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RLiving Mr. Williams, played by Bill Nighy, is a brooding, austere bureaucrat reduced by countless days of quotidian offi ce work, hollowed by midcentury, postwar London. He moves with a gentle melancholy that’s undoubtedly signaling an inner pain bubbling slightly beneath the surface. The lonely widower lives quietly with his son and his son’s wife, played by Barney Fishwick and Patsy Ferran, respectively. The fi lm is solemn, moving steadily until Mr. Williams leaves work uncharacteristically for a doctor’s appointment—and, to disrupt his cyclical life, is given only months to live. Confronted by the end of his life, Mr. Williams grapples with his legacy, the potential of redemption, and a revived vigor to live with purpose for the time that remains. He fi nds inspiration in young, hopeful Margaret, an employee who nicknamed him Mr. Zombie, played wonderfully by Aimee Lou Wood.

Mr. Williams abandons his offi ce, embarking on a brief (but undignifi ed) quest for debauchery with a disreputable writer, played by Tom Burke. However, Mr. Williams is infatuated platonically with Margaret, who quits her offi ce job to experience something new. Mr. Williams pivots from existential debauchery to a small but impactful purpose: ensuring the construction of a playground abandoned to static bureaucracy. In this, Living rejects the futile and instead proposes that there is meaning to being alive hidden in small things.

Living is the remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 fi lm, Ikiru, but director Oliver Hermanus and novelist Kazuo Ishiguro managed to gracefully reimagine this sentimental fi lm. Despite falling short of the poignancy and subtlety of Ikiru, Living delivers a beautiful glance at an attempt to live—even when life is terminal. Retold in London instead of Tokyo, Hermanus and Ishiguro parallel Ikiru, envisioning a story playing out side by side, positioned halfway across the world. Without Nighy’s refi ned performance as Mr. Williams, Living’s lasting impact would be fl eeting, but his embodiment of revival, despite incurable limitations, gives this fi lm an unlikely opening to redemption. —MAXWELL RABB PG-13, 102 min. Limited release in theaters

RM3GAN Few trailers from the past year have inspired as much anticipation in me as M3GAN’s did. Finally, I thought, a movie that answers the question on all our minds: what if Chucky was a girl boss? Imagined and written by the screenwriter and producer of Malignant, Akela Cooper and James Wan, respectively, it’s hard not to wonder if they’ve let the instant midnight movie canonization of their last collaboration go to their heads. Whereas Malignant was something genuinely weird and audacious that earned its word-of-mouth reputation, there’s nothing organic about the way M3GAN is precision engineered to achieve cult classic status, from the wink-nudge hamminess of supporting actors Ronny Chieng and Lori Dungey to the broad jokes with a 50/50 hit rate. And yet, in spite of its obvious shortcomings, when that little lady fi nally started going postal, I found myself struggling not to start hooting and hollering in the theater. The movie fully lives up to the promise of its ridiculous trailer whenever our star is indulging her hard-PG-13 homicidal instincts or performing vaguely threatening TikTok dances toward her enemies. This won’t pop up on any top ten lists by the end of the year, but for a genre fi lm released in a month typically reserved as a dumping ground for studios, this is all you could hope for. I wouldn’t say no to two or three sequels (MEG4N? Or maybe a James Cameron Aliens route with M3GANS?) that take this premise to even greater extremes. What if we sent M3GAN to space? What would it look like if she took Manhattan? —JOEY SHAPIRO PG-13, 102 min. Wide release in theaters

A Man Called Otto

It feels wrong to root for a suicide attempt to succeed. Otto Anderson tries via rope, gas, train, and rifl e and fails each time. Since his beloved wife, Sonia, died from cancer six months back, Otto feels no reason to keep living. When not trying to off himself, he spends his a fi ne Poe, and the movie is littered with references to the writer’s work. We get a close-up of a raven, the poem “Lenore” is connected to Lea, and Landor lives in a cottage, per Poe’s story “Landor’s Cottage.”

These are all surface trifl es, though. The center of the fi lm is Bale’s performance—a frozen surface which cracks open to reveal icy, rushing depths—and the cold New York landscape, with swirls of snow and bare tree limbs against the stark sky. The Pale Blue Eye sees, in the end, with clarity; it is a movie about revealing and understanding hard truths. It’s a fi ne Hollywood fi lm. But Poe’s mysteries aren’t so easy to pin down. —NOAH BERLATSKY R, 128 min. Netflix

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Living SONY PICTURES CLASSICS

days fl ying off the handle at neighbors who don’t follow his myriad but inchoate rules of decorum. Everyone’s an idiot, and nothing’s like it used to be. But what is this golden-hued past Otto longs to return to?

We’re forced to relive his glory days through copious fl ashbacks, but what’s clear to me, just as in every present-day scene, is that Otto is an emotionally stunted, possibly autistic man tolerated by loved ones and coworkers until they die or can no longer bear him. When a young family moves in across the street, Otto is distracted from his preparations for the a erlife and convinced via Hallmark-card-level emotional trickery to stick around. The movie is cringeworthy when not outright off ensive in its broad-strokes handling of everything from aging to gentrifi cation to racism to gender issues. It’s as if the fi lmmakers did a keyword search for hot-button cultural topics and sprinkled them in pellmell without bothering to read past the bullet points.

I haven’t read the 2012 Swedish book or 2015 fi lm that this is based on, but I can’t imagine either could be half as tone-deaf. Otto’s bloviating about the past is a close cousin to chants of “You will not replace us,” no matter the crudely applied multicultural makeover. Tom Hanks has practically trademarked likability, but his Otto is not only loathsome but wholly unbelievable. To begin with, no one with an engineering degree would ever fail to get a noose to work. —DMITRY SAMAROV PG-13, 126 min. Wide release in theaters

RThe Pale Blue Eye Edgar Allan Poe’s decadently cerebral approach to genre is an odd fi t for Hollywood, which tends to tear into its pulp pleasures with a hearty trencherman’s aplomb, rather than sipping them delicately from paperthin china. Sure enough, Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye is not very Poe-like, even if it features the poet as a character. Agatha Christie, with her twisty plots and straightforward examination of human evil, is a clearer literary antecedent than Poe’s layers of irony, intellectual play, and sensual embrace of the bizarre.

This isn’t exactly a criticism; Agatha Christie is also great, and this is a skillful variation on some of her most treasured tricks. A cadet is murdered at West Point, his heart cut from his corpse. A gruff detective with a painful past, Augustus Landor (Christian Bale) is called in to help with the investigation. He enlists cadet Poe (Harry Melling) to help him gather information from the other trainees. Their investigations lead them to a mysterious circle of devil worshippers, perhaps connected to the family of Dr. Daniel Marquis (Toby Jones). Daniel’s son Artemus (Harry Lawtey) is a cadet. His daughter Lea (Lucy Boynton) is an accomplished pianist and an epileptic; she and Poe inevitably and instantly fall for each other.

Melling, all long fi ngers and penetrating stares, is

RTurn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

This engrossing 2022 documentary chronicles the 50-year-and-counting collaboration between two literary lions: political biographer Robert Caro, who turned 87 on October 30, 2022, and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, who turned 91 on April 29, 2022. The dynamic duo fi rst teamed up for the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 bestseller The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York; at the time this fi lm was shot, they were working on the fi h and fi nal volume of Caro’s epic The Years of Lyndon Johnson, still unfi nished at the time of the movie’s release. (Gottlieb’s track record as an editor also includes such novels as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, as well as nonfi ction landmarks like Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment and Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Death.)

The running theme in the Caro/Gottlieb canon—the uses and abuses of power in politics—seems especially urgent now, in a time when so many people feel disenfranchised in, and disengaged from, the American democratic system. To write about the controversial and complex careers of New York City public works czar Robert Moses and U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, Caro interviewed thousands of people and—with his wife and sole research assistant, historian Ina Caro—pored over countless documents. The movie’s title references the advice Caro says he got from his editor when he was a young investigative reporter at Long Island’s Newsday newspaper: “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”

Directed by Lizzie Gottlieb—the daughter of Robert Gottlieb and his wife, actress Maria Tucci—Turn Every Page focuses on the partnership involved in putting a great book to bed, ranging from what to cut and how to set up a scene to when to use—and not use—a semicolon. “The great thing about Bob is also the maddening thing about him,” Gottlieb says about Caro. “Everything is of total importance. The fi rst chapter of the book, and a semicolon—they’re of equal importance. . . . I’m like that too. It takes one to know one.” —ALBERT WILLIAMS PG, 112 min. Limited release in theaters v