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

When Walt Whitman declared “I contain multitudes”, it was a defiant statement of personhood that contained a solidity of purpose and place; but containing these multitudes can often be a burden. Such is the caseRead Full Review

Mia Hansen-Løve has made no secret about the autobiographical nature of her films. If anything, it seems to be a point of pride. Her films have a kind of frank, episodic nature that might remind youRead Full Review

The central conceit of Alcarràs – a Catalan family that runs a peach orchard in rural Spain faces the existential threat of globalization when their owner wants to convert their land into a plot of solarRead Full Review

Over time, the Belgian film industry has developed a well-earned reputation for grim slice-of-life dramas that examine the granular aspects of domestic ennui. Writer-director Lukas Dhont is a follower in that tradition, though his twoRead Full Review

The story of Medea, the sorceress from Greek mythology, is of a spurned woman who killed her children. On paper, this sounds like the worst crime imaginable. As the title character in Euripedes’ most famous play,Read Full Review

“What would happen if Noah Baumbach got $100 million to make a movie?” is a question that, more likely than not, you’d expect to stay as a hypothetical. Thanks to Netflix, this thought exercise becomes aRead Full Review

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s uber-humanist approach to storytelling has produced some of the best films of the last twenty-five years, but his penchant for melodrama and sentimentality can sometimes lead him astray. His best films (like After Life or StillRead Full Review

As Babylon winds down to its end – a conclusion that manages to be both sentimental and ostentatious – it seems to be making a case for the end of movies. Or, more specifically, that the “endRead Full Review

It’s said that limitations can fuel creativity. No living filmmaker has taken more credence in that theory than Iranian director Jafar Panahi, a filmmaker whose persistence and prolific output hasn’t ceased even after being legallyRead Full Review

The face of Bill Nighy is a character actor’s dream. Expressive, handsome, slightly devilish, Nighy has used that face (and his expansive, wiry frame) to great success in his decades-long career, which has seen himRead Full Review

We all know what to expect of a royal biopic. The vast, sweeping palaces. Complex, ornate clothing. Rigid interiority thinly veiling robust emotion. Whether by design or by necessity of a limited budget, Corsage sidesteps a lotRead Full Review

The last time we had a new Sarah Polley was all the way back in 2013, when her documentary Stories We Tell laid bare the secrets that lie within her family. That film was tinged withRead Full Review

When he’s in between films, it does always feel like we’ve lost James Cameron to his infatuations. His submarine expeditions to explore the wreckage of the Titanic is still one of his great obsessions all theseRead Full Review

Empire of Light is a movie that has a lot of reverence for the more granular details of cinema. Yes, it takes place in a movie house and you often see the marquee lit upRead Full Review

Samuel D. Hunter’s play The Whale is a work brimming with so much self-hatred that you can almost forgive the complete lack of care it takes with its delicate subject matter. Almost. The subjectivity of itsRead Full Review

2022 has been a historically lucrative year for naval aviation dramas. Well, for one movie anyway. Top Gun: Maverick has made over a billion dollars worldwide since its release on Memorial Day weekend, a triumph that feltRead Full Review

David Foster Wallace once famously claimed that “every love story is a ghost story”. Like many of Wallace’s quotes, it’s a romantic gesture flush with alternate meanings. I don’t think of Joanna Hogg as a DavidRead Full Review

The Inspection excels at subverting your expectation. We have our notions about a US Marine Basic Training drama, and that notion gets even more narrow when you learn that the protagonist is a queer characterRead Full Review

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is part biography, part protest, part photo slideshow. The protagonist is groundbreaking photographer Nan Goldin, whose life is a constant battle between the hardships of her past, the emotionalRead Full Review

Perhaps the most notorious line in the Lennon-penned Beatles song “Glass Onion” is “Well, here’s another clue for you all… the walrus was Paul”. The lyric is considered a smoking gun confession in the deepRead Full Review

The empire of Harvey Weinstein was built upon the idea of prestige. Weinstein and Miramax were a symbol of high artistic standard – in simpler terms, he ran successful Oscar campaigns. While his brother Bob reeledRead Full Review

In the annals of doomed Hollywood epics, the production of Wakanda Forever has to be up there. After suffering the death of its main star Chadwick Boseman in 2020 – a presumably insurmountable hurdle for any movie –Read Full Review