The new “Wolf Man” from Universal Pictures and co-writer/director Leigh Whannell may likewise provoke some puzzled Count Floyd-esque looks of confusion among horror fans. Not that it’s a failure or a joke. Whannell, whose bracing, sharp-edged 2020 remake of “The Invisible Man” ushered us into the cold-creeps COVID era, makes genre films for a wide audience, adults included. He doesn’t play these Universal franchise reboots for kicks.

In “Wolf Man,” he really doesn’t. The results are equal parts marital crisis, sins-of-the-father psychodrama and visceral body horror. They’re also a bit of a plod — especially in the second half, when whatever kind of horror film you’re making should not, you know, plod.

The first half is crafty, patient and deceptively good. A 1990s prologue introduces young Blake (Christopher Abbott) and his surly father, venturing into a remote corner of the Oregon woods (New Zealand portrays Oregon) on a hunting expedition. They live nearby; Blake has yet to hear about the rumored “face of the wolf” creature sharing the same woods that First Nation tribes have feared for centuries. Protecting his son in a shrewdly staged attack, the father disappears into the woods, presumed dead.

Thirty years later in present-day San Francisco, Blake is an unemployed writer and full-time caregiver, married to workaholic journalist Charlotte (Julia Garner). She’s stress incarnate, envious of her husband’s close emotional bond with their daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). With the arrival of his long-missing father’s death certificate, Blake inherits the rural Oregon house. For the sake of the troubled family, Charlotte agrees to spend some time with Ginger in this place.

From there, the movie narrows its geographic parameters, transforming into a close-quarters drama of three people in an old dark house, surrounded by lots of shrewdly designed sounds and beset by a werewolf stalking the visitors like it means business. Once Blake suffers a flesh wound at the hands of this predator, Whannell’s devotion to, among other films, David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” becomes apparent.  “Wolf Man” delves into the fractured psyche and grotesque physical disintegration of a man stricken with an animal-borne virus, terrified of what it’s doing to him and what he may end up doing to those he loves. In other words, it’s a movie about every indignity an unemployed writer must suffer, lycanthropy included.

Even when her character takes a more urgent role in this hermetic story, the excellent Garner doesn’t have much to play outside a parade of slow-roll nonverbal shots of Charlotte peering this way and that, taking charge of a rapidly dissolving situation but never really getting her due. (The script is by Whannell and his partner Corbett Tuck.) “Wolf Man’s” seriousness is heavy going. Its leitmotif sticks, doggedly, to the idea of transmutable, unholy fears, and sins of the fathers, transmitted like a virus down the family line. A rare in-joke pops up on the side of the moving van Blake rents to clear out his father’s house: The company has been in business since 1941, the slogan notes, taking us back to the year Universal made hay with Lon Chaney Jr. in “The Wolf Man.”

That was neither the first nor the last werewolf movie. This one, originally slated for Ryan Gosling and director Derek Cianfrance, goes about its business with a solemn air, even when it’s super-blechy and Abbott is chewing on his own forearm for obvious reasons: an unemployed writer’s gotta eat.

“Wolf Man” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for bloody violent content, grisly images and some language)

Running time: 1:43

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Jan. 17

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

As a 100% Los Angeles comedy in location and spirit, it’s the first 2025 release of its kind since the wildfires broke out on Jan. 7. Every overhead drone shot of West Hollywood and other LA neighborhoods, graced by clear skies and untouched mountain greenery in the background, lands differently now than it would’ve two weeks ago. Now those shots are reminders of what was and what is no longer. Even the movie’s poster provokes a wince: The film’s stars, plopped down on a couch on the curb, their characters’ apartment furnishings piled high, to the right of a palm tree in flames.

So the timing is what it is. (The wildfires postponed last week’s LA premiere.) Even so, “One of Them Days” is a pretty good time, made better when its other major point of distinction takes the wheel.

The driver? Keke Palmer, at 31 a seasoned pro, born and raised in Harvey and Robbins, Illinois, with credits spanning “Barbershop 2” (at age 10), “Akeelah and the Bee,” dozens of TV and cable appearances and, recently on bigger screens, Jordan Peele’s “Nope.” She’s one of many alums of Issa Rae projects collaborating on this feature, including director Lawrence Lamont, first-time screenwriter Syreeta Singleton and R&B star and four-time Grammy winner SZA, taking her first co-lead.

Palmer and SZA are an easy on-screen pair in all the best ways: easy interplay, near-zero visible effort even when the movie itself strains for laughs, easy enjoyment for the audience. “One of Them Days” begins at Norm’s diner on La Cienega Boulevard, where server Dreux (Palmer) is the glue holding a hectic shift together. Clearly she’s manager material, and she’s interviewing at 4 p.m. for a job running her own franchise.

Her friend and roommate Alyssa (SZA) is a painter without any monetary gain to show for her talent. At the moment she’s being free-loaded-upon by a half-hearted though fully endowed boyfriend (Joshua David Neal, at one point attached to a hilarious prosthetic). He squanders $1,500 in rent money on a line of T-shirts called “Coucci” and promptly decamps to another part of town, where he’s set up with a vengeful hottie. This leaves the ladies with nine hours to come up with the money, while regular tick-tocks on screen count down to the eviction deadline.

The movie’s not a scramble, exactly; its episodic nature is more like “Oh! Wait! Gotta get back to the business at hand!” which occasionally stalls the comic momentum. Screenwriter Singleton sends Dreux and Alyssa out and around in search of the absconding boyfriend, with a quick-cash stop at a Baldwin Hills blood bank featuring Janelle James of “Abbott Elementary” as a first-day-on-the-job employee. Later, high atop a telephone pole, Alyssa retrieves a valuable pair of dangling Jordans off a live electrical wire, to mixed results.

The broader slapstick in “One of Them Days” is the sloppy side, which is a directorial issue. The script’s better than the direction, with writer Singleton keeping one foot in these characters’ real-world circumstances. That pays off. This isn’t Harold and Kumar going to White Castle; it’s closer to Ice Cube and Chris Tucker in “Friday,” but to my taste, tastier.

Dreux and Alyssa are up against it but unbowed, coping with wobbly self-confidence in the face of economic stress; gentrification (Maude Apatow plays their first white rental neighbor, moving into the only unit that looks like the website photos); nightmarish payday loan usury, with a 1,900.5% APR; and a somewhat jarring climax bringing the armed and fearsome King Lolo (Amin Joseph) to the roomies’ last chance for the money they need: a pop-up art exhibit in the apartment courtyard.

Palmer delivers an on-the-fly masterclass in overlapping comic skills, sometimes heightened (I love her eyeblink-quick, frozen-statue reaction to the good-looking, possibly homicidal hunk named Maniac, played by Patrick Cage), sometimes subtle and heartfelt. Her keen instinct for pacing, and for propelling an exchange or a scene from point A to B, or C, keeps things energized. She and SZA won’t change anyone’s lives with this one, but I came out smiling, despite “One of Them Days” opening in a week when LA is having one of those centuries. The film’s sweet, upbeat ending feels right, right about now.

“One of Them Days” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language throughout, sexual material and brief drug use)

Running time: 1:37

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Jan. 17

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Among the 2024 movie releases worth arguments and accolades, director and co-writer Brady Corbet’s third feature has the most evident problems — subplots and supporting characters left hanging, a modern-day coda that feels like a hasty summary judgment of the title character. There are films that emerge, somehow, as like the exhalation of a single breath, every creative element in rare harmony. “Nickel Boys” is like that for me. And there are movies like “The Brutalist” where the seams show, but there’s too much worth relishing to worry about the seams. “The Brutalist” is also an American immigration tale, as well as catnip for anyone with a passing interest in architecture or design.

Director Corbet wastes no time handing us his thematic declaration of principles. A fictional Holocaust refugee, László Tóth, Hungarian and Jewish and a Bauhaus-trained architect, has survived Buchenwald. The audience knows more than Tóth, in these early scenes, regarding the whereabouts of his missing wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy).

Our first sight of Brody is cloaked in darkness and chaos: He’s one of a cluster of refugees on a ship docking in New York City. Tóth, scrambling toward the upper deck, finally spies his destiny, symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. His perspective, though, and ours, tilts Lady Liberty on her side, nearly upside down. Freedom in “The Brutalist,” at least for the outsider, is a profoundly destabilizing state of being.

In the lovely momentum of the film’s first half, Tóth tries to make peace with this strange new world, though he cannot make the accommodations his Philadelphia cousin (Alessandro Nivola), who emigrated years earlier, has made to fit in. This man, formerly named Molnar, now Miller, runs a small furniture store specializing in bland midcentury American design. Tóth loathes it, but finds a way up and out through his cousin’s contacts: There is a library renovation to be done in the grand home of Harrison Van Buren, an imperious plutocrat with airs portrayed by Guy Pearce.

From there, Corbet’s screenplay, co-written by his real-life partner Mona Fastvold, treats the story’s several-decade timeline as a battle royale between the brilliant, difficult artist and his insidiously controlling sponsor. The project that nearly kills them both, at least in spirit, is the Van Buren Institute, to be built north of Philadelphia outside Doylestown. Tóth moves to the Van Buren estate, where he learns first-hand what scads of American money, old or new, can do for — and to — a purist under the commission of a lifetime. The film’s second half brings Erzsébet into her husband’s lofty but suffocating new environs. Coping with osteoporosis, Tóth’s wife has brought along her surviving, traumatized niece, Zsófia. Meantime Tóth struggles to complete his twin-towered concrete creation, part community center, part Christian chapel (against the Jewish architect’s initial wishes) and part deeply personal memorial to loved ones, killed in the genocide.

Later scenes in “The Brutalist” relocate the action to the stark white wonders of Carrara, Italy’s marble quarry site, which is also the site of Tóth’s final subjugation at the hands of his client. Throughout the 3½-hour film, which is a little erratic in the second half, the Brody character uses his design aesthetic the way he leans on his heroin addiction, or the way he feels about the postwar American jazz explosion known as bebop: as a means of obliterating one part of his psyche, or history, while accessing another at great cost.

The great, undervalued Isaach De Bankolé plays Tóth’s friend and assistant, Gordon, who’s also his fellow addict. There’s a lot of movie in this movie, of course, but it’s too bad this character doesn’t get the scenes he merits, which is true also of Nivola’s character. In trade, I suppose, I could’ve used a little less of the wormy Van Buren family, though it’s more a matter of actors such as Joe Alwyn playing one hammy note throughout. (There’s a suggestion of assault involving this heir-apparent to the Van Buren fortune and the mute niece Zsófia, but it’s frustratingly opaque.)

The shortcomings on the page and, here and there, in the supporting cast don’t come to much because “The Brutalist” is a work of real cinema, with a visual stamp distinguishing Corbet’s spectacularly gifted collaborators. The movie was photographed, brilliantly, by cinematographer Lol Crowley on film, primarily in the nostalgic but vital widescreen VistaVision format. Production designer Judy Becker takes on what must be the most enticing challenge imaginable to someone in her line of work: creating a style of visual thinking for the film’s main character and seeing his ideas to cinematic fruition. On an extremely low budget. But that’s the “challenge” part of it. Elements of Louis Kahn’s glorious oceanside Salk Institute appear in the crucial library renovation sequence; Frank Lloyd Wright’s petal columns, a hallmark of the Johnson Wax administration building in Racine, Wisconsin, pop up as details in the Van Buren Institute construction. It’s amazing work, and if Tóth as written ultimately lacks a dynamic third dimension as a driving force, Brody’s performance gives the presence and details we need.

I haven’t mentioned the movie’s themes of postwar Judaism, or postwar American consumerism, or the push/pull sexual dynamics between the Brody and Jones characters, at war with their new land and often with each other. Director Corbet can’t possibly finesse everything he’s laid out. But “The Brutalist,” filmed primarily in Hungary, is a singular example of a mini-maxi epic, made up of small scenes, often between two or three people, visually placed against highly selective and evocative backgrounds mostly not dependent on digital effects, but rather on elemental things. There are no expansive, expensive shots of Philadelphia city streets circa 1947, for example. When the Brody and Nivola characters are reunited, the reunion takes place against the side of a Greyhound bus, because it’s enough.

There’s one scene in particular I love, and it’s one of the quietest: the completion, though not without some accidental destruction, of the Van Buren library. Here we see what Tóth is all about as an architect, and to Corbet’s great credit the camera actually pays attention to the workers putting it together. Without this sequence “The Brutalist,” which has its reductive, polemic bits, might not work at all. But it’s there, and it’s beautiful, and beautifully scored by composer Daniel Blumberg. We see and feel what’s at stake in mysterious ways.

A key later scene depicts the groundbreaking ceremony for the proposed (and to most of the guests, puzzling) Van Buren Institute. Tóth makes a few remarks, nervously. He knows he’s surrounded by skeptics and, very likely, antisemites. Here, Corbet keeps the camera at a sly middle distance, avoiding any underlining of the dynamics and side-eyeing going on. Tóth’s architectural intention, he says, is to become “part of the new whole,” i.e. a broader, warmer, inclusive postwar America. We’re still debating that one, which is why “The Brutalist” works as fictional but urgent history and as a reminder to the present.

Whose America this is, in 2025 or anytime, is a question we’ll be asking as long as the Statue of Liberty stands in the Hudson River.

“The Brutalist” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, rape, drug use and some language)

Running time: 3:35 (includes a 15-minute intermission)

How to watch: Premiered in theaters Jan. 10.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

In “The Last Showgirl,” Pamela Anderson plays Shelly, the longest-running cast member in the longest-running retro spectacle in town. In her baubles, bangles and bright, shiny beads this workhorse has made a living in the (fictional) show, “Le Razzle Dazzle,” for 38 years.

The promotional photos, Shelly notes, “are from the early ’80s.” The show’s audiences have grown tiny, and restive. And now the revue has entered its final two weeks. Shelly is 57, with a grown daughter she barely knows.

In the movie’s modestly scaled 80 minutes, not including the end credits, we come to know the neatly arranged supporting players in Shelly’s uncertain life. There are members of a newer generation of showgirl, played by Kiernan Shipka and Brenda Song. Jamie Lee Curtis, bronzed and blowsy, goes to town as Annette, Shelly’s best friend and former comrade-in-feathers, now a cocktail waitress with a gambling problem. Dave Bautista portrays stage manager Eddie, a “Razzle Dazzle” lifer like Shelley. The two share a romantic history.

As daughter Hannah, Billie Lourd enters the story as a wary stranger, resentful of Shelly’s frazzled, distracted parenting once upon a time, though increasingly forgiving as the story’s short, bittersweet line extends. The movie’s an adaptation: Screenwriter Kate Gersten based “The Last Showgirl” on her own unproduced play “Body of Work” and director Gia Coppola took it from there, filming scenes at the 1957-era Tropicana Hotel just before its 2024 demolition.

Anderson has gotten a tremendous response for her work here. It’s gratifying to see a perpetually objectified and underestimated performer get ahold of a leading role requiring more of her. But more isn’t always more.

There’s a strain to much of her scene work in “The Last Showgirl,” a tendency to rush and overplay that recedes only in her scenes with Bautista. I think it’s because Bautista is like Anderson in one way but not another. He’s a performer whose career was made initially on his body and what he could do with it. But he has found his naturalistic groove. He’s an unusually effective and unaffected minimalist. You can feel Anderson relaxing in their scenes, even in moments when Shelly’s distraught, and easing into an emotion or a state of mind.

Is she really Oscar-nomination worthy at this point, in this film? No. But Hollywood loves nice, simple comeback vehicles whether the star was really away or not. And words mean little when Coppola and Arkapaw explore every dressing room corner, or sun-baked exterior shot, blurring the margins of the widescreen frame so that we concentrate on the gold: the glorious, unadorned faces we’ve known for decades.

Just not like this.

“The Last Showgirl” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language and nudity)

Running time: 1:29

How to watch: Premiered in theaters Jan. 10

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic. 

Some said that in early 2020 when a film from South Korea triumphed at the Oscars. That was “Parasite” and it was, in fact, a big hit all over the world. But there are facts and there are feelings, and when some folks feel out of the loop when it comes to films they haven’t heard about and may never want to get to know, there’s nothing to be done.

I’m here to argue: There is something to be done. Take the chance. Screen first. Ask questions and sling your opinions later.

Right now, we’re at the midpoint between the annual December best-of-the-year lists and the Academy Awards ceremony, held this year on March 2. Let’s take stock.

Last week’s Golden Globes, no longer mobbed up with the merry, compromised band of brothers and sisters known as the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, recognized the narco-trans-musical-melodrama-bag-of-Mexican-stereotypes-directed-by-a-Frenchman “Emilia Pérez” as best film of 2024, in its musical or comedy category.

In the drama category, the Globes chose “The Brutalist,” director Brady Corbet’s grand, erratic, touching smackdown between the forces of art and the brutalities of commerce. The film opens Jan. 10 in Chicago  in several venues, with a 70mm presentation exclusively at the Music Box Theatre.

Following last year’s introduction of a populist Cinematic and Box Office Achievement category, an addition designed to ensure big stars on the red carpet, the Globes singled out “Wicked” for its big-money winner. In the parlance of Dick Clark Productions, now in charge of the Globes telecast, the two-year-old award honors one of “the year’s most acclaimed, highest-earning and/or most viewed films that have garnered extensive global audience support and attained cinematic excellence.”

I understand the reasoning here, especially from the POV of theater owners, who by now must belong to a secret national association of teeth-gritters. Just as the hugely successful theatrical run of “Wicked” was midway through its fifth week, a point at which the theater operators traditionally garner a higher percentage of badly needed box office revenue, boom: The most successful Broadway-to-screen adaptation ever made its streaming premiere on New Year’s Eve, actively dissuading folks from seeing it in theaters, or re-seeing it.

Some years more than others, the films dominating the national and regional critics circles awards are not the “Wicked” type. The awards dominators, most years, are not the big hits. They often open in a limited, Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles or New York in December, and then get around more widely early in the new year.

This is the case of “The Brutalist.” It’s also the case with “Nickel Boys,” winner of the National Society of Film Critics’ citation for best film of 2024. (I’m a member, for the record.)

What else has emerged from the critics organizations’ awards? Among them: the raucous, touching comedy-drama “Anora,” which I love nearly as much as “Nickel Boys” for wholly separate reasons. “Anora” hit the No. 1 spot at the LA, Boston and San Francisco film critics’ groups. It’s so alive, this movie.

It’s also writer-director Sean Baker’s most commercially successful venture to date, grossing $31 million worldwide on a $6 million production budget. I mention those figures because hits come in so many varieties. Look at “Moonlight,” the film that, in early 2017, won the best picture Oscar for 2016. Production budget: $1.5 million. Worldwide box office: $65 million. That’s very, very profitable.

Maybe you’ve seen “Moonlight” once or twice, and maybe you haven’t. (It’s great.) Like any number of other awards favorites, that one was written off by many who hadn’t seen it, or heard of it, or who decided in advance it wasn’t for them because it looked “arty,” or whatever.

“Moonlight” has been on my mind lately, because I wonder: Have audience habits changed so intractably since COVID that the same film, in 2024, would’ve had to settle for a tiny box office fraction of that $65 million?

And yet 2024 was pretty terrific.

True, global franchise favorites such as “Deadpool & Wolverine” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” may have made for a year of dispiriting blockbusters (the numbers, of course, disagree with me), coming off a much more interesting blockbuster year of 2023, which yielded “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.” A year like that will happen once a decade, if we’re lucky.

But in 2024, and right now, in early 2025, the riches are everywhere.

Compressing my Top 10 of 2024 down to a Top 5, now with the benefit of second or third viewings, it’s a glorious toss-up between “Nickel Boys,” “Anora,” the Mumbai rhapsody “All We Imagine As Light,” “The Brutalist” and the pitch-black, clear-eyed Romanian black comedy “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.”

Every year I make my best-of lists, and I vote as a member of the National Society of Film Critics, with a ridiculously simple motive and a series of questions. What were the films, the images, the feelings, that lingered like a fragrance, or a newly acquired memory destined to last a little while? Or a lifetime?

What astonished me? Amazed me? Really made me laugh, hard? Made me laugh and cry in the same second?

Maybe “The Brutalist” or “Anora” or “Nickel Boys” or “All We Imagine As Light” or even “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” will hold nothing for you. But maybe, one or two or more of those titles will. If the titles are new to you, take them as an invitation.

And now, they’re on your radar.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Whatever else happened, 2024 was a very good year for cinema.

And now? Ladies and gentlemen, start your jump-scares. Early 2025 brings us lots of horror, for starters, because no matter how churning and erratic the state of the film industry, certain genres tend to pay off better than others. The winter months will also bring familiar intellectual properties in recycled scenarios and new takes on characters we already know. These range from Snow White to Captain America to the Wolf Man, though not in the same movie.

Here are 10 titles due for January to March release, most of which remain known unknowns. We’ll see how many hit our respective sweet spots. Release dates are subject to change.

“Wolf Man” (Jan. 17): Five years ago, the Australian director Leigh Whannell unleashed a really good remake of “The Invisible Man” on audiences. Continuing his way through the Universal monster catalogue in (blessedly) standalone remakes, he next goes werewolf, with a cast led by Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner.

“The Room Next Door” (Jan. 17):  After a limited December bow, the latest from Pedro Almodóvar — his first feature in English — adapts the novel “What Are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez to an American setting (though the film was shot in Spain). Tilda Swinton plays a woman approaching her end-of-life chapter with a clear plan dependent on her reunion, after many years, with an old friend (Julianne Moore). It’s a wry and, not surprisingly, extremely well-acted chamber drama.

“Presence” (Jan. 24): In the first of two Steven Soderbergh movies this winter (yay! we hope), the un-retired and extremely busy and versatile filmmaker peers into a haunted-house premise, in which the camera’s point of view stays with the unseen spirit while Lucy Liu and other humans freak out to ebbing and flowing and escalating degrees. The reviews were very warm out of Sundance last year.

“I’m Still Here” (Jan. 24; Apple TV+ streaming premiere Feb. 14): Widely admired in its festival bows last year, director Walter Salles’ fact-based political drama follows the lives of Brazilian activist Eunice Paiva (Fernanda Torres) and her dissident husband (Selton Mello), the latter arrested and “disappeared” in 1971. I’m eager to see this one, and not simply because we forget the recent past at the peril of whatever instability the present has in store.

“Captain America: Brave New World” (Feb. 14): The 2021 streaming series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” transferred the lease on the Marvel superhero’s famous shield from Chris Evans to Anthony Mackie. Now Mackie gets his own feature film, co-starring Harrison Ford in the role played earlier in the MCU cycle by William Hurt, now deceased. This means Ford adds another fictional U.S. president, “Thunderbolt” Ross, to his CV, as well as a go at “Red Hulk.”

“Paddington in Peru” (Feb. 14): A late 2024 release in Britain, this is the newest film adventure of the dear, resourceful champion of marmalade voiced by Ben Whishaw. The scenario takes the wee London resident back to his childhood home in Peru in search of Aunt Lucy. Olivia Colman plays the singing nun in charge of the Home for Retired Bears; Paddington’s accompanied on his jungle excursion by the Brown family, headed once again by Hugh Bonneville, this time with Emily Mortimer (replacing Sally Hawkins) as the missus.

“Sinners” (March 7): Keeping a good thing going, director Ryan Coogler reteams with star Michael B. Jordan for their fifth joint feature, following “Fruitvale Station,” “Creed” and two “Black Panther” forays. This one’s set in the 1930s; Jordan plays the dual role of vampire brothers, whose small-town homecoming turns into a square-off with the Ku Klux Klan. Hailee Steinfeld and Delroy Lindo co-star with Jack O’Connell.

“Black Bag” (March 14): In what may well be a spy movie for actual adults, director Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp concoct a moody drama steeped in espionage, marital trust issues and, one hopes, prime opportunities for playing the pause, the side-eye and the steely glare along with the words. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender portray the married couple at the story’s center. Let’s go!

“Alto Knights” (March 21): De Niro. Mob movie. Six syllables that make a tremendous amount of sense together. In this 1950s-set Barry Levinson-directed saga, working from a script by Nicholas Pileggi, De Niro tackles not one but two underworld kingpins: Vito Genovese and Frank Costello.

“Snow White” (March 21): Long in controversial development, Disney’s live-action rejiggering of Uncle Walt’s 1937 animated landmark has caught heat from various quarters for, well, a few things, insensitive dwarfism among them. Let’s see the thing before opining, though, shall we? Besides, the script is co-written by Greta Gerwig, who pulled off a billion-dollar long shot with “Barbie.” It’s a musical, by the way, with songs from the “Dear Evan Hansen” team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Favorite never-again screening experience of 2024: “The Art of the Benshi” at Gene Siskel Film Center, April 16-17. What was it? It was a series of programs featuring Japanese silent film, presented in the virtually lost art form and framework of the benshi orator tradition of live performers at the side of the screen, providing vocal characterizations, some historical footnoting and so much more. The result bridged the gap between cinema and live theater in a way I’ve never seen before. That, plus a beautiful quartet of musicians accompanying the action. The Chicago run sold out in a flash, and I’m glad I caught this stunner at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during another one of its four U.S. tour stops.

All hail Dick Van Dyke:  And Chris Martin of Coldplay, and director Spike Jonze. You’ve heard about it and seen it by now, probably, but the simple, deeply sincere music video (see the director’s cut if you haven’t) features a 98-year-old Van Dyke (he’s now 99) dancing to Martin’s “All My Love.” This tribute to a great American entertainer and Danville, Illinois, native arrived near the end of 2024, when our hearts needed it the most.

Ace wordsmith and musician Elle Cordova: It took me until this year to discover someone whose short-form videos built on highly unlikely subjects for comedy — Mother Nature interviewed on a podcast hosted by Father Time; dinosaurs in their final minute on Earth before extinction; Romulus and Remus, debating the name and location of Italy’s capital; dialogue between a frustrated texter and the underminer known as Autocorrect — have been rolling around on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram for years. Well, better late than never, as younger generations never tire of hearing from older, squarer ones. Check her out, along with the rangy, inventive songs that Cordova and Toni Lindgren have featured on five albums to date.

And now, because the film industry remains hardy enough to withstand it, and in alphabetical order …

The worst movies of 2024

“Argylle”: A frantic, overelaborated action bore.

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die”: The last scene at the barbecue nearly made up for the rest of it. Also, the movie found a clever way to comment on co-star Will Smith’s behavior on Oscar night in 2022. The other 111 minutes, not so good.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”: The first one: funny, unpredictable, fresh. Sequel: bigger, more popular, not funny. Nostalgia sold it.

“Deadpool & Wolverine”: Big hit, which the theaters needed this summer, but after the relative bounce and invention of the first two “Deadpools,” particularly the second one, this two-hour Tikety-Tokety fan service blowout was a serious come-down.

“Kinds of Kindness”: Numbing misfire from filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, coming off the riches and visual wonders of “Poor Things.”

“IF”: Cloying to the point of offensive, this ode to the glories of childlike imagination could’ve used some.

“Red One”: Some scripts just don’t have that holiday spirit, and everything that went haywire with “Red One” happened long before the actors arrived on set.

“Road House”: The brutal Doug Liman-directed remake un-learned every lesson the 1989 “Road House” teaches us, to this day, about trash with panache and the right spirit.

“The Substance”: Demi Moore, fully committed and very good. But she could not transcend some mighty reductive and wearyingly familiar material. Still: bonus points for writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s final bloodbath, which goes on so long it becomes a kind of crimson fugue state.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

A second viewing revealed more, like most second encounters. Its examination, with weirdly comic swerves, of one woman’s risky road to sensual fulfillment lands on some good, old-fashioned values, capping a relationship between a formidable robotics firm CEO, played by Kidman, and her seductive, strategic intern, played by Harris Dickinson. In the broad terms of the BDSM realm, the boss is the submissive to the intern’s dominator. Now, this may be familiar territory for you, or it may not be. “Babygirl” doesn’t care. It’s nonjudgmental in ways some audiences won’t like. But as a table-turning riff on sexual thrillers with a male gaze, and as a portrait of one woman’s sensual fulfillment, it’s pretty compelling.

She and he meet outside the company’s Manhattan office. There’s a small crowd staring in awe at the intern, Samuel, as he calmly brings a snarling dog to heel with a few simple commands and a “good girl” on his lips. Romy, the executive, takes note of what’s happening. They exchange not glances, really, but stares bordering on glares bordering on lust. (The narrative moves right along in these early scenes.)

We’ve already gotten a defining element of Romy’s emotional and psychosexual makeup in the opening, set hours earlier, with Romy and her theater-director husband, played by Antonio Banderas, in the throes in bed. It’s a lie: She has faked orgasms across the whole of their marriage. She has desires she has never talked about with her husband. Seconds after this scene, Romy makes a hasty retreat with her laptop to another room, where she masturbates to some submissive-centric porn. Reijn establishes the stakes and Romy’s secrets with darting speed and efficiency.

The Banderas character is deep into rehearsals for a modern staging of Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” a play about a thwarted sensual creature much like the woman he’s married to but doesn’t really know. Samuel requests Romy to be his mentor as part of his internship program; she doesn’t know what she’s been roped into until he’s there, in her office doorway. His come-ons lack all pretense and while she’s taken aback, and spouts the usual boilerplate HR commentary about what’s appropriate behavior and what isn’t, she doesn’t have her heart in it. Soon, it’s shared cigarettes on patios and makeout bouts followed by scenes where Romy visits the bar where Samuel bartends. He orders her a glass of milk as a dare; she downs it. The roleplay demands escalate. Soon she’s on all fours in a hotel room with him, obeying commands like the dog in the overture. Kidman has taken leaps before and has done plenty of nude scenes in recent years. But in “Babygirl,” the queasiness of the scenario is played both straight and for eccentric black comedy, which wouldn’t work at all if Reijn’s psychological territory — the shame and desire and insecurity — didn’t guide the way.

Romy and Samuel are damaged souls, yearning for a connection both darkly thrilling and, from a corporate policy point of view, untenable. Reijn’s screenplay doesn’t over-detail the source of either character’s damage, though we hear of Romy’s childhood, her upbringing in the confines of a cult. Samuel’s admiration and fear of his distant, strict, presumably violent father has left his own wiring a little haywire.

This is Reijn’s third feature, following “Instinct” (2019) and her first film in English, “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022). “Babygirl” is not an erotic thriller per se, although the movie takes plenty of inspiration from Hollywood’s sexual transgression hits of the ‘80s and ‘90s (“Fatal Attraction,” “Basic Instinct,” “Indecent Proposal”). Reijn has said in interviews that she rewatched “9½ Weeks” a lot as a teenager, a lot a lot. Her adult self has plenty of issues with that movie. The subject of a woman’s sensual curiosity and a controlling male looking for female submission is not one of them.

Dickinson’s Samuel is an intriguing, insolent magnet from the start. He’s also opaque and essentially unknowable in many ways. “Babygirl” has a peculiar rhythm and in the third and final section, after the affair has sent Romy into a full-on panic, things feel more hypnotized than hypnotic. Yet Kidman’s emotional abandon keeps costars Dickinson and Banderas on their toes. You’ll find the ending pat, but it’s a sincere affirmation of some good old-fashioned relationship virtues, honest communication most of all.

Also, the “Hedda Gabler” angle with “Babygirl” is hardly accidental. Ibsen’s notorious sexual vagabond suffocates in her marriage to the dullest academic on the planet, and she cannot square her desires with her lust for appearances. The character made no sense to most critics back in the late 1800s. Novelist Henry James reviewed the play, adored it, yet professed his confusion that he couldn’t locate “the type-quality in Hedda.” In other words, the character was a tangle of impulses, qualities, drives.

At its best, the flawed, worthwhile “Babygirl” offers a similarly dimensional example of a woman, searching for a truer self, and fewer false fronts to maintain. Kidman rises to the occasion, and while one-note mediocrities like “The Substance” offer gallons of fake blood where the provocations should be, Reijn’s film — seen the second time, at least – only needs its nerve and its interest in what Kidman can do, which is more than I even realized.

“Babygirl” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong sexual content, nudity and language)

Running time: 1:54

How to watch: Premiered in theaters Dec. 25

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Which, yes, sounds like ingratitude. But do we even want more conventional or better-behaved work from talents such as Francis Ford Coppola? Even if we’re talking about “Megalopolis”?  If Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2” gave audiences a less morally complicated courtroom drama, would that have mattered, given Warner Bros.’ butt-headed decision to plop it in less than three dozen movie theaters in the U.S.?

Coppola is 85. Eastwood is 94. Paul Schrader, whose latest film “Oh, Canada” arrives this week and is well worth seeking out, is a mere 78. Based on the 2021 Russell Banks novel “Foregone,” “Oh, Canada” is the story of a documentary filmmaker, played by Richard Gere, being interviewed near the end of his cancer-shrouded final days. In the Montreal home he shares with his wife and creative partner, played by Uma Thurman, he consents to the interview by two former students of his. Gere’s character, Leonard Fife, has no little contempt for these two, whom he calls “Mr. and Mrs. Ken Burns of Canada” with subtle disdain. As we learn over the artful dodges and layers of past and present, events imagined and/or real, Fife treats the interview as a final confession from a guarded and deceptive soul.

He’s also a hero to everyone in the room, famous for his anti-Vietnam war political activism, and for the Frederick Wiseman-like inflection of his own films’ interview techniques. The real-life filmmaker name-checked in “Oh, Canada” is documentarian Errol Morris, whose straight-to-the-lens framing of interview subjects was made possible by his Interrotron device.

In Schrader’s adaptation, Fife doesn’t want the nominal director (Michael Imperioli, a nicely finessed embodiment of a second-rate talent with first-rate airs) in his eyeline. Rather, as he struggles with hazy, self-incriminating memories of affairs, marriages, one-offs with a friend’s wife and a tense, brief reunion with the son he never knew, Fife wants only his wife, Emma — his former Goddard College student — in this metaphoric confessional.

Schrader and his editor Benjamin Rodriguez Jr. treat the memories as on-screen flashbacks spanning from 1968 to 2023. At times, Gere and Thurman appear as their decades-young selves, without any attempt to de-age them, digitally or otherwise. (Thank god, I kind of hate that stuff in any circumstance.) In other sequences from Fife’s past, Jacob Elordi portrays Fife, with sly and convincing behavioral details linking his performance to Gere’s persona.

We hear frequent voiceovers spoken by Gere about having ruined his life by age 24, at least spiritually or morally. Banks’ novel is no less devoted to a dying man’s addled but ardent attempt to come clean and own up to what has terrified him the most in the mess and joy of living: Honesty. Love. Commitment.

There are elements of “Oh, Canada” that soften Banks’ conception of Fife, from the parentage of Fife’s abandoned son to the specific qualities of Gere’s performance. It has been 44 years since Gere teamed with Schrader on “American Gigolo,” a movie made by a very different filmmaker with very different preoccupations of hetero male hollowness. It’s also clearly the same director at work, I think. And Gere remains a unique camera object, with a stunning mastery of filling a close-up with an unblinking stillness conveying feelings easier left behind.

The musical score is pretty watery, and with Schrader you always get a few lines of tortured rhetoric interrupting the good stuff. In the end, “Oh, Canada” has an extraordinarily simple idea at its core: That of a man with a movie camera, most of his life, now on the other side of the lens. Not easy. “I can’t tell the truth unless that camera’s on!” he barks at one point.

I don’t think the line from the novel made it into Schrader’s script, but it too sums up this lion-in-winter feeling of truth without triumphal Hollywood catharsis. The interview, Banks wrote, is one’s man’s “last chance to stop lying.” It’s also a “final prayer,” dramatized by the Calvinist-to-the-bone filmmaker who made sure to include that phrase in his latest devotion to final prayers and missions of redemption.

“Oh, Canada” — 3 stars (out of 4)

No MPA rating (some language and sexual material)

Running time: 1:34

How to watch: Opens in theaters Dec. 13, running 1in Chicago Dec. 13-19 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State St.; siskelfilmcenter.org

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Director Justin Kurzel hails from Australia, and this is a Canadian production with Alberta subbing, convincingly, for rural Idaho and thereabouts. Screenwriter Zach Baylin based his work on the nonfiction book “The Silent Brotherhood.”

“The Order” shapes that story as an account of how the FBI, represented here primarily by a fictional New York-to-Idaho transplant portrayed by Jude Law, took on a Pacific Northwest cadre of white supremacists known as The Order in the early 1980s. The Order’s fresh-faced leader, Robert Mathews, engineered a string of bank robberies, financing a plan to attack the U.S. Capitol and overthrow the government. Mathews’ blueprint was “The Turner Diaries,” a fancifully apocalyptic 1978 novel laying out steps toward a successful all-American insurrection.

Law’s character, Terry Husk, arrives in Idaho a man in desperate need of repair. His marriage is shaky, as is his corrosive history with alcohol. He’s anticipating a quiet, uneventful period of isolation and recovery. Then he notices a few White Power leaflets and flyers around town enticing citizens to “reclaiming your birth right.”

Concurrently, local law enforcement receives reports of a string of bank robberies in Spokane, Washington, and other cities. As Husk investigates the apparent activities of The Order nearby, the connections between the robberies and The Order’s activities tighten. Tye Sheridan plays the newest addition to the sheriff’s office, a longtime local resident who grew up with a lot of the Order’s members. At considerable personal risk, he becomes Husk’s ally in tracking down Mathews.

We know where “The Order” is going; the actors ensure our interest en route. Nicholas Hoult plays the charismatic cult leader, and he’s just right, lending a disarming air of a Boy Scout grown up and ready for a truly big adventure, working from more than one handbook to create his own toxic ideology. Jurnee Smollett could use another scene or three but she’s equally assured as Husk’s fellow FBI agent, the movie’s sounding board, skeptic and wary conscience.

Nothing the feds are up against in “The Order” feels settled, or solved, by movie’s end, and only a dishonest thriller would settle for a finale with anything like finality. Kurzel has a real knack for violence in the right doses, in the robbery and heist sequences as well as smaller, sweatier encounters. There’s a bit of a sag around the halfway point, as Baylin’s screenplay lets the audience get out ahead of the story developments. And functioning as a dramatic composite of several real-life FBI agents, Husk lacks definition.

But Law, sporting a literally weighty and arguably depressed mustache, fills in what’s missing. He’s not going for swaggering heroics here; instead he creates a surly husk of a man (whose character name is not subtle) steeling himself for whatever’s next, trying not give in to his rage. The supporting characters weave in and out of the narrative, often unpredictably. At one point, one such character, Mathews’ ideologically simpatico minister (Victor Slezak), mentions that “in 10 years, we’ll have people in Congress and the Senate.”

It’s a quick throwaway line. It’s also a telegram from America’s past to America’s future.

“The Order” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for some strong violence, and language throughout)

Running time: 2:00

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Fri. Dec. 6

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.