A24’s ‘Lamb’ Is the WTF Movie of the Year

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been looking for a movie to shake me up a little; shake me out of my streaming-induced torpor. I found it with Lamb, the debut feature from Icelandic director Valdimar Johannsson, which opens this weekend only in theaters and is a kind of WTF object of fascination—a dark fairy-tale-meets-windswept-sheep-farm domestic drama that you want to know almost nothing about before you see.

That’s probably an impossible proposition. Even the (excellent) trailer from  boutique studio A24 can’t find a way to entirely hide the movie’s hyper-bizarre premise. Suffice it to say that a grieving couple on an isolated farm in Iceland, which is photographed with gorgeous Nordic light, are blessed with a new arrival during lambing season that no one can quite explain. But the couple, Maria and Ingvar (played by Noomi Rapace, in a series of excellent woolen sweaters, and Hilmir Snaer Gudnason), accept their new addition with curious equanimity, and then a kind of touching love.

This movie is wild in all senses of the word. The landscape is barren, the distances vast, and the comforts few and far between. And the story is just bonkers. Maria and Ingvar model a kind of radical acceptance in their approach to parenting, even as things turn ominous, first with the arrival of Ingvar’s no-good brother and then with the advance of a more supernatural retributive force. This is so not a horror movie—not scary in the slightest—but its ending packs an unforgiving wallop. I was so glad I saw Lamb in a theater, not at home, so as to give into its nuttiness, its appealing sincerity, its commitment to being ludicrous and luminous all at once.—Taylor Antrim

Lamb is currently in theaters. Need a few more suggestions for your weekend watching? Read on.

The Rescue

I still remember watching Free Solo with a kind of queasy riveted horror. That Academy Award-winning 2018 documentary harnessed the allure of an adrenaline sport with an unsettling psychological portrait of an obsessive athlete. The same directors, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, have returned now with The Rescue, in theaters this weekend, which chronicles the incredible Thailand operation from 2018 to save a boys’ soccer team stranded in a flooded cave. It’s another National Geographic film and equally rousing, if a bit more straightforward in its appeal. This is an improbable story of true heroism by a small band of crack cave-divers from the U.K. who found a way to do the impossible. It ends with a kind of fist-pumping uplift (that is sure to turn saccharine when it is adapted into a feature film).—T.A.

Jacinta

For another gripping—if far more tragic—new documentary, consider Jacinta, from the photographer-turned-filmmaker Jessica Earnshaw, which follows the trials and tribulations attending a 26-year-old woman’s release from prison. “Despite Jacinta’s desires and the director’s own hopes, it is not a success story,” Variety’s Jessica Kiang wrote of the film last year, when it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival (and won the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director Award). “Instead,” she continues, “it’s something truer, stranger and more complicated, a broad sociological study containing a Greek tragedy’s worth of inherited sins and fatal flaws.” Stream it on Hulu.—Marley Marius

Fire Shut Up In My Bones—and Eve’s Bayou

If you’re in New York, I urge you to see Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up In My Bones, the latest addition to the Metropolitan Opera’s repertoire (and a historic one, at that). Based on Charles M. Blow’s 2014 memoir of the same name, the work offers a moving meditation on queerness, masculinity and childhood trauma, anchored by wonderful performances from Will Liverman, Angel Blue, Latonia Moore, and the young actor Walter Russell III. (It also features, I should add, a thrilling step-team number in Act II.)

Fire’s run this season concludes on October 23—you’ve got about two weeks—but if you can’t make it to Lincoln Center, might I recommend revisiting Eve’s Bayou? That 1997 film, directed by Kasi Lemmons (who contributed Fire’s poetic libretto) and scored by Blanchard, foregrounds similar themes—Black life in the 20th-century South, a complicated family dynamic, the issue of sexual abuse—plus, it features another stirring turn by a child actor, in this case a 10-year-old Jurnee Smollett. (Meagan Good, who plays Smollett’s older sister, also impresses.) It’s currently streaming on HBO Max.—M.M.