In Ferrari, the life-and-death stakes of professional car racing are made pretty clear early on. The smallest things – both and in and out of the driver’s control – can cause unconscionable horror. This is theRead Full Review

Perhaps it’s that we are so starved for low-stakes, adult romantic comedies that Anyone But You feels like a triumph. A similar thing could be said about No Hard Feelings from earlier this year. Both movies haveRead Full Review

Wonka makes it clear pretty early on how much it wants to separate itself from previous versions of the Willy Wonka cinematic universe. The showtune-ification of the character is a deliberate shift from the man weRead Full Review

Few directors today are a better purveyor of human devastation than Andrew Haigh, and yet, his films are never bleak and never give way to sorrow. His movies and TV shows go about it in differentRead Full Review

It is perhaps not surprising at all that professional wrestling – an entertainment sport that values the operatic details of melodrama – would lend itself to cinematic recreation. The level of performance, physical and emotional, isRead Full Review

The writing life is a lonely one, contending with the voices in your head more than the people in your life. The protagonist of American Fiction, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, is a published author whose fallenRead Full Review

The question of depiction in Holocaust films will always be controversial in a way that has nothing really to do with movies. How does one find the balance of evoking the level of monstrosity withoutRead Full Review

Retirement for legendary artists, especially in the film world, should always be taken with a grain of salt. I don’t think many people really believed that Hiyao Miyazaki was done making films after 2013’s The Wind Rises,Read Full Review

Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos loves playing the role of naughty provocateur. He’s a storyteller unafraid of sexual frankness and the pivotal role it plays in our lives and in our societal foundations, like a descendant of LarsRead Full Review

The droll, darkly comedic worlds of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki are an acquired taste. His working class characters deliver their dialogue in a highly stylized deadpan, cutting gravely serious words with a humorous edge. OftentimesRead Full Review

Narrative simplicity and character complexity are often the hallmarks of filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda. While he has a gift for drama, it almost never spawns itself out of mechanical plot points. He’s often influenced by realRead Full Review

There’s a moment at about the halfway point of Maestro, the latest film from actor/director Bradley Cooper, where our protagonist, Leonard Bernstein (played resplendently by Cooper), explains to a sycophantic interviewer that he’s actually gravely disappointedRead Full Review

May December is a film about the creative process, but not in the ways you might expect. Natalie Portman plays a famous actress who agrees to play a real life woman. That real life womanRead Full Review

It’s obvious that Emerald Fennell strives to be considered amongst cinema’s greatest provocateurs, yearns to rank amongst the Lars von Triers and Catherine Breillats of the world. Her taste for evocative imagery hints at a talentedRead Full Review

If happiness is measured by our reality divided by our expectations, then being content should be as simple as following that equation. This seems to be the case for Himayama, the protagonist of Perfect Days, the latest filmRead Full Review

What you see in Nyad – a film that spends most of its time in the vast ocean of the Florida Straights – is the difficulty of film adaptation. The story of Diana Nyad is compellingRead Full Review

If you’ve ever worked a day in your life, Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents will pummel you with its stark views on the entrapment that is Life Under Capitalism. At over three hours, the film concerns itselfRead Full Review

The Killer is an actively fatigued film that seems to carry the burden of existing with every scene. It’s the latest film from David Fincher, the great American master who’s found a new creative homeRead Full Review

It’s been nineteen years since Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti collaborated on Sideways, a movie that felt like a minor key triumph upon its release, though it seems to be mostly forgotten these days. I can’tRead Full Review

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