( some words toward Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, and then two others to see instead if you need to misremember

Blonde is wholesale maddening. Director Andrew Dominik loses the thread early, but seems to know it? And I'm not sure that's any better. It's an odd movie that would steal scenes from itself, but, here we are. While Ana de Armas almost takes the child out of childish enough to keep beauty, and Julianne Nicholson is a heat that leads bottles to lightning, nothing leaves a mark. Aside from the first 20 minutes, and one scene with Adrien Brody as Arthur Miller, this movie is so much tell that the show is secondary, and no amount of body horror or spiritual indictment can survive on image alone with writing this obvious and unquiet. It might have been the point, but the experience isn't strange enough, and the relief is always in sight, no matter how much is left onscreen. Too much sabotage, not enough self.

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While keeping confession pinned beneath the unholy ripple of Tim Roth's flickering muscle of a performance, Resurrection, as guided and committedly freed by director Andrew Semans, is a film of secret chaos and bodily left turns that lovingly loses its permission to a possessed and wholly overtaken showing from Rebecca Hall. While surely mad and caringly unpredictable, it wouldn't be able to talk its tongues without the work that Grace Kaufman does as a child who moves the happening from under the accident with a waiting lonely enough to cradle the hurting young and uncarried old.

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Elegantly untouched by director Nikyatu Jusu, who knows that stories are owed their belongings, Nanny is a delayed stunner of a film that never feels behind or slow but instead, and in line with the spiritual and physical fluidity of Anna Diop's fictile performance, stops and starts in a depth that feels both timeworn and newly doomed.