One of the things that’s so frustrating about the political nightmare the United States finds itself tossing and turning through right now is the fact that it’s been, in its broad strokes if not its particular insanities, so predictable. For at least a decade, and with increasing frequency, experts have noted how developments in this country rhyme with, even if they don’t exactly repeat, those in other nations that have retreated from liberal democracy into authoritarian, if not outright fascist, regimes. And, as Raoul Peck’s new film Orwell: 2+2=5 reminds us, few thinkers delivered more prescient and explicit warnings about the precariousness of the norms and institutions on which the post-World War II order was built than the Indian-born British author George Orwell. And he was issuing them well before World War II.

Peck’s engaging strategy is to lay voiceovers by actor Damian Lewis of Orwell’s written words on top of a collage of both fictional and documentary film footage, demonstrating that his ideas have as much, if not exponentially more, relevance to 2025 than they did when first published. The adjective “Orwellian” usually refers to the surveillance-state panopticon of his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but Peck uses passages from Orwell’s wider oeuvre as well. Animal Farm, of course, is a touchstone, but his memoirs Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia provide both biographical background and illuminate the real-world context in which his political philosophy was formed.

The visual component alternates between scenes from cinematic adaptations of Orwell’s work and 21st-century illustrations of the ways in which his warnings have been ignored. Of the former, the two adaptations of Nineteen Eighty-Four, from 1956 (with Edmond O’Brien) and 1984 (with John Hurt), are joined by a bizarre 1999 adaptation of Animal Farm featuring the voices of Kelsey Grammer, Ian Holm, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. (I hadn’t heard of it either.) Peck also includes scenes from multiple films by the leftist British filmmaker Ken Loach, Ramin Bahrani’s 2018 take on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and other fellow travelers. At the same time, Peck sketches Orwell’s life, from the experiences as an imperial police officer in Burma that soured him on colonialism and instilled a sympathy for the oppressed to his experiences fighting against fascism in the Spanish Civil War to his time on the island of Jura in Northern Scotland, where he wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four while battling the tuberculosis that would claim his life at the age of 46.

So much of what Orwell says in these passages feels like it could have been written in the late-stage capitalism of the last twenty years. Examples of what he termed Newspeak are provided, from the Vietnam Era (“collateral damage”) to the Putin Era (“special military operation”). Orwell talks about the dangers of media consolidation, the notion that billionaires are nothing more than parasites on the social body, and the perils inherent in the increasing mechanization of artistic creation. All of this, of course, decades before the rise of the Disney/Fox/Warner/Apple oligarchy, the birth of Elon Musk, or the invention of generative AI. The rewriting of history that Winston Smith performs at his job at the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four, too, feels familiar, with the clumsy airbrushing from photos of Joseph Stalin with executed former allies updated to the baseless allegations that the January 6 insurrection was spurred by FBI agents (and, one might add, the refusal to acknowledge the photographic evidence of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s close friendship).

More than anything, though, Peck spotlights Orwell’s insights about the ways authoritarian rule requires its subjects to surrender their own perceptions of truth and reality, to, as he put it, “reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.” The epitome of this in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the interrogation in which Winston Smith is browbeaten into admitting that, sometimes, two plus two can equal five. Anyone who has visited the Portland outpost of the Party’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division in recent weeks and compared their own perception of circumstances with the descriptions of anarchic rampage proffered by elected national leaders can certainly relate. Orwell’s anxieties about the manipulability of the populace have been turbocharged by the rise of social media, echo chambers, and realistic AI-generated imagery.

Peck doesn’t limit his analysis to developments in the U.S. Nations from India to Russia to China (whose “Social Credit System” may be the most flagrantly Orwellian thing in the world today) are called out, with Myanmar (formerly Burma, where Orwell policed) highlighted for its treatment of, and refusal to acknowledge the existence of, the Rohingya minority. Nineteen Eighty-Four used to be ubiquitous on high school reading lists. Nowadays, it’s more likely to end up on a list of banned or challenged books, even though the Party’s slogans don’t seem all that controversial today. WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. Also, the Gulf of Mexico is the Gulf of America, and the Department of Defense is the Department of War.

Orwell 2+2=5 closes with a forced analogy between Orwell’s oxygen-starved death from tuberculosis and the Black Lives Matter slogan, derived from the last words of Eric Garner, “I can’t breathe.” But it works, somehow. As both a tribute to a man ahead of his time who transcended his class origins and a diagnosis of the communicable disease (thought largely eradicated after the defeat of Adolf Hitler) sweeping the globe, Peck’s smartly assembled piece hits home. (Living Room Theaters)

Tron: Ares: What a dumb title. Why can’t they just give sequels numbers like in the old days? I’d be much more likely to buy a ticket to Tron 3 (or, even better, Tron 3D), especially if I have to get over the presence of Jared Leto. Anyway, this is the second follow-up to the iconic 1982 film that gave Bruce Boxleitner his biggest break and has led to Jeff Bridges being de-aged digitally more than seemingly any other actor by now. The notion of going inside a computer to interact with anthropomorphized programs hits a bit different in the age of AI, but it’s still a neat concept. Here, exposition via newscast over the opening credits informs us that two rival corporations have created technology that can transport things and even programs/people to and from the digital world. One is run by evil boy genius and son of original Tron antagonist Julian Dillinger, Jr. (Evan Peters), the other, ENCOM, founded by original Tron protagonist Kevin Flynn, by Eve Kim (Greta Lee). Dillinger wants to use this ability to sell weapons, including the unstoppable virtual soldier Ares (Leto), to the military. Kim, picking up work that her recently deceased sister had been pursuing, wants to use it to create orange trees out of thin air.

The hitch is that these manifestations only last for 29 minutes before disintegrating (painfully for the sentient programs) and returning to Tron-world. Eve cracks the “permanence code” that will allow Ares, his cool vehicles, and unlimited oranges to stay in our realm forever, but Dillinger will stop at nothing to get his hands on this particular MacGuffin, which Eve carries the only copy of on an external drive. Eve has a sidekick with a strong Steve Zahn vibe, and her Chief Technology Officer is played by Hasan Minhaj. Also, Dillinger’s mom, who’s all for regular corporate evil but thinks murder and such goes a byte too far, is Gillian Anderson.

Anyway, all that is an excuse for some fantastic set pieces, including an urban motorcycle chase between two Tron-cycles and Eve on her analog Ducati as well as the eventual, you-knew-it-was-coming appearance of one of those giant two-legged mecha that patrolled the halls in the original Tron. (Its introduction seems to be a shot-for-shot homage to the debut of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, but I wasn’t able to do a direct comparison). As the first of those indicates, Eve can, refreshingly, take care of herself in the action department, at least at first. Eventually she becomes more of an appendage to the increasingly rebellious, Pinocchio-souled Ares. Leto is the perfect choice to play the best approximation of humanity that can be cooked up on a hard drive, a digital messiah who would surrender his immortality in order to experience life as a flesh-and-blood human, and who also has a Ducati. This movie is as dumb as a dug-up stump. I wrote down several plot-logic questions while watching it (“Why doesn’t Dillinger just delete Ares like he does the other members of the team that sabotaged Eve’s computers?” “Why did Athena’s rifle stay behind when she discorporated back to the grid?”) but they’re irrelevant.

Late in the film, one character visits the “grid” as it existed in the original 1982 Tron (although more snazzily rendered), and the contrast between that space of spare, elegant lines and an echoey quiet, a place you can breathe in, and the cluttered, overwhelming detail of its 2025 equivalent, accompanied by an excellent but near-constant and very loud score by Nine Inch Nails, says a lot about the way our relationship with computers has evolved. 43 years ago, there was a respect of sorts mixed with the anxiety about tech that Tron, WarGames, and other movies emerged from. Instead of that relatively blank desktop, we’re beset, culturally, by so many open tabs, pop-up ads, and two-factor authorizations that it’s not respect most people feel but annoyance. We fear the men who control the technology more than the technology itself these days, maybe because, as Tron: Ares suggests, the machines are more able to learn and evolve than the moguls. See it in IMAX 3D if you can. (Wide release)

A House of Dynamite: Remember that old bumper sticker: “One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.” Director Kathryn Bigelow’s new thriller demonstrates the truth of that, even before anything blows up. After opening theme music reminiscent of Jaws, we cut to the White House Situation Room, where a nuclear-armed missile has just appeared on radar. Since its launch went undetected, there’s no telling whether Korea, China, or Russia is behind it, but initial readings indicate it’ll hit somewhere in the American Midwest in nineteen minutes. The highly trained, extremely competent executive branch officials (that’s how you know this must have been made prior to the current administration, and it honestly does feel a little dated in that respect) enact their well-rehearsed contingency plans, paging through binders and hollering out acronyms that Bigelow helpfully translates on-screen (“SBX radar,” “launch the GBIs!” “detonate the EKV”). At its most gripping, it feels like one of those chilling Atlantic Monthly or New Yorker pieces that tease out worst-case, but eminently possible, scenarios for disasters both natural and human-caused. There are lots of closeups of tense, intelligent faces, and even more shots of monitors that tell you NORAD has come a long way since WarGames.

How can you sustain an entire feature on a premise like this? By flashing back and relating the same events from different perspectives. The first section, “Have a Nice Day,” takes place primarily in the Situation Room. The next “Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet,” centers on the Pentagon and the efforts to intercept the threat. The third, “A House of Dynamite,” finally gives us the face of Idris Elba as the President (after we’ve been hearing him on the phone in the previous chapters) and the Oval Office’s perspective of the same events. The editing is damnably clever, and one assumes that the asides and other interactions between the three environments would match up perfectly if you played them all at once.

Among the other locations the film darts to on occasion are a civil war battle reenactment in Nebraska, a FEMA center in Chicago, and sub-Saharan Africa, where Elba’s first lady is on either a safari or a diplomatic mission, or both. After efforts to intercept the missile fall short, and with no clear idea whether North Korea, Russia, or China is behind it, President Elba is faced with the same dilemma as the President in Fail-Safe (and Dr. Strangelove) confronted: whether to launch a retaliatory strike and potentially start World War III immediately, or take a direct hit to a major city and wait to see if any more attacks follow. Rebecca Ferguson is kind of wasted as the top official in the situation room, and Jared Harris is oddly bland as the Secretary of Defense. Bigelow ably ramps up the tension, but once the novelty of the narrative structure wears off, the film doesn’t have much more to offer, ending up more of a dud than a mushroom cloud. (Salem Cinema, streaming on Netflix October 24)

Also this week

My Omaha: Filmmaker Nick Beaulieu captures a sense of America’s political division as well as a possible treatment for it as he engages in dialogue with his conservative, Trump-supporting father Randy while Randy battles a terminal illness. Against the backdrop of Black Lives Matter protests, Beaulieu and his father demonstrate that even in families on opposite sides of the aisle, conversation can, and in fact must, happen. (10/12, Salem Cinema, Living Room Theaters)

Spider: In this Latvian horror flick, “A young woman agrees to model for an artist as Virgin Mary. His strange influence triggers her repressed sexual urges causing her to have delusions and nightmares about spiders and other grotesque imagery.” (10/15, Clinton St. Theater, Church of Film)

Are We Good?: Comedian and podcaster Marc Maron bares his soul in this documentary portrait that captures his grief and resilience in the wake of the death of his partner, filmmaker Lynn Shelton. (10/14, Cinema 21)

Messiah of Evil: “A young woman goes searching for her missing artist father. Her journey takes her to a strange Californian seaside town governed by a mysterious undead cult.” The 1973 feature debut of the director who would go on to make Howard the Duck. (10/13, Hollywood)

Anxiety Club: “Funny, deep and hopeful, Anxiety Club captures the experience of anxiety through the eyes of comedians and explores their efforts to overcome their angst.” Of course Marc Maron’s in it. (10/16, Living Room Theaters)

Chess of the Wind: “The first lady of a noble house has died and now there is conflict between the remainders for taking over her inheritance.” This 1979 Iranian film was screened only once before the Islamic Revolution and was thought lost for decades. (10/13-10/15, 5th Avenue Cinema)

Lurker: “A retail employee infiltrates the inner circle of an artist on the verge of stardom. As he gets closer to the budding music star, access and proximity become a matter of life and death.” (10/12, Tomorrow Theater)

Also opening

Deathstalker: “A remake of the cult classic 1983 sword and sorcery film.” (Regal Fox Tower)

Kiss of the Spider Woman: “Valentín, a political prisoner, shares a cell with Molina, convicted for public indecency. An unlikely bond forms as Molina recounts a Hollywood musical plot starring Ingrid Luna.” (various theaters)

Roofman: “A charismatic criminal, while on the run from the police, hides in a hidden space of a toy store. There, he adopts a new identity and becomes involved with an employee, beginning a relationship as unlikely as it is risky.” (various theaters)

Repertory

Friday

• 42nd Street [1933] (Kiggins Theater)
• Alien [1979] (Cinema 21, also 10/11)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4: The Dream Master [1988] (Clinton St. Theater, with actress Tuesday Knight in attendance)

Saturday

• The Cabin in the Woods [2011] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Cat People [1942] (Salem Cinema)
• Poltergeist [1982] (Salem Cinema, also 10/14)
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? [1962] (Cinema 21)

Sunday

• Alien [1979] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Battle Royale [2000] (various theaters, also 10/13 & 10/15)
• The Dark Crystal [1982] (various theaters, also 10/13)

Monday

• The Descent [2005] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Every Little Thing [2024] (Salem Cinema)
• Sunset Boulevard [1950] (Kiggins Theatre)

Tuesday

• Cure [1997] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Trick ‘r Treat [2007] (various theaters, also 10/16)

Wednesday

• The Witches of Eastwick [1987] (Salem Cinema)

Thursday

• Sisters [1974] (Clinton St. Theater)