Sentimental Sundance films are an annual tradition. They send wide-eyed distributors scurrying for winning bids on the festival’s feel-good hit of the year. CODA, the 2021 entry, meets the required criteria: it’s small, charming and performance-led.Read Full Review

Ema has had a strained journey to American screens. Stalled by the pandemic, the film from Chilean maestro Pablo Larraín was stalled for over a year, only to be dumped at the end of Summer, aRead Full Review

Hollywood has been allowing a lot of mulligans in this young century. Don’t like Eric Bana or Edward Norton as The Hulk? Let’s try Mark Ruffallo. Fantastic Four movie was a giant dud? We’ll reload andRead Full Review

Ron and Russell Mael, the two brothers that make up the band Sparks, are having a moment. Earlier this year, Edgar Wright released his documentary The Sparks Brothers, dubbing them “Your favorite band’s favorite band”. TheirRead Full Review

Arthurian legends have persevered over centuries with their tales of honor and faith. Conceived as bloated epics, dainty Disney cartoons and brash adventure tales. In 2017, Guy Ritchie made King Arthur into a gritty, bareRead Full Review

The performance that Matt Damon gives in Stillwater sniffs of awards bait. To play William ‘Bill’ Baker, he sports a well-worn ball cap stained with years of sweat, a tricep tattoo of a bald eagle grippingRead Full Review

The key to Pig is how committed it is to its premise. The absurdity of its story – a man goes on the war path to find his stolen pig – is not played down, butRead Full Review

The new Space Jam movie is bad. Like “what were they thinking?” bad. This isn’t shocking. This is a sequel to the 1996 film starring Michael Jordan, which was an 87-minute parade of Looney Tunes bits interspersed withRead Full Review

It’s hard to talk about Steven Soderbergh without mentioning how spirited and prolific his career has been. He can do it all: studio blockbusters (Ocean’s Eleven), slick capers (Out of Sight), prestige drama (sex, liesRead Full Review

About halfway through Black Widow, Florence Pugh’s Yelena mocks the titular character, Scarlett Johansson’s Natasha Romanov. Yelena calls her a poseur, makes fun of her infamous fighting stance, and even takes note of her place inRead Full Review

I’ve often referred to Twitter as “my newspaper”. It is a statement of fact and also shame-based self-deprecation. The very concept of Twitter is to take a variety of complex ideas and compresses them into 280-character bitesRead Full Review

The opening shot of Amir “Questlove” Thompson’s stirring documentary Summer of Soul is of a clapboard directly in front of the camera, moments before an interview is set to begin. Under ‘title’, the clapboard reads “Black Woodstock”,Read Full Review

Pixar Animation, and Disney at large, has become a bit of a geographical rover, finding areas of the world that its studio has yet to recreate with uncanny accuracy. (Before Soul, was there ever a moreRead Full Review

Lin-Manuel Miranda is his own industry. His own cinematic universe. The phenomenon of his career was fast and furious, torpedoing skyward with the abundant success of Hamilton, perhaps the defining piece of pop culture from theRead Full Review

David is a man down bad. Played by Clayne Crawford, he’s an overall-wearing day laborer with long, greasy hair and a crumbling marriage. He puts on a good face for neighbors and friends and even his family,Read Full Review

It’s hard to put into words the freshness that Christopher Miller and Phil Lord have brought to animated movies in Hollywood. Their efforts are a brilliant counter to the monolithic dominance of Disney and Pixar. TheirRead Full Review

We are living through the Tyranny of Origin Story. Back in the simpler, dumber year of 1995, the film version of Mortal Kombat was content in its ludicrousness, with bits of exposition treated as necessary evilsRead Full Review

In one of the few calm moments from Quo Vadis, Aida?, our title character (played with perfection by Jasna Đuričić) is sitting with a doctor smoking a cigarette. They’ve just delivered a baby in a run-down UNRead Full Review

Spoiler alert: Godzilla vs. Kong is bad. I don’t know who this will surprise, maybe no one. Anyone’s expectations for a showdown film between two of the movies’ most recognizable monsters (or kaiju – or “titans”,Read Full Review

There has always been a contradiction central in all of Lee Daniels’ movies. There is a part of his films that strive for prestige, for mainstream recognition of black lives, good and bad. But Daniels’Read Full Review

There are few things that Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) needs to be comfortable. Sitting in his flat, headphones plugged in, listening to classical music while wearing his favorite watch; this is all he needs to beRead Full Review

Watching Minari, I was reminded of Tolstoy’s famous line “each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. He is both suggesting an infinity of unhappiness while also alluding to a sort of snowflake pattern within eachRead Full Review

It says a lot about the state of comedies that I Care a Lot can call itself one. It’s not simply that the film is unfunny, but one would be hard-pressed to find a single punchline. TheRead Full Review

The adventure of discovery has long been a major part of American mythology. Even after explorers and colonists reached the Pacific, large swaths of the American public are still pushed toward what’s next, what’s new, what’s out there. This isRead Full Review

Early in Judas and the Black Messiah, Bill O’Neal (played with frantic perfection by Lakeith Stanfield), finds himself in a police interrogation room. He’s just been arrested after impersonating an FBI officer in a creative attemptRead Full Review

In a way, One Night in Miami is its own kind of superhero movie. Its structure and tone are rooted in populist storytelling, history through the eyes of American titans. That it takes real historical figuresRead Full Review

Pieces of a Woman exists in the spaces between grief and explanation, examining the vacuum created by the arbitrary nature of tragedy. How does someone manage to simply exist in these spaces? Where all seems lost andRead Full Review

I’ve relented in my personal battle against superhero movies. They’ve taken over cinematic pop culture to such a degree that a pandemic-plagued year without them made the public feel like there were no movies atRead Full Review

Pixar’s skill for selling you sentimentality without making you feel cheap is unmatched in Hollywood. Their films offer platitudes about the affirmations of life and maximize emotional effect by zeroing in on humanity’s small beauties. It’sRead Full Review

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom opens with the image of two Black men running through the nighttime forests of the American South. As they journey through the thick trees they come upon some torches. Right at the momentRead Full Review

Triumphs don’t come without great struggle in the worlds of Steve McQueen. His first three Small Axe films have been about spirited resistance in one way or another, but he flatly refuses to coat it in any romanticism.Read Full Review

There are moments in Collective that feel unbelievable as you’re watching them. One happens in the first ten minutes. Soon after a metal band finishes their set in a popular Bucharest club called Colectiv, a fireRead Full Review

Herman J. Mankiewicz was a movie character long before Mank. He was an invaluable supporting character within the grand epic of Hollywood’s Golden Age, a vibrant Falstaff during the height of the Classical Studio Era. HeRead Full Review

If the first installment in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series (Mangrove) was a tense procedural, the second is a loose dance party. Literally. A collection of people, ranging from teenager to young adult, meet in aRead Full Review

Harper Caldwell, played by Mackenzie Davis in Happiest Season, is a Christmas person. She enjoys holiday rituals, gaudy home decorations, and white elephant gift exchanges. A major aspect of the Christmas person’s life is the Christmas movie,Read Full Review

J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy kicked off a literary trend in 2016 of nonfiction books meant to reconcile the plight of lower class whites in America. These books were liberal olive branches to poor white communities, ravagedRead Full Review

If you feel like the disparity between movies and television has shrunken, then Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series is a stunning example of it. The series is composed of five feature films, independent from one another inRead Full Review

Keeping track of all the clichés used in The Life Ahead can be tiresome. Perhaps, you could turn it into a drinking game, if you wanted to add a dose of excitement that you certainly wouldn’tRead Full Review

The dynamics of a complicated father-daughter relationship lay at the heart of Sofia Coppola’s latest film, On The Rocks. On the one end, we have a beacon of New York City liberal motherhood played by RashidaRead Full Review

Shock value, in and of itself, isn’t Sacha Baron Cohen’s main interest, though his notorious interviews often leave his subjects hapless and compromised in ways that can make your jaw drop. Exposing hypocrisies throughout theRead Full Review

The reason historical period drama is such a popular prestige genre is that it can be either nostalgic or aspirational, pleasing a broad audience no matter what their predispositions may be. That is true of The TrialRead Full Review

Attention is Kirsten Johnson’s specialty. Her 2016 film, Cameraperson, was a masterpiece of attention, a collection of footage shot over a decades of a career as a documentary cinematographer. Johnson called the film a memoir, a life’sRead Full Review

Near the beginning of Tesla, the film’s narrator quantifies Nikola Tesla’s legacy in its simplest terms: through its Google search results. He has over thirty-four million results, we’re told, including a multitude of variations on the same fourRead Full Review

MLK/FBI is being broadcast virtually as part of the 58th New York Film Festival, and was available to rent and stream through the virtual theater at the Film Society at Lincoln Center The declassification of FBI filesRead Full Review

Without the filter of directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, the screenplays of Charlie Kaufman can have an unfiltered quality, as the despair so central to his stories becomes much less palatable. Directing his own scripts,Read Full Review

The tenderness of the films from the Dardenne brothers are usually contrasted by worlds offset by calamity. Their characters are often forced into inherently unfair circumstances that are made worse by their suspect judgment and poorRead Full Review