Left photo: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, detail from “Portrait of the Mozart Family,” by Johann Nepomuk della Croce, c. 1781 (Wikipedia); right photo: Constanze Mozart (née Weber), portrait by Joseph Lange, c. 1782 (Wikipedia) By PEGGY ANN BLISS Special to The STAR What better way to show love for one’s new bride recovering from an illness than to write a Mass for her? And how much better if she just happened to be one of Austria’s most celebrated sopranos? Her husband, Wolfgang

“Good News” By DEVIKA GIRISH ‘Good News’ Real life is truly stranger than fiction, as proven by this Korean dark comedy, whose harebrained premise, you’ll be amazed to know, is lifted from a true story. In 1970, members of Japan’s Red Army Faction, a militant communist group, hijacked a Japanese Airlines plane and demanded it be flown to North Korea. Together, Japanese and Korean officials hatched a plan to direct the plane to Gimpo Airport in Seoul, South Korea, which they d

Set almost exclusively in a creaky Irish hotel surrounded by woodland, this effective folk horror introduces Ohm Bauman, a cranky, depressed novelist and likely alcoholic. By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS Irish filmmaker Damian McCarthy, in common with his genre colleague Osgood Perkins, likes to seed familiar horror setups with moments of ludicrousness that destabilize his scares and discombobulate his viewers. Very little in his movies can be taken at face value — not even their titl

“Our Land” makes liberal and thoughtful use of drones, gliding repeatedly over the area occupied by the Indigenous Chuschagasta people in Tucumán province, Argentina. (Strand Releasing) By ALISSA WILKINSON Drone footage is common (perhaps too common) in documentaries, and it can feel gimmicky, like the filmmakers got a little too fond of a toy. But for her first nonfiction feature, “Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)” (in theaters), celebrated Argentine director Lucrecia Martel makes

Alfonso Herrera in Miami, April 12, 2026. Herrera first read “The House of the Spirits” in high school — now he is starring in a lavish adaptation on Amazon. (Martina Tuaty/The New York Times) By CARLOS AGUILAR Like many people, Mexican actor Alfonso Herrera suffered mentally and emotionally during the COVID-19 pandemic. He began therapy while shooting the Netflix series “Ozark” in Atlanta, and during one session the therapist asked him to restate in Spanish something he had

By ERIK PIEPENBURG ‘Vulcanizadora’ Joel Potrykus’ darkly comic slow-burn buddy movie is streaming on Shudder, but it’s not a conventional horror movie. Most of it is about two friends who spend a walk in the woods talking smack, shooting off bottle rockets and fighting over debts. But once their destination is revealed, the film’s horrors are, too, and that’s when this slacker meditation on aging and death squares up and delivers its blows. The film opens as Marty (Joshua Bur

Jackson’s smash “Billie Jean” premiered on MTV in March 1983 and integrated what had been almost exclusively a format for white rock artists. By STEVE KNOPPER “Michael,” the new biopic about Michael Jackson’s triumphant but traumatized life, underwent costly reshoots when Jackson’s estate discovered a legal agreement from the ’90s preventing the film from depicting a child who had alleged the star sexually abused him at the time. Instead, the movie’s central conflict is betwe

A cantata, “Las troyanas” (The Trojan Women), will present a contemporary version of the ancient Greek tragedy by Euripides about women’s resistance after the Trojan War. The piece is to be staged with premier actors by Vicente Castro. (prpop.org) By PEGGY ANN BLISS Special to The STAR The iconic Casals Festival, now heading into its fifth decade, will offer an exciting program honoring the legendary Catalan cellist, composer and conductor Pablo Casals. The classic work “Las

Nieves González, a 29-year-old painter who once worked in relative obscurity in Andalusia, at a favorite antiques store in Granada, Spain on March 24, 2026. A Baroque-style portrait of Lily Allen, used for an album cover, has made González an overnight art sensation. “It’s like a dream I always had, but times 50,” she said. (Finbarr O’Reilly/The New York Times) By JASON HOROWITZ The shushing of brush strokes stopped as Nieves González, painting her latest baroque-style portra

The art collector Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in one of the galleries of the arts complex she created on the island of San Giacomo in Paludo, in Venice, Italy, on April 19, 2026. Sandretto Re Rebaudengo has turned a former gunpowder store into a showcase for her contemporary art collection. (Matteo de Mayda/The New York Times) By SCOTT REYBURN From a distance, across the opalescent waters of the Venetian lagoon, the cluster of low redbrick buildings looks like a factory