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October 17, 2025 
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Hi, movie fans!
The news of Diane Keaton’s passing caught us by surprise here on the film desk. But what didn’t surprise our critics was how well her films held up more than 20, 40 or even 50 years later.
Manohla Dargis remembered disliking the Nancy Meyers rom-com “Something’s Gotta Give” (2003) when she first watched it but was won over later by Keaton’s performance. The actress had “become a female filmmaker’s avatar: a beautiful, funny, soulful, successful and blissfully independent woman,” Dargis wrote.
Alissa Wilkinson took a deep dive into “Reds” (1981), the historical epic in which Warren Beatty (who also directed) and Keaton play the early-20th-century writers John Reed and Louise Bryant amid a circle of revolutionaries. “Of all the characters, her evolution is the most striking, and Keaton’s performance has to tiptoe along a thin edge,” Wilkinson wrote.
And Esther Zuckerman examined how Keaton’s unique sense of style informed her performances, most notably as the title character in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall” (1977): “It’s there in the way her hat increases her bashfulness,” Zuckerman wrote, and in how “she turns the pockets of her pants into props, putting an errant hand in when she’s trying to appear nonchalant.”
In other movie news, the top Cannes prizewinner, “It Was Just an Accident,” from the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, is finally reaching American theaters this week. The director told my colleague Nicole Sperling that the drama was inspired by his time in prison, convicted of essentially running afoul of his country’s regime. “When I got out of jail, I turned around and looked at the gate, and I remembered all those faces,” he said, referring to his fellow prisoners. He continued, “These faces started becoming more real and marched in my head. I felt that I owed them something.”
Panahi’s film is a critic’s pick (Manohla Dargis calls it “a cry from the heart”), as are the much-anticipated “Frankenstein” (Alissa Wilkinson says it’s the film Guillermo del Toro “was born to make”), “Blue Moon” (starring Ethan Hawke as the Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart) and the docuseries about Martin Scorsese.
What a wealth of choices this week. Whatever you decide to watch, enjoy the movies!
