For all those (like me) who found Baz Luhrman’s Elvis to be grossly overcooked, may I offer an alternative: Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. It would be difficult to find a filmmaker whose style is more opposed toRead Full Review

David Grann’s 2017 book Killers of the Flower Moon is a chilling piece of true crime literature. A good amount of it is a thrilling FBI procedural, but the emotional core of it is Molly BurkhartRead Full Review

As a performer, Jamie Foxx seems almost unfair. There are plenty of actors with skill for both comedy and drama, but few make it look as effortless as Foxx, who can shift between both with greatRead Full Review

In the opening sequence of Anatomy of a Fall, our protagonist – a successful German author named Sandra Voyter – is the subject of an interview, but she seems much more interested in her interviewer thanRead Full Review

Neither of Kitty Green’s first two narrative features are particularly violent but both are primed with the threat of it. The haunting menace of angry, entitled men is the dangerous weapon swinging precariously above the heads ofRead Full Review

There’s no way to say this without sounding derogatory: Fair Play feels a lot like television. That statement is more a reflection on the resources with which television drama is gifted than about Chloe Domont’s debutRead Full Review

Regardless of what you may think of No One Will Save You (I think it’s not very good), it can’t be argued that it deserves its fate of being sent straight to Hulu, bypassing a theatricalRead Full Review

The Twentieth Century has cursed many nations with their fair share of ghosts. Few historical figures of that time escaped without a fair share of blood on their hands. Some have had the benefit of winningRead Full Review

One of the many things I remember about living in the depths of the pandemic in 2020, is the adamance with which people ensured that they would NEVER want to watch a film that would take placeRead Full Review

Gael García Bernal is one of the few performers in movies today who is truly peerless. The Mexican actor has been working consistently for over two decades both in and out of Hollywood. His boyish goodRead Full Review

The trailer and main poster for Bottoms positions it as such: “From the producers of Pitch Perfect and Cocaine Bear“. Quite the Venn diagram. Putting aside the fact that neither of those two films are particularly good, oneRead Full Review

Theater Camp chooses to frame itself as a fake documentary. I stress this as a choice because as you watch you really don’t see any actual benefit to that choice. It seems like it wouldRead Full Review

The Alzheimer’s Drama has become something of a trope in movies in the last twenty years. The affliction is an easy application for melodrama, and is often exploited for maximum pathos in ways that areRead Full Review

Ira Sachs’s rich filmography is filled with stories that find high drama within everyday interactions and conversations that spark more with what’s unsaid than what’s said. His films Love is Strange and Little Men are both aboutRead Full Review

Throughout their existence, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have always used the lightness of its premise as an asset. There has never been attempt to reimagine the Ninja Turtles with a gritty, realistic origin story; no passesRead Full Review

Let’s talk about ‘Barbenheimer’, a genuinely organic phenomenon that produced one of the greatest box office weekends in Hollywood history. In an industry that has turned adversarial opening weekend competition into a standard, the ideaRead Full Review

One of the appeals of Christopher Nolan is the way he embraces genre in ways that are enriching but never patronizing. His approaches to noir (Following, Memento) or science fiction (Inception, Interstellar) or war films (Dunkirk) willRead Full Review

Writer-director Christian Petzold is one of the best screenwriters on the planet, and his style of filmmaking is a kind of modest formality that excels at showcasing his incredible writing and the terrific performances heRead Full Review

Tom Cruise’s dedication to the movies is such that appreciating his films goes hand-to-hand with appreciating said dedication simultaneously. The grandiosity of his ego means that his endless commitment to his films cannot go unnoticed.Read Full Review

We’ve had two films from earlier this year – Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul and Celine Song’s Past Lives – delve into the displacement of Korean children raised in Western countries. Both dramas, Seoul is a scabby indieRead Full Review

It used to be that you could just fart out a movie like No Hard Feelings with a movie star like Jennifer Lawrence and get an automatic $100 million. Those days are seemingly over, and thereRead Full Review

For all the gripes about Wes Anderson’s thematic vapidness, the filmmaker may actually be one of his generation’s most emotionally sensitive directors. His catharsis is often packaged within a dense collection of literary allusion, cinematic verbosity,Read Full Review

WARNING Although I only speak theoretically, the main conceit of this review might be seen as a **SPOILER**, so any and all people who want to avoid that as much as possible should probably not read.Read Full Review

Celine Song’s film debut, Past Lives, pulls off a trick that few can do: it manages to illustrate the power of memory, the way it wains over time before fully arresting us when we least expectRead Full Review

Among the greatest actors in the history of television comedy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s career is peerless in both quality and sustainability. In the movies, it’s only writer-director Nicole Holofcener that has ever been able to showcaseRead Full Review

Published 53 years ago, Judy Blume’s novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret has become a literary standard for children, especially for young girls. Less required reading and more a universally accepted classic, Blume’s bookRead Full Review

Romanian filmmaker and all around anti-feel-good master Cristian Mungiu has always been an illustrator of disturbing tales from the backwards enclaves of his home country. His latest film, R.M.N., is no different. Taking place in Transylvania, the film hasRead Full Review

You might wonder why Ghosted, an action rom-com starring recent Oscar nominee Ana de Armas and Marvel superstar Chris Evans, is premiering on a streaming service – Apple TV+ – instead of getting a legitimate theatricalRead Full Review

The main character of Showing Up is Lizzy (played wonderfully by Michelle Williams), a sculpture artist. She has a day job doing secretarial work at her mother’s Portland art school, but finds ways to steal time forRead Full Review

Ari Aster may be A24’s leading in-house auteur; a homegrown talent that both represents the film studio’s brand and continued potential. Hereditary and Midsommar were both high-concept, performance-forward horror films that were critical darlings as well as sleeper hits. HisRead Full Review

Jason Hehir’s documentary mini-series The Last Dance proved that we are still very much interested in the mythology of Michael Jordan. The Greatest of All Time (GOAT) mesmerized millions of viewers in the Summer of 2020, whenRead Full Review

There’s an explicit Lawrence of Arabia reference within the first five minutes of John Wick: Chapter 4. The homage is an easter egg for all the classic Hollywood cinephiles out there, but it’s also a statement aboutRead Full Review

A Thousand and One begins in 1994 and ends in the mid-2000s. It all takes place in New York City, covering the major cultural transition that beset Manhattan at the behest of then America’s Mayor, nowRead Full Review

As The Lost King‘s opening credits fly across the screen in kinetic angles, with Alexandre Desplat’s score whirring histrionically in the background, we are given a pretty direct allusion to Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. If you’veRead Full Review

We’ve all heard of stunt casting but nabbing the extremely British Keira Knightley to play a Boston-based investigative reporter in the 1960’s is one for the ages. We’ve spent twenty years cultivating an image ofRead Full Review

Bad-on-purpose is, flatly, not my thing. Films that actively court the notoriety of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode always reek of desperation, an embarrassing attempt to reverse engineer cinematic infamy. Cocaine Bear is working within thisRead Full Review

The creative success of 2015’s Creed is a result of director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan perfectly measuring Creed’s character arc against the mythos of Rocky. Rocky Balboa and Adonis Creed have little in common asRead Full Review

There’s a simplicity to the story and the characters throughout The Quiet Girl that could possibly misdirect your expectations. In a tight 94 minutes, writer-director Colm Bairéad manages to exact a wealth of suspense and feeling,Read Full Review

The literary legacy of the Brontë sisters has sustained itself for centuries. Their novels and poetry are amongst the most well known in the world. Emily Brontë, the author of Wuthering Heights, is the most mercurial.Read Full Review

It’s indicative of Steven Soderbergh that each film in the Magic Mike franchise distinguishes itself against the one that came before it. Soderbergh has done this before, with Ocean’s Eleven and its two subsequent sequels. Despite hisRead Full Review