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Rosario
Emeraude Toubia in Rosario (2025)
Rosario
(In Theaters May 2)
Directed by 25-year-old Felipe Vargas, this freshman effort highlights the director’s attraction to horror. Emeraude Toubia portrays a first generation American, Rosario. Having found success as a stockbroker, Rosario reluctantly makes her way to her deceased grandmother’s rundown New York City apartment to await an ambulance delayed by a monstrous snowstorm. Rosario is investigating her grandmother’s deplorable living conditions when she discovers that Granny was practicing the dark arts. David Dastmalchian appears as the weird next-door-neighbor while José Zúñiga, Diana Lein and Emilia Faucher, play Rosario’s family members—each having contributed to a curse bringing forth an evil entity. (Lisa Miller)
The Surfer
(In Theaters May 2)
Any character played by Nicolas Cage is begging to become unhinged. Working from a screenplay by Thomas Martin, director Lorcan Finnegan gets exactly that from Cage's middle-aged businessman seeking to recapture his youth. At the Australian beach where he surfed as a lad, the Surfer (Cage), looks forward to taking on the waves with his teenage son (Finn Little). The pair’s access is blocked by territorial bullies who insist that “if you don’t live here, you don’t surf here.” Casting Cage ensures the Surfer (his character’s only moniker) simply can’t, or won’t, lay down his board. Billed at Cannes as a “midnight movie,” the struggle for dominance is brutally and comically navigated. (Lisa Miller)
Tito, Margot and Me
(IndiePix DVD)
It didn’t draw as many paparazzies as Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier, but in the UK and Latin America, the marriage of Royal Ballet star Margot Fonteyn and Panamanian diplomat Tito Arias made headlines. She was a ballerina who danced with Nureyev; he was the scion of Panama’s ruling family. It was a love story fit for Hollywood, enduring even as Arias was confined to a wheelchair in his last years, paralyzed by an assassin’s bullets.
Director Mercedes Arias is Tito’s niece, but has only vague, childhood memories of the couple. Her well-wrought documentary (with Delfina Vidal Frago) tells a fascinating story through stills, archival footage and interviews with surviving friends and family, in a film nicely shot and edited at an agreeable pace. Unlike too many contemporary documentarians, Arias doesn’t interject herself needlessly into her subject. Tito was reform minded and cosmopolitan. Educated at Cambridge, his social circle was wide and included such disparate personalities as John Wayne, Fidel Castro, John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. Tito, Margot and Me was Panama’s submission to the 2024 Academy Awards. (David Luhrssen)
