The Oscars are behind us, and the summer movie season hasn’t yet hit us full blast: Springtime is always the point at which some of the best new movies of the year start showing up. Often, these movies are merely enjoyable—and thank God for that. But this particular spring season has been especially strong, bringing us at least two pictures we’ll still be talking about at the end of the year. Here are five of the best movies released in April.
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The Shrouds
As a thriller, David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds isn’t a very good film: the plot mechanics feel like an afterthought, tied up in the end with a messy shrug. When I revisited the film recently at a New York City theater, I overheard a couple of young Cronendudes casually grumbling about how bad they thought it was. Yet there’s something about this mysterious, tender picture—a story of grief, and almost-renewal—that’s not easy to shake. Vincent Cassel stars as Karsh, a man mourning the fairly recent loss of his wife—she’s played, in several dream sequences, by Diane Kruger. Karsh has invented a special shroud that allows the living to witness the decomposition of the dead, a way of bringing physical intimacy into the grave; he has also made this technology available to others, opening a cemetery equipped with a number of these special shroud-enabled tombs. (There’s also a chic, high-end restaurant on-site, a wicked Cronenburgian touch.) One night, the cemetery is plundered; graves are tipped over, their wi-fi connections disabled. Karsh’s sister-in-law (also played by Diane Kruger) and ex-brother-in-law (Guy Pearce) try to help him unravel the mystery of who might do such a thing, and why. Meanwhile, Karsh struggles to find his way back to life. The Shrouds’ true center is Kassel’s performance. He translates grief into a restless electrical energy; you can practically feel it vibrating through his agile, lanky frame.
Warfare
You don’t need to have fought in a war to make a great war movie: though neither Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, nor Stanley Kubrick did, the movies they made about the horrors of combat endure. But you could argue that the stakes are higher when a filmmaker who’s been to hell and back sets out to express the truth of his experience. Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza has teamed with Civil War and Ex Machina director Alex Garland to make Warfare, which dramatizes the day in 2006 a team of Navy SEALs, Mendoza among them, entered an apartment building in Ramadi province, Iraq, on a treacherous surveillance mission. Within just a few hours, al-Qaeda forces had tossed a grenade in their midst, injuring two SEALs, one of them sniper and medic Elliott Miller (played in the movie by Cosmo Jarvis). Miller was even more seriously wounded, along with another SEAL (Joseph Quinn), when an IED exploded outside the building as they were being evacuated. Mendoza and others who took part in the mission (played by a group of fine young actors including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Charles Melton, and Will Poulter) pieced the story together from memories of that day. Miller doesn’t remember the day’s events at all, and Mendoza has said that he wanted the movie to be “a living snapshot” for him, a way of honoring all that he lived through but can’t recall. Warfare, beautifully crafted, tells the harrowing story of the men’s rescue in real time. If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is. [Read the full review.]
The Friend
Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel The Friend is a gorgeous, unsentimental novel about friendship, the selfish nature of writing, and the way loving an animal can change us, not always in the ways we expect. Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s film adaptation can’t quite capture the prickly subtlety of the book—yet on its own, it still works as a lively and thoughtful reflection on the way the death of a loved one can complicate rather than simplify our feelings for that person. It’s also, of course, a movie about what it means to love an animal: Naomi Watts stars as a writer and academic, living in a tiny, rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, who inherits a dog from an older ex-lover (Bill Murray). But this isn’t just any dog; it’s a noble giant, a Great Dane known as Apollo. (He’s played by a fabulous animal actor named Bing.) What happens when a creature of such magnificence takes up residence—and a lot of space—in a no-dogs-allowed studio? That’s the main dramatic fulcrum of The Friend, though in the end, the story is really about how the dog you’re not sure you want becomes the dog you don’t want to live without.
Sinners
What makes Ryan Coogler’s extraordinary horror entertainment Sinners, set in the 1932 Mississippi Delta, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain. Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, returning to their hometown from a stint in prohibition-era Chicago. Flush with cash, and toting cases of booze, they hope to open a juke joint that very night. They enlist their cousin, blues prodigy Sammie (Miles Caton), to provide the entertainment, and within a few hours of opening, the place is a smash hit—until a trio of vampire hillbilly musicians, led by Jack O’Connell’s scarily seductive Remmick, show up at the door, begging with utmost politeness to be let in. Sinners is one of the great vampire movies of the modern age, mining the legend of these perpetual outsiders who desperately yearn to belong, but whose silky promises are rooted in treachery. Mostly, though, Sinners is alive to the mystery of music: the way, for centuries, white people and Black people seemed to hear and feel music differently, until somehow the sounds they were hearing, and making, merged and blurred into a kind of aural futureworld, one that’s still unfolding today. Sinners is gory, seductive, pitiless. But there’s also something wistful about it, as if its characters had glimpsed a possibility of freedom, unity, and happiness that, nearly 100 years later, is still out of reach. [Read the full review.]
One to One: John & Yoko
Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards’ documentary traces an eventful year in the lives of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who moved from their English estate to a small apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1972. They sought a connection with other artists and radicals; they also watched a lot of television, immersing themselves unapologetically in modern American life with an almost naïve enthusiasm, tuning in to, say, The Mary Tyler Moore show just as everyone else did. Then again, TV was different then, essential for cultural connection among humans, and in this illuminating, detailed doc, Macdonald and Rice-Edwards show how television, as well as the vitality of New York, galvanized Lennon and Ono as artists and activists. The movie is anchored by footage from the August 1972 One to One concert the duo organized as a response to Geraldo Rivera’s truly shocking exposé of the Willowbrook institution, where children with disabilities were horrifically maltreated and abused. Their anger at this cruelty—revealed to them through the little television that graced their economically sized Bank Street apartment, which is re-created in the film—moved them to act. If nothing else, One to One reminds us of one of the gravest dangers of the modern world: That of becoming anesthetized to human suffering around us.