s really at stake for Cornelia. And Eli, for that matter. It also introduces an evil force that will be hard to reckon with.

Artistically and thematically, I couldn’t get enough of The English. I wanted more. In that respect, Blick did his job. Core themes of identity and revenge interweave themselves in a fascinating parable that also touches on race, power, and love. The middle episodes tend to droop just a bit. Like bullets ricocheting off wooden porches or barns, you wonder where things may land and there’s a fear—because the front half was so good—that the story may have lost its footing. Like roping cattle, though, Blick steers things back in the right direction. This comes to light during an investigation by the local sheriff Robert Marshall (played by Rea) and the young widow, Martha Myers (Valerie Pachner) into a series of bizarre and macabre unsolved murders. Here we realize the full extent of Cornelia and Eli's intertwined history. The passion found in the latter half of Episodes 5 and 6 are, by far, something of the best things we’ve experienced in a Western.

Much is at stake as Cornelia and Eli’s precarious, often violent, journey unravels, and in the hands of another writer, producer, and director—Blick is all three—I sense we’d experience a much choppier ride overall. There’s depth and tenderness, too, when we learn more about Cornelia’s emotional plight. Her bond with Eli is visceral as past traumas come to light. These truly are expectational characters.

The English is one of the most passionate Western tales to hit the screen. Blunt and Spencer are cinematic gold. The cast shines. The acting is powerful, effective, and, to a degree, a bit soul-stirring. Aside from its midway dip—easily forgivable—Blick’s big dive into Westerns is one hell of a—to coin his term—"horse opera."

The English hits Amazon Prime Video on November 11.

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‘the english’ review: emily blunt in amazon’s big, bold swing of a western.

Hugo Blick's six-part series pairs Blunt and Chaske Spencer as outsiders seeking revenge on the wide open prairie.

By Daniel Fienberg

Daniel Fienberg

Chief Television Critic

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As presented in Hugo Blick ‘s new Amazon limited series The English , the Old West was a dangerous place: a collection of breathtaking vistas connected by trauma from horrifying massacres, in which disease-ridden, testicle-eating outlaws sold their services to the highest bidder and the only currency more valuable than acreage was revenge. No place for a woman, but no place for a man either.

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The English is a beautifully shot exercise that’s always right on the border of saying something brilliant, only to more frequently settle for being a picaresque assembly of bizarre characters, bloody adventures and satisfyingly badass lead performances from Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer .

Blunt plays Cornelia Locke, a British aristocrat who arrives in the New World circa 1890 with trunks of regionally inappropriate gowns, bags of cash and one goal: avenging the death of her son. At a remote outpost on the Kansas plains, it becomes clear that Cornelia’s arrival and her mission have been anticipated by some powerful and threatening forces (embodied by Ciaran Hinds, in exceptionally supercilious form).

Also present in that outpost, by luck or by cosmic design, is Eli Whipp (Spencer), a Pawnee-born former member of the US Army cavalry. The white folks look at Eli as a Native. The Natives look at Eli as white. All Eli wants is to reclaim the property that was his birthright.

Cornelia and Eli’s futures are intertwined, and their pasts are connected as well; while the Old West is vast, it’s a small world.

The English is, at heart, a clear-cut tale of revenge, and I loved the simplicity of the first two episodes. I would watch hours of Blunt and Hinds sitting opposite each other noshing on prairie oysters and making insinuations of violence. Ditto Blunt and Spencer sitting under the stars, each feeling out the other’s motivations and mettle. Then the show has to go and become pointlessly circuitous for two episodes, as a combination of interchangeable actors obscured by period facial hair, unplaceable accents and purposeless time jumping make the story hazy for no good reason.

There’s a strong rebound in the closing episodes, which rise to a level of Grand Guignol grotesquerie as the long-promised revenge comes to a head. But when Blick reaches his elegiac conclusive thoughts on the genre’s mixture of affectation and authenticity, you may wish, as I did, that the middle of the season had had more of that and less twistiness-for-the-sake-of-twistiness.

Cinematographer Arnau Valls Colomer shoots the heck out of the Spanish locations, meant to evoke, not impersonate, the Old West mystique. As in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog , foreign terrain stands in for the most American of geography, paralleling how Ford would use Monument Valley as a stand-in for the totality of The West.

You don’t need to share Blick’s checklist to get caught up in the camera’s careful compositions or the muscular and erudite dialogue. But appreciating The English on referential terms helps distract from a sense of actual history that’s a little superficial and an exploration of Indigenous cultures that improves on that of the traditional Western without marking a true corrective in the way that Reservation Dogs or Dark Winds have recently done.

Blunt and Spencer offer ample pleasures of their own. Blunt, already a veteran action hero, wields rifles and a rapier wit and does it all in Phoebe De Gaye’s stylishly constraining costumes. Spencer swaggers confidently as the Eastwood/John Wayne archetype with a soulful, outsider twist. Together, they have a pleasing chemistry, without the series forcing it to necessarily be romantic.

The nagging sense that the sloppy middle prevents the series from being something truly special by its heightened and emotional end is a minor disappointment. But its’ breadth, ambition and technical virtuosity make it well worth seeking out nevertheless.

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A humiliating marital breakdown triggers a riveting portrait of male rage in Robert Machoian’s thought-provoking thriller, starring Clayne Crawford and Sepideh Moafi. Read the full review.

Palm Springs

Ingenious Groundhog-Day style romance starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti as two wedding guests who get stuck in a time loop that they can’t seem to escape from. Read the full review.

Identifying Features

First-time director Fernanda Valadez conjures up a vision of real evil in her story of the horror and heartbreak faced by migrants into the US in Mexico’s borderlands. Read the full review.

Rebecca Hall ’s directing debut is a stylish and subtle study of racial identity, starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as friends who are both “passing” for what they are not, in an adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel. Read the full review.

The Story of Looking

An eye operation sets veteran cinephile Mark Cousins out on a delicate and fascinating exploration of what it means to look at movies and the world. Read the full review.

Joanna Scanlan gives a tremendous performance as a Muslim convert, who agonisingly uncovers the secret life led by her late husband Ahmed, in a lacerating portrait of a life built on marital lies. Read the full review.

Heart-rending portrait of refugees stranded in Scotland that announces Ben Sharrock as a master of atmospheric film-making, in a stirring drama about a Syrian migrant. Read the full review.

Summer of Soul

Questlove’s magnificent documentary of the forgotten 1969 Harlem cultural festival gives moving context to rediscovered footage of Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone et al. Read the full review.

Getting Away with Murder(s)

David Nicholas Wilkinson’s epic investigation into the Nazis who escaped a postwar reckoning is a powerful call for Holocaust justice, but lays out the difficulty of prosecuting a technocratic atrocity. Read the full review.

Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning play makes the leap to film with ease. A masterly drama that is an extraordinarily well acted, uncomfortably intimate look at a family at Thanksgiving. Read the full review .

Quo Vadis, Aida?

Through the eyes of a translator moving between the different ethnic factions, director Jasmila Žbanić musters real tragic power and clear-eyed compassion revisiting the Srebrenica massacre 25 years on. Read the full review.

Infused with a wonderful sentimentality, Lee Isaac Chung ’s fictionalised account of his rural Arkansas childhood explores the growing pains of a family farm. Read the full review.

Dear Comrades!

Andrei Konchalovsky’s stunning re-creation of a Soviet-era massacre, in which Red Army soldiers and KGB snipers opened fire on strikers, is a rage-filled triumph. Read the full review.

No Time to Die

The long-awaited 25th outing for Ian Fleming’s superspy James Bond has Daniel Craig saying goodbye to 007 in a weird and self-aware epic with audacious surprises up its sleeve. Read the full review.

Meek’s Cutoff director Kelly Reichardt returns with a superbly chewy story about a pair of drifters in the old west trying to make money by stealing milk from a newly arrived cow. Read the full review.

Anthony Hopkins is superb playing a man with dementia in Florian Zeller ’s unbearably heartbreaking film full of intelligent performances, disorienting time slips and powerful theatrical effects. Read the full review.

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand hit top form in Joel Coen’s austere reimagining of Shakespeare’s Scottish bloodbath. Read more .

The Lost Daughter

Maggie Gyllenhaal’s accomplished directing debut makes humid, sensual cinema of Elena Ferrante’s psychodrama of a novel, and boasts a superb central performance from Olivia Colman. Read more .

Unnervingly subtle drama from Andreas Fontana, about a Swiss private banker visiting clients in Argentina during the period of the military junta and “disappearances”. Read more

West Side Story

Stunning recreations of the original film’s New York retain the songs and the dancing in a re-telling that will leave you gasping at the verve and panache of Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner. Read more .

Denis Villeneuve’s awe-inspiring take on the sci-fi classic starring Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac and Zendaya has been given room to breathe, creating a colossal spectacle and an epic triumph. Read more .

Frances McDormand delivers a wonderful performance as a boomer forced out of her home and on to the road in Chloé Zhao’s inspired Oscar-winning docufiction. Read more .

Drive My Car

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi reaches a new grandeur with this engrossing adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story about a theatre director grappling with Chekhov and his wife’s infidelity. Read more.

Petite Maman

A spellbinding ghost story from Portrait of a Lady on Fire’s Céline Sciamma. A girl meets her mother as a child in the woods in a moving tale of memory, friendship and family. Read more .

The Green Knight

Dev Patel rides high in the director David Lowery’s sublimely beautiful quest, which conjures up visual wonders and metaphysical mysteries from the anonymously authored 14th-century chivalric poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Read more .

The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion’s superb gothic western is a mysterious and menacing psychodrama about two warring brothers ( Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons) on a ranch in 20s Montana. Read more.

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8 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

For this tennis-pro triad, it’s love, set, match.

‘Challengers’

The highly-anticipated latest from the director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me by Your Name”) follows three tennis pros as they shift between lovers, friends and foes. It stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist.

From our review:

All three leads in “Challengers” are very appealing, and each brings emotional and psychological nuance to the story, whatever the characters’ current configuration. They’re also just fun to look at, and part of the pleasure of this movie is watching pretty people in states of undress restlessly circling one another, muscles tensed and desiring gazes ricocheting. Guadagnino knows this; he’s in his wheelhouse here, and you can feel his delight in his actors.

In theaters. Read the full review .

Critic’s Pick

A series of powerful vignettes.

‘terrestrial verses’.

Tehranians interact with various cultural officials in their everyday life — finding the right uniform for a daughter’s school ceremony, applying for a job or a drivers license, registering a son’s name — and must navigate the restraints of authoritarian bureaucracy.

Because each vignette is no more than a few minutes long and consists of Kafkaesque conversations that border on the absurd, “Terrestrial Verses” operates with a cumulative effect. It’s death by a thousand pinpricks, a succession of small indignities. Each seemingly simple task is not just saddled with procedural irritations — forms to fill out, appointments to attend, banal questions to answer — but with fear. Suppose your answer to a routine query could incriminate you or there’s no way to prove to an official that you aren’t lying. How would you live your life?

B(oredom). D(etachment). S(tagnation). M(alaise).

‘the feeling that the time for doing something has passed’.

This deadpan sex comedy directed, written by and starring Joanna Arnow in her debut feature follows a woman as she’s dominated both at work and in various B.D.S.M. relationships, none of which seem to bring her fulfillment.

Arnow films her own nude body with the kind of frankness that is called brave because she wants to be more confrontational than arousing. She’s so visible that it takes a beat to remember that someone can be physically exposed and emotionally opaque.

A tear-jerker that’s unusually understated.

‘nowhere special’.

A terminally-ill single father (James Norton) searches for the right adoptive parents to care for his son (Daniel Lamont) after he dies.

After being admonished by a snotty rich client because of slow work, John, taking the adage “you only live once” to heart, eggs the fellow’s house. It’s one of the few moments when the movie deigns to deliver a conventional satisfaction. But the mostly low-key mode of “Nowhere Special” is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.

Another Cronenberg progeny with unsettling in her DNA.

In Caitlin Cronenberg’s feature debut, ecological collapse leads Canada to reduce its population by calling on citizens to volunteer for euthanasia. One well-off family discovers that the choice might not be so voluntary.

“Humane” is a thought experiment sprung to bloody life, a cross between the trolley problem and dystopian extinction nightmares. Set in the very near future, it tries to tackle a cascade of ethical questions. Who counts as valuable? What does it mean to be good? If humans wreck the earth, what will we do to survive? Do we even deserve it?

Perfect for arachnophobia exposure therapy.

After a venomous spider escapes from its owner’s care and begins rapidly reproducing, the residents of a low-income housing block must face off against these eight-legged menaces.

There are no fresh ideas in the French creepy-crawler “Infested,” yet this first feature from Sébastien Vanicek scurries forward with such pep and purpose that its shortcomings are easily forgivable. Add a handful of eager young actors, a sociopolitical slam and a claustrophobic location swarming with venomous spiders and you’ll be hunting for the DEET long before the credits roll.

Watch on Shudder . Read the full review .

Your standard musician biopic, but make it spiritual.

‘unsung hero’.

Based on a real family of musicians who have five Grammy Awards between them, this faith-based drama follows a tight-knit clan as they move from Australia to Nashville, and find success in recording Christian music.

Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash. Joel Smallbone plays his own father, David, who faces financial and reputational ruin after booking a big concert and failing to pack the house. He resettles the family in the United States, but no job materializes. His pep-talking spouse, Helen (Daisy Betts), and their beatific children pull up bootstraps and practically whistle while they work, but it’s not enough.

A boyish action flick starring a boy named Boy.

‘boy kills world’.

Blood begets more blood when a victim of an attack that left him deaf and mute seeks revenge on the perpetrators.

At least give it up for the stunt crew on “Boy Kills World,” a boneheaded action movie that gives some exceedingly fit performers — its hard-body star Bill Skarsgard very much included — a chance to flaunt their physical skills. To judge from all the grunting, the straining muscles and cascading sweat, Skarsgard, along with a few of his nimble co-stars and an army of stunt performers, puts in serious work to try to make the relentless bashing and smashing, flailing and dying look good. Too bad the filmmakers were incapable of doing the same.

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As “Sex and the City” became more widely available on Netflix, younger viewers have watched it with a critical eye . But its longtime millennial and Gen X fans can’t quit.

Hoa Xuande had only one Hollywood credit when he was chosen to lead “The Sympathizer,” the starry HBO adaptation of a prize-winning novel. He needed all the encouragement he could get .

Even before his new film “Civil War” was released, the writer-director Alex Garland faced controversy over his vision of a divided America  with Texas and California as allies.

Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions,” a comedy about millennials weathering the early days of the pandemic , will ask audiences to return to a time that many people would rather forget.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

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Best Movies of 2024: Best New Movies to Watch Now

Welcome to our guide of the Best Movies of 2024, featuring every Certified Fresh movie as they come in week by week!

In April : Challengers , Abigail ,   Arcadian , Scoop , Wicked Little Letters , Civil War , Monkey Man , The Beast , and The First Omen .

In March : Love Lies Bleeding and Problemista , both from A24 . One Life , starring Anthony Hopkins. Ordinary Angels , starring Hilary Swank. In horror, we got You’ll Never Find Me and  Late Night with the Devil , the latter which also tops our best horror of 2024 list . Dialogue-free animation Robot Dreams and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World jockeying for the top spot here.

And what about February ? Dune pretty good, thanks for asking. Part Two went Certified Fresh within an hour after the reviews embargo lifted on February 21st. With it outclassing the first Dune , we took a look at 20 sequels that got better Tomatometer scores than their originals . Otherwise, things got freaky with horror film Stopmotion and the comic zaniness of Hundreds of Beavers taking the crown for the best-reviewed of the year.

We didn’t have a blockbuster January like we did in 2023 ‘s, when genre surprises M3GAN and Plane went Certified Fresh. But Daisy Ridley got her post-Skywalker win with Sometimes I Think About Dying . Mads Mikkelsen re-teamed with his A Royal Affair director Nikolaj Arcel to find The Promised Land. With The Crime Is Mine , Francois Ozon is getting career-best reviews, and his 10th Certified Fresh film over the past decade-and-change. And Netflix scored with The Kitchen , Orion and the Dark , and Good Grief .

Robot Dreams (2023) 98%

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) 98%

The Crime Is Mine (2023) 98%

Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (2023) 98%

Molli and Max in the Future (2023) 98%

Late Night with the Devil (2023) 97%

Io Capitano (2023) 97%

Tótem (2023) 97%

The Promised Land (2023) 96%

Challengers (2024) 88%

Hundreds of Beavers (2022) 95%

Fitting In (2023) 95%

Love Lies Bleeding (2024) 94%

Limbo (2023) 94%

Driving Madeleine (2022) 94%

Dune: Part Two (2024) 93%

Femme (2023) 93%

The Settlers (2023) 93%

About Dry Grasses (2023) 93%

La Chimera (2023) 93%

Cabrini (2024) 91%

Orion and the Dark (2024) 91%

One Life (2023) 90%

Stopmotion (2023) 90%

The Kitchen (2023) 89%

Monkey Man (2024) 89%

Problemista (2023) 88%

Disco Boy (2023) 88%

Abigail (2024) 83%

Arcadian (2024) 84%

The Beast (2023) 84%

Monolith (2023) 83%

Ordinary Angels (2024) 84%

Civil War (2024) 81%

Riddle Of Fire (2023) 83%

The First Omen (2024) 81%

Sometimes I Think About Dying (2023) 80%

Wicked Little Letters (2023) 80%

You'll Never Find Me (2023) 79%

Scoop (2024) 77%

Suncoast (2024) 76%

Good Grief (2023) 76%

Self Reliance (2023) 72%

Related news.

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hensarali 712 days ago

Anku27x gulati 18 1112 days ago.

A thought provoking ordeal concerning empowerment of household Indian women in the truest sense. Must watch! 

Durgesh k 1411 days ago

good movie but overrated

Durgesh 1411 days ago

overrated movie but good

Nandini 1 1411 days ago

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Dystopian horror with bloody mayhem and a climate theme.

A Lot or a Little?

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

The movie is a clear cautionary tale about the dan

Even the most likable character here, Noel, is a d

Noel, the movie's most likable character, is playe

Set in a time when climate change and overpopulati

Reference to "booty call." Dialogue about a romant

Language includes many uses of "f--k" or "f---ing,

A main character is said to be a recovering addict

Parents need to know that Humane is an uneven futuristic/dystopian horror movie in which people are compensated for volunteering to be euthanized. It focuses on the conflict between four wealthy siblings after their father goes through the procedure. Violence can be intense, with deaths, gory corpses, threats…

Positive Messages

The movie is a clear cautionary tale about the dangers of climate change and the unchecked, unfair privilege of wealthy White people. It's also about how people somehow manage to justify our abominable behavior against one another.

Positive Role Models

Even the most likable character here, Noel, is a damaged person who resorts to violence to defend himself.

Diverse Representations

Noel, the movie's most likable character, is played by Sebastian Chacon, who's of Colombian and Ecuadorian descent. He's in a loving, interracial relationship with Grace (Black actor Blessing Adedijo); she only appears in two scenes, but her presence is important. Another woman, a chef named Dawn, is played by Korean actor Uni Park. Other characters of color appear in smaller or background roles. Jared (Jay Baruchel), who's White, tries to explain to his brother why he's not racist but uses racist language in the process. One of the movie's themes is related to the privilege of wealthy, White Americans. The movie's climate disaster is blamed by some on something called "the Asian Collapse," which causes racial hatred and violence against China, India, and Japan. Dawn's restaurant was burned down by racists. An adopted family member is targeted by other members of his family.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Set in a time when climate change and overpopulation have made daily life deadly. People are asked to volunteer for euthanasia to make resources more widely available. Threats with guns and knives; people are shot (including fatally) and stabbed (in the chest, hand, neck). Gory corpses, bloody wounds, knives painfully yanked out of wounds. Blood spurts. Finger pressed into open wound. Wound cauterized with hot spoon. Characters are hit in head and groin with baseball bat and the butt of gun. People punched in the face. Bloody nose, bloody tooth yanked out, blood-soaked towels. Choking. Spraying with mace. One character quietly killed by three injections. Dead bodies hauled away. Fighting. Descriptions of climate change-related disasters -- images of fires, riots, etc. Violent outbursts, tantrums. Arguing. Vague dialogue about a fatal accident. Character referred to as a bully. Character is a pharma executive whose pills, it's said, "don't work and make women sicker and sicker."

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

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Reference to "booty call." Dialogue about a romantic partner "having an affair."

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

Language includes many uses of "f--k" or "f---ing," plus "s--t," "bulls--t," "a--hole," "ass," "bitch," "swear to God/for God's sake/oh my God," "Jesus f--k," "Jesus Christ/Jesus," "piss," "up your butt," "screw," "idiot," "hell," "damn."

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

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A main character is said to be a recovering addict who's currently not using. He met his girlfriend "in a meeting." Wine is removed from the house prior to his arrival so that no one is tempted.

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 Humane is an uneven futuristic/dystopian horror movie in which people are compensated for volunteering to be euthanized. It focuses on the conflict between four wealthy siblings after their father goes through the procedure. Violence can be intense, with deaths, gory corpses, threats with guns and knives, shooting, multiple stabbings, blood spurts, bloody wounds, hitting with blunt objects, disturbing images of climate-related disasters, and much more. The sibling who was adopted is ultimately targeted by the others. Strong language includes many uses of "f--k," plus "s--t," "a--hole," "ass," "bitch," "Jesus," God," "piss," "butt," "screw," "idiot," "hell," "damn," etc. There's also some sex-related dialogue ("booty call," "having an affair"). A main character is said to be a recovering addict who's currently not using. He met his girlfriend in a meeting, and wine is removed prior to his arrival. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In HUMANE, it's the near future, and climate change has worsened immeasurably. The United Nataions decrees that each industrial nation must decrease its population by 20 percent, so the United States adopts an "enlistment" program, in which "volunteers" for euthanasia will be issued a $250,000 check for their surviving family members. The wealthy Charles York ( Peter Gallagher ) summons his four children to dine with him. Under duress, TV political commentator Jared ( Jay Baruchel ); troubled mother Rachel ( Emily Hampshire ); adopted piano prodigy Noah ( Sebastian Chacon ), who has been battling addiction; and struggling actor Ashley ( Alanna Bale ) all arrive. And, despite warnings, Rachel also brings along her teen daughter, Mia ( Sirena Gulamgaus ). Charles' second wife, professional chef Dawn (Uni Park), prepares a beautiful dinner before Charles announces that they'll be "enlisting." Dawn gets cold feet and disappears before Bob ( Enrico Colantoni ) shows up to perform the procedure. The siblings say goodbye to their father, and then Bob informs them that he needs a second body to replace Dawn's. And it needs to be one of theirs. They have two hours to decide.

Is It Any Good?

A dystopian sci-fi story, a darkly comic skewering of American capitalism and greed, and a gory horror tale, this bloody movie doesn't always achieve a satisfying balance, but it's never boring. The directorial debut of photographer Caitlin Cronenberg, who's also the daughter of legendary horror master David Cronenberg , Humane begins with a hauntingly realistic depiction of climate change's dire effects, including images of people carrying reflective umbrellas to protect them from deadly sunlight. That sets an effectively oppressive tone that carries through the rest of the story.

Humane 's "eat the rich" elements are nothing new, with the characters' unethical, inhumane greed showing through, much as they try to hide it. (Outside of Bob, who occupies a different role here, there are no middle- or lower-class people to create a juxtaposition; there's no depiction of the "haves" versus the "have nots.") The stalking-and-killing section is competently handled, with viewers' affections directed toward Noah, who's clearly suffered and has come out the other side with a measure of empathy. But since his character was adopted, the others target him. By the end of Humane , it's abundantly clear that there are no heroes in this story and that the villain is humanity itself for its general disregard and apathy toward the future and our own kind.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Humane '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?

What does the movie have to say about climate change? Does it offer any reasonable solutions? Is it scary enough to prompt action?

What's the movie's opinion on the privilege of wealthy, White Americans? Can you think of other movies that tackle this subject?

How is addiction portrayed in the movie? What are some of the other characters' opinions toward Noel, even though he has sought help?

Is the movie scary? What's the appeal of horror movies ? Why do people sometimes enjoy being scared?

Movie Details

• In theaters : April 26, 2024
• Cast : Jay Baruchel , Emily Hampshire , Peter Gallagher
• Director : Caitlin Cronenberg
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Female actors
• Studios : IFC Films , Shudder
• Genre : Horror
• Run time : 93 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : strong violence, and language throughout
• Last updated : April 25, 2024

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Civil War Review: Alex Garland's Terrifying War Movie Will Leave You Shaken [SXSW 2024]

The most disarming thing about writer/director Alex Garland's "Civil War" is its deliberate, harrowing sense of neutrality. Here is a major movie, one of the biggest ever produced by studio A24 , about a brutal civil war being fought on three fronts in the modern United States, being released into theaters during a period of intense political unrest that chooses immersion over perspective. It's a choice that doesn't always click throughout the film's running time, but it pays off in a big way during the film's harrowing, terrifying final act.

Those hoping to have their personal beliefs mirrored in one way or another, to have Garland pick a side and validate a certain point of view, will be left wanting. And those hoping for a movie that is more loudly specific about its intentions may find its intentionally vague politics to be a cop out. But the key to "Civil War" lies in the choice of protagonists. Garland largely tells the story from the perspective a group of journalists traveling a war-ravaged America in search of a big story in the final days of the conflict. They're an objective bunch — the nature of their job demands it, as they float between several sides of the conflict to capture what's going on — and the movie follows suit.

"Civil War" is less about the politics of right now, and more about the horror that accompanies a world beyond politics, where all meaning gets lost in gunfire and smoke. No one knows what they believe at this point, and no one even discusses why they're fighting anymore. It's not a film about a divided America in the sense that we, folks doom scrolling in 2024, think of it. It's a film about how all of that ceases to matter when the violence starts. What the hell were we fighting about anyway?

The road trip movie from hell

All of Garland's films blend disconcerting horror and staggering beauty, and "Civil War" doesn't buck the trend. Like the veteran war photographer Lee (played with a understated toughness by Kirsten "Hey, I've Been Undervalued For Years And Now I'm Going To Strut My Stuff" Dunst ), Garland's camera recognizes the unusual beauty and surreality that can accompany images of tremendous stress and terror. Quick flashes of joy and humanity accompany a visit to a refugee camp, where people seem happy to just be alive. Snipers casually patrol the roofs of small towns. One especially unsettling sequence, a standoff with a sniper at a long-abandoned roadside Christmas experience, is the kind of haunting scene that gives the film its specific nightmare heartbeat. Something so typical and tacky, something so American, becomes the site of total inhumanity.

As Ellie and her crew head south, hoping to reach Washington D.C. to secure an interview with the President of the United States before the capital falls, the film follows a familiar road trip formula. Some vignettes are more effective than others. Some pit stops are little short stories unto themselves, a "day in the life" of these four journalists as they struggle to do their jobs. Others exist to just let characters tell each other their life stories (the weakest moments of the film, frankly). A few allow Garland, who expressed such a fascination with the corruption of worlds both natural and manmade in films like "Annihilation" and "Ex Machina," to just turn his camera toward impossible, startling imagery and to just let us exist in it all.

It's no accident that these images, among the most haunting of the film, often barely draw the eyes of the folks on the screen. It's that objective voice that steers the film from frame one — this is their reality now, they've seen this before, and they're on the hunt for something bigger. And hopefully something final.

A warning from a world too-much like our own

As a road trip movie, "Civil War" is quite good, with some segments proving more enthralling than others. Dunst is the standout among the cast, keeping us anchored through the more episodic elements, but Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Cailee Spaeny contribute strong work (with Jesse Plemons and Nick Offerman showing up in well-utilized cameos). However, "Civil War" roars to a different kind of life in its third act, as our battered journalists find themselves in the middle of a proper war zone, embedded with troops, and struggling to survive as they document the biggest moment in (fictional) American history. These scenes contain a rare and special power, and they pay off because of Garland's specific perspective choices, and his decision to leave clearly identifiable politics at the door. Everything that led to this feels so small now.

In its own weird way, "Civil War" is a science fiction movie, an alternate history tale of the biggest thing to happen in the United States since the Revolutionary War. And in a weirder way, it plays out like a movie that was made in an alternate reality, a film where this already happened, and where the most dramatic, iconic, horrible moments are so fresh, so embedded in the minds of a theoretical audience, that no exposition or world-building is necessary. We bear witness to monumental turns of events, and they're filmed through a lens that yes, of course we recognize this moment. We all saw it on the news. It's in all the textbooks now. Everyone knows that photo.

So when the film asks us to accompany the characters into one of the most relentless war sequences of recent years, there's an unusual sense of decorum. We're bearing witness to an exacting recreation of historical events that haven't actually happened. And we, the audience from this reality, are asked to take it all as a warning. This is the movie that gets made if we don't fix our sh*t. And these events, recorded with such raw reality by Garland and his crew, are exactly what we want to avoid at all costs.

/Film Rating: 8.5 out of 10

‘The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady’ Review: Eva Green Surprises in French Blockbuster’s Less-Than-Faithful Finale

As in Richard Lester's two-part 1970s adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel, the villainous Milady takes the spotlight in the second half, though this time, the film inventively strays from the source.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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For readers of Alexandre Dumas’ novel, extravagant French adaptation “ The Three Musketeers – Part II: Milady” packs its share of surprises: killing off important characters, sparing others and reimagining allegiances that have stood for nearly two centuries. For viewers of “Part I: D’Artagnan,” however, this swashbuckling sequel feels totally in keeping with what came before. Even the twists track, paying off what amounts to a nearly four-hour investment (not counting however many months audiences may have waited to see how the story ends).

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Bourboulon isn’t the first filmmaker to split Dumas’ novel down the middle. Half a century earlier, Richard Lester directed back-to-back features, dubbed “The Three Musketeers” and “The Four Musketeers” — though the latter was rechristened “They Call Her Milady” (“On l’appelait Milady”) in France, suggesting a precedent for accentuating Green’s character in the second half. She’s an infinitely more interesting source of obsession for D’Artagnan than Constance, who comes across as beatifically banal as played by Khoudri here. That in turn makes D’Artagnan’s efforts to rescue her seem rather uninspired, as if he could be doing something better with his time — like lusting after Milady.

In this telling, Constance stumbled upon the perpetrators of the plot to assassinate the king just before the first part ended, which at least imbues the character with a certain value. Still, it’s far more exciting to see D’Artagnan and Milady together, as they are early on, fighting side by side for a change. Bourboulon’s big innovation in these films can be seen in his action sequences, which typically unfold via elaborate oners — dynamic set-pieces designed to look as though they were captured in a single unbroken shot.

During an early escape, the camera chases after D’Artagnan, running along the lofty fortress parapet. When the young hero finds himself cornered, the lensman plunges right behind brave D’Artagnan into the moat. The effect is far more immersive than most adventure movies, which use quick cutting to place viewers in the fray. The way DP Nicolas Bolduc shoots these well-choreographed, minimally edited sequences, we feel like participants in the action, as in a knife fight that comes just a few scenes later, where the nimble camera is at knee level when D’Artagnan drives a blade through his opponent’s leg.

The other musketeers have less to do this time around, though each remains sworn to protecting the honor of others. Porthos has fallen in love with Aramis’ sister, Mathilde (Camille Rutherford), and together the two confront the cad who took advantage of her. In a rather confusing (but nonetheless exciting) subplot, Athos risks his life to rescue a comrade strapped to a wooden cross. He too has unfinished business with Milady — which remains the case all the way to the end, suggesting a thread that could inspire an off-canon “Part III,” should Bourboulon care to continue the epic.

Stateside, subtitles tend to relegate movies to art-houses, where the kind of young audiences most likely to appreciate such showy theatrics rarely set foot. Like last year’s “Napoleon,” this is megaplex entertainment at its most grand. Still, it would take some clever marketing to transform this import into a “Parasite”-style phenomenon, even if both well-made offerings have the same quality: They fill an entertainment niche that American movies have all but abdicated.

Reviewed online, Dec. 19, 2023. Running time: 121 MIN. (Original title: “Les trois mousquetaires: Milady”)

• Production: (France-Germany-Spain-Belgium) A Samuel Goldwyn Films (in U.S.), Pathé (in France) release of a Dimitri Rassam, Jérôme Seydoux presentation of a Chapter 2, Pathé Films, M6 Films production, in co-production with Constantin Films Produktion, ZDF, Deaplaneta, UMedia, with the participation of OCS, Canal+, M6, in association with Ufund, with the support of La Région Île-de-France, La Région Bretagne in partnership with the CNC, BNP Paribas. (World sales: Pathé, Paris.) Producer: Dimitri Rassam. Co-producer: Ardavan Safaee.
• Crew: Director: Martin Bourboulon. Screenplay: Matthieu Delaporte & Alexandre de La Patellière, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas. Camera: Nicolas Bolduc. Editor: Célia Lafitedupont. Music: Guillaume Roussel.
• With: François Civil, Vincent Cassel, Romain Duris, Pio Marmaï, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, Vicky Krieps, Lyna Khoudri, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Éric Ruf, Marc Barbé, Patrick Mille, Julien Frison. (French dialogue)

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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

Juliette Binoche as Hana

Willem Dafoe as Caravaggio

Kristin Scott Thomas as Katharine Clifton

Colin Firth as Geoffrey Clifton

Naveen Andrews as Kip

Ralph Fiennes as Almasy

Written and Directed by

• Anthony Minghella

Based On The Novel by

• Michael Ondaatje

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