Justin Chang

Agnes is, in many ways, a classic Zhao character, a woman deeply and eccentrically attuned to the natural world.

She also feels like an amalgam of some of Buckley's past roles, the wild child she played in the thriller Beast, but also the ill-treated girlfriends she played in mind-bending films like Men and I'm Thinking of Ending Things.

There's an elemental force to Buckley's performance in Hamnet.

When Agnes gives birth, or watches as her son takes his last breath, she howls her agony to the skies.

At some point, Buckley doesn't even seem to be acting anymore.

So effortlessly does she seem to inhabit Agnes's earthy mysticism, her maternal love, and her bottomless grief and despair.

She's the reason the film is as affecting as it is.

especially at the climax, when we finally see how Shakespeare's son, Hamnet, and the first production of his play, Hamlet, converge.

I'm still wrestling with what I think of this sequence, which will undoubtedly move audiences to tears.

The first time I saw it, I shed more than a few myself.

It's undeniably effective.

It also feels a little reductive in the way that it regards an endlessly complex Shakespeare masterwork in purely therapeutic terms, a means of achieving closure.

Zhao knows that in the end, the play's the thing.

But as staged here, it feels like a smaller, less meaningful thing than it should.

The Arabic word Sirat means path or way.

In Islamic scripture, it refers to a narrow bridge that connects paradise and hell.

That makes it a fitting title for the director Oliver Lachey's new movie, which is both exhilarating and devastating.

It's a survival story about several unlikely traveling companions making their way through a godforsaken stretch of the Sahara Desert.

It carries echoes of countless earlier films,

from the arid landscapes of a John Ford Western to the post-apocalyptic setting of Mad Max.