Kimberley Jones

The Austin Chronicle’s Top 10 list, listed alphabetically, is the combined effort of Chronicle film critics Kimberley Jones and Richard Whittaker and film critic emeritus Marjorie Baumgarten, who was this week named the Austin Film Critics Association’s first Member Emeritus. Avatar: Fire and Ash Blue Moon Frankenstein It Was Just an Accident Marty Supreme Nouvelle […]

The title of writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s last film was Pictures of Ghosts, and his latest, The Secret Agent, opens with pictures of ghosts, too, of a sort. They are black & white photos of a bygone Brazil, pictures of 1970s-era merrymaking – drinking, singing, dancing. You’d never imagine these photos were taken in the […]

The how and why behind the death of William Shakespeare’s only son at age 11 is lost to history. But novelist Maggie O’Farrell plausibly imagined plague as the cause, a narrative choice that had unanticipated resonance when her novel Hamnet was first published in March of 2020. The novel – and now the feature film […]

Tradwives may rule a uniquely hellish pocket of the internet, but in arthouse film at least, Grim Mommy is ascendant, with an emerging canon presenting a more clear-eyed portrait of women buckling under domestic stress – in last year’s Nightbitch, this fall’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and now Lynne Ramsay’s hallucinatory picture of […]

A sparky cast and scenic vistas can’t quite overcome the suffocating singlemindedness of You’re Dating a Narcissist! That’s not just the name of the film – it’s also the title of a book written by psychology professor and podcaster Judy (Marisa Tomei), as well as Judy’s default diagnosis of basically anyone in a relationship, from […]

A sparky cast and scenic vistas can’t quite overcome the suffocating singlemindedness of You’re Dating a Narcissist! That’s not just the name of the film – it’s also the title of a book written by psychology professor and podcaster Judy (Marisa Tomei), as well as Judy’s default diagnosis of basically anyone in a relationship, from […]

Magical realist romance swings for the fences but fails to connect

Arts and culture happenings for the weekend

Riz Ahmed and Lily James star in a throwback thriller about a whistleblower who changes her mind

Ron Howard thriller about real-life island settlers who turn on each other