Reviews

Perchance to dream: a satire on celebrity and cancel culture, Kristoffer Borgli’s new Nicholas Cage–vehicle, Dream Scenario, treads the thin line between critique and caricature

Shutter speed: a new series at the Museum of Modern Art showcases a staggering range of Iranian films made before the revolution of 1979, including including films by Bahram Beyzaie, Amir Naderi, and Masoud Kimiai

In-between times: a new series at MoMA sheds light on rarely screened, boundary-pushing films made in the shadow of an oppressive dictatorship

Garden of forking paths: Yui Kiyohara’s latest follows the intersecting paths of three women, in the process painting a portrait of their town as a ruin in the making

Spit take: a collection of newly restored shorts from the Sudanese Film Group strain against the didactic dictates of a state-sanctioned national cinema

What we do in the shadows: André Øvredal’s pulpy, sea-set Dracula adaptation says much about the place of vampires in our cinematic imagination

Through the looking glass: Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is something smarter than girlboss fantasy or canny corporate sellout—it’s a grappling, rather, with the fundamental ways in which we represent and relate to reality

Close shave: Masc, a new program on Criterion Channel, offers a rebuttal to the transphobic charge that transition and gender nonconformity are 21st-century phenomena

Sing out: a program at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles showcases the many possibilities of concert movies—both as cinema and as performance—through a range of classics

It belongs in a museum: the latest big-screen adventure featuring Harrison Ford’s grizzled archeologist only faintly recalls the streamlined pleasures of series highpoint, Raiders of the Lost Ark