Movies Released May 5, 2023

A young woman tries to ease the pain over the death of her fiancé by sending him romantic texts. Unbeknownst to her, a single guy across town starts to receive the messages (the number has been reassigned). At first, he thinks it's spam but then is so moved by the words that he endeavors to find out who is writing them.

A gunslinging Texas ranger (Thomas Jane) tracks a bank robber (Dean Jagger) across the desert— only to discover he’s an international terrorist set on detonating a bomb in the heart of London. When the lawman’s partner is killed, he is drawn into partnership with a British intelligence agent (Dominique Tipper) and her boss (John Malkovich) to bring the outlaw to justice — dead or alive.

When Matthias returns to his native multi-ethnic mountain village in Transylvania, he finds his son and the village under the shadow of a strange irrational fear and unsettlement. When two foreign workers are hired in town, deep-rooted impulses and resentments emerge, conflicts and emotions erupt and the veneer of peace in the community is shattered.

How do you find lasting love in today’s world? For documentary filmmaker Zoe (Lily James), swiping right to find Mr Right has only delivered bad dates and funny anecdotes, much to her opinionated mother Cath’s (Emma Thompson) dismay. For her childhood friend and neighbour Kazim (Shazad Latif), the answer is to follow his parents’ example and opt for an assisted marriage with a bright and beautiful bride from Pakistan. As Zoe films his hopeful journey from London to Lahore to marry a stranger, chosen by his parents, she begins to wonder if she might have something to learn from a different approach to finding love.

Kiran Singh, a 1st generation Punjabi-American, has just accepted a last-minute trucking job before returning to his 37-week pregnant wife, who admits to feeling abandoned. En route to complete this "one final job," Kiran discovers Elena, a 10-year-old Mexican-American stowed away in his trailer. After debating the merits of turning her to the police, Kiran deduces she might be undocumented, and instead resolves to shepherd Elena to her uncle in Boston despite putting his own livelihood in jeopardy. As the pair ride across the changing American landscape, Kiran faces what it means to be a father and Elena learns how to trust again.

Another time is possible! At least that is the case in the early days of industrial watchmaking in Switzerland in around 1877, when the disparity between the authorities, manufacturers and models gives rise to parallel temporal dimensions, each with their own timetable, values and ideology. In this proto-Taylorist society, where dignitaries and their gendarmes control the exact time and dictate the rhythms of production and community, a group of workers form an anarchist union in association with the First International federation of workers' groups. This is where Josephine, who is in charge of assembling the unrest wheel, the heart of the mechanical watch, meets the Russian cartographer Pyotr Kropotkin, who is currently in the Jura valleys. Inspired by anarchist ideas, they demand the liberation of time and counter the values of the marketplace and nationalism with solidarity and pacifism.

This illuminating documentary uses film scenes to tell of the cultural appropriation of a world-famous landscape. Monument Valley is one of the most recognizable landscapes in the world. Its iconographic use in Westerns has had a lasting influence on stock photography, advertising, and tourism. The valley has been given mythical significance as an image of a “primitive West” firmly in the hands of white people and meant to be protected from intruders. The fact that Monument Valley is traditional Navajo territory has been obscured in the process. A radical examination of Monument Valley’s representation in cinema and advertising since John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), The Taking scrutinizes how a site located on sovereign Navajo land came to embody the fantasy of the “Old West,” replete with self-perpetuating falsehoods, and why it continues to hold mythic significance in the global psyche.