"Blue Heron"

☆☆☆☆☆

For the first 40 minutes or so of the brief but potent Blue Heron, it's not quite clear what we're supposed to be tracking. Sophy Romvari's beautifully crafted film seems to be a memory piece about a girl's childhood in Canada during one languid summer in the early 2000s.

The girl, Sasha, observes her family closely. Mother and Father are Hungarian immigrants on Vancouver Island. Father has a job he does from home, something to do with computers and the Internet — if we never really grasp what he does, it makes complete sense: Like their missing first names, Blue Heron lets us understand about as much as Sasha does. This is a rare film that manages to present the world in the close-up, insular way of an observant child.

What Sasha notices most, as the mostly plotless first half of Blue Heron progresses, is that her family is close and loving and Mother and Father are wonderful parents, though, perhaps the adults watching these memories may notice, they are frustrated, confused, more than a little worried. The problem, it comes clear, is their oldest child, Jeremy.

Jeremy is never quite involved. He's always off on his own, keeping to himself, irritable, strange. No one can put their finger on it, but Jeremy turns an outing to the beach into a tense, worrisome afternoon. Then one day, the police show up with Jeremy in handcuffs. But that's not the worst of it. Someone else comes to the house, and on one warm and beautiful afternoon while the other kids play on the trampoline, Mother and Father are forced into a wrenching, life-changing decision.

The second part of Blue Heron does something extraordinary with the first half, and it seems almost unfair to explain too much. Suddenly, as the audience, we're watching another story. There's a different woman on screen, someone who's examining what happened during the first part of the movie.

As a filmmaker, Romvari's change-up here would be breathtaking and showy if presented in another way, but she's willing to keep it low-key, to let the audience figure things out for itself. Eventually, it is clear that Sasha as an adult is assuming the role of Romvari the filmmaker in trying to understand what has happened with her family, to make sense of what happened to the brother whose actions that summer led to a life of unanswered questions and deep sadness for Sasha.

An adult is not a child. A child cannot be an adult. The same person cannot bridge the gap in understanding between the two parts of their lives. The questions that had no answers to the child become the inevitable answers that make no sense to the adult.

In a truly staggering sequence, adult Sasha haunts her own life, and as she does it makes total, heartbreaking sense on screen — this is what we all do: revisit the hallways and bedrooms of our childhood, looking for answers to lives that make no sense at all, except, maybe, to us.

Blue Heron made the festival rounds in 2025, and is now receiving a small theatrical release, primarily at AMC Theaters. In what's already become a strong year for movies, Blue Heron is one of the best I've seen in 2026 — and is worth seeking out and being patient with it. Its many rewards are deeply worth the effort.

Viewed April 26, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Mother Mary"

   ☆☆☆½

Mother Mary is a movie with keen insight into human nature, into the way people form and then break attachments and what that does to everyone involved. Just as it starts getting really interesting and engrossing, it buries those insights in a strange and not entirely effective story of the paranormal.

The result is both satisfying and not, both insightful and surface-level, but never less than entirely captivating to watch. It's not the Black Swan-meets-Burlesque campfest that the trailers have been promising, but something deeper, weirder and more challenging.

Anne Hathaway gets the top billing, but Mother Mary belongs equally to her and to the phenomenal Michaela Coel, whose intensity both smolders and burns, especially in the first half of the film, which, it must be said, surpasses the second.

Hathaway plays "Mother Mary," a pop-star who makes Madonna or Lady Gaga look a little like B-listers. Religious iconography is her schtick, and whether the woman known as Mother Mary believes in what she sells is never revealed. But she wasn't always Mother Mary (her true name is never revealed). Once, she was another singer in search of an image.

Fashion designer Sam Anselm created the image. In essence, she created Mother Mary herself. Now, as Mary is about to embark on a comeback tour after a mysterious tragedy (it's revealed in the film, but I'd never think to spoil it here), there's something off. It's one of her dresses. The dress for her big number. It's ... how should she put it? Not her.

Only one person can set it right: Sam. So, Mary flies to London to meet with Sam and plead with her to create the dress she needs by Sunday. She gets to London on Thursday. The task is impossible, but Mary is desperate.

All this sounds like it might be a dull drama, but writer-director David Lowery (The Green Knight) infuses everything, from the first shot to the last, with a mystical, dread-laced tension. And, importantly, a human tension. Sam and Mary were once not just colleagues but close friends, but Sam has taken Mary's success personally, or Mary has forgotten Sam in her success. Either way, the wounds run deep.

Mother Mary is best as a two-hander between these two headstrong women, whose relationship was once more than close, it was symbiotic. They made each other. 

In its exploration of anger, guilt, regret and love, Mother Mary shines brightest. No scene in the entire film comes quite as close to the near-abuse Sam heaps upon Mary by forcing her to perform a physical dance routine from her concert — without the music. It's a rhythmic, writhing moment of near-madness, one in which Hathaway seems to be channeling Linda Blair from The Exorcist.

Mother Mary is also filled with the razzle-dazzle of giant-sized musical performances that are visually thrilling but musically bankrupt. If this is what passes for pop music these days, I'm glad I've aged out. The musical bits showcase Hathaway as an impressively believable pop star and some spectacular costumes, but they feel curiously flat. More thrilling are those moments with just Mary and Sam.

Then, somewhere along the way, Mother Mary turns into a tale of the paranormal, in which the guilt and anger between these two women seems to manifest itself in weird and violent ways. It's a real testament to Hathaway and Coel that the movie never fails to mesmerize, even when it starts going off the rails.

That it never entirely jumps the track but also never entirely reaches the heights of its first 30 minutes leaves Mother Mary as a film that feels both fulfilling and not. Dark, curious, challenging and eye-popping, Mother Mary, like its title character, tries just a little too hard to be something it's not entirely sure it really is.

Viewed April 20, 2026 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Exit 8"

  ☆☆☆½

Exit 8 opens with a man on his way to a temp job. He's riding in a packed Japanese subway train, and not everything is going well. When he exits the train, he gets some unexpected news, then promises the caller he's on his way.

He's not.

The man is never given a name other than The Lost Man, and given his temp job, his casual clothes on a train full of suited men, and his bedraggled appearance, that moniker may have more than one meaning. So, too, may Exit 8, though this isn't Last Year at Marienbad. Based on a video game, Exit 8 is puzzling and engaging, clever and diverting, and filled with symbolism and meaning, but it's not inscrutable.

Building on a 25-minute video game that is all about careful observation, director Genki Kawamura (who co-write the adaptation with Kentaro Hirase) has created a film filled with dread, a movie crafted to do two things, both of which it does well.

The first is to captivate the audience with its simple story: On his way out of the subway station, the man finds himself trapped in an endless loop. The promised Exit 8 never appears. Over and over, the man wanders the same set of geometric hallways, always seeing the same businessman, the same set of posters, the same set of doors. What's going on?

Eventually, the man finds a set of instructions. They promise that if he can follow each rule carefully eight times, he'll get to the exit.

Why? Who knows. But it works. And it sets up the second thing beautifully:

As the man encounters slightly different moments, as the hallways fill with increasingly worrisome sights and sounds, the audience sees what he misses. The small audience I was with shouted at the screen — "Go back!" "No!" "Turn around!" — and not in a way that damaged enjoyment of the movie.

Exit 8 puts you right there with this Lost Man, invested in the outcome and in his every decision, focused even more than he is on the backgrounds and the details, and equally frustrated when one mistake resets the whole of the game.

Just as it seems the idea is about to wear thin, this tight 95-minute puzzler offers up something new, and if some of what the subway exit throws the man's way seem random, that may just be because you weren't paying enough attention in the opening shots. Memory and trauma, both personal and collective, also factor in to the story, as does a healthy dose of Stanley Kubrick.

Not for nothing does Exit 8 feel a lot like roaming the hallways of the Overlook Hotel, and it's no coincidence that a gushing wall of blood seems a direct callback to The Shining — this is a movie that hopes to be as labyrinthine as Kubrick's, as stacked with hidden detail and meaning.

Over time, Exit 8 may well get the sort of die-hard audience it deserves, the kind who wants to count up every gleaming white tile to see if it all means something. Does it? I think so — and it seems salient that the one thing Exit 8 asks viewers to do is put their phones down and concentrate, to focus on the world on screen. And, when the lights go up, maybe on the world around them, too.

Viewed April 19, 2026 — AMC Universal 16

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