LATEST FILM REVIEWS
Is This Thing On? Review: Consciously Uncoupling Under the Spotlight
Let’s call the whole thing off, thinks a couple when their 20-year-long marriage appears to have run out of steam. That’s the starting point of the movie Is This Thing On?. It’s the third directorial outing from Bradley Cooper following A Star Is Born and Maestro, and like those two films, Is This Thing On?…
The Secret Agent Review: A Pulp Fiction With Political Resonance
The title of writer-director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s last film was Pictures of Ghosts, and his latest, The Secret Agent, opens with pictures of ghosts, too, of a sort. They are black & white photos of a bygone Brazil, pictures of 1970s-era merrymaking – drinking, singing, dancing. You’d never imagine these photos were taken in the…
Avatar: Fire and Ash Review: Bigger, Hotter, Wetter, Longer
It’s a running joke in certain more arch circles of cinema that no one can remember the name of the hero of the Avatar films. It’s Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), but that never really mattered, since James Cameron was never really that interested in having some singular figure save the day. He’s talked about these…
Silent Night, Deadly Night Review: Santa’s New Slayride
Remakes of certain films border on heresy. You’re not going to make Casablanca more heartbreakingly heroic, you won’t make Alien scarier, and, as 2012’s inessential Silent Night seemed to prove, no one feels like they got a big gift if you remake Charles E. Sellier Jr.’s 1984 Santasploitation classic, Silent Night, Deadly Night. The original…
Dust Bunny Review: Hit Men and Monsters, Oh My!
With TV shows like Pushing Daisies and Dead Like Me on his résumé, it’s clear that writer-turned-director Bryan Fuller has an extraordinary knack for the quirky and somewhat macabre. However, his work can sometimes wobble between charmingly, ghoulishly cutesy and simply twee, and so his debut feature as a director, Dust Bunny suggests that the…
100 Nights of Hero Review: A Tale of Tales
In a not-quite-anywhere realm of fantasy, a tale is told. In fact, a tale is told over 100 nights, and it’s always a distraction. Not that the lordly Jerome (Amir El-Masry, Limbo) or his louche houseguest, Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine, The Idea of You), realize that they’re being manipulated. Foolishly, arrogantly they believe that they’re in…
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair Review: The Action Classic Becomes a Melancholy Drama
Once upon a time there was a woman who was very, very, very good at killing people, and then she pretended that she wasn’t, that she was a regular person, but she was just too good at killing for that ever to be true. When Quentin Tarantino released his magnum opus, the female-driven roaring rampage…
Hamnet Review: Goodnight, Sweet Prince
The how and why behind the death of William Shakespeare’s only son at age 11 is lost to history. But novelist Maggie O’Farrell plausibly imagined plague as the cause, a narrative choice that had unanticipated resonance when her novel Hamnet was first published in March of 2020. The novel – and now the feature film…
Zootopia 2 Review: Hopps and Wilde, Back on the Beat
Aesop got it. You can use cute talking animals to teach important life lessons. So when Disney once again opens the gates to a city filled with conversational critters for Zootopia 2, you know there’s more than just sight gags and big adventure. The first film was released in 2016, and with co-director Rich Moore…
Wake Up Dead Man Review: Believe in Benoit Blanc
So who did the dastardly deed? Was it the local doctor (Jeremy Renner)? Was it the groundskeeper (Thomas Haden Church)? The local lawyer (Kerry Washington) or the aspiring politician she claims is her son (Daryl McCormack)? The cellist with chronic pain praying for a miracle (Cailee Spaeny) or the has-been SF writer (Andrew Scott) or…
Review: The Bad Dads of Jay Kelly and Sentimental Value
Jay Kelly arrives at a weird prolonged moment in Hollywood. It’s a movie about a movie star, released at a time when movie stars’ heyday has passed, and it is more or less loving in its lens on the movie industry, and by extension the theatrical experience, even as distributor Netflix poses an existential threat…
Angel’s Egg Review: A Lost Anime Still Hides Its Meaning
What happens to a symbol if you strip it of its inherent meaning? That’s the biggest question to spin out of Angel’s Egg, the “lost” anime from writer/director Mamoru Oshii. The 1985 feature – a bust at the time, never released internationally, and now granted a director-approved 4K restoration – is quietly loaded with Biblical…
The Running Man Review: Glen Powell’s Victory Lap
It’s no coincidence that two of this year’s angriest and most nakedly political movies are adapted from the Bachman books – stories published by Stephen King under a nom de plume because they were seen as off-brand for the author. Both deal with our prurient interest in game shows as a form of endurance torture…
The Carpenter’s Son Review: The Passion of the Teenage Christ
Conventional wisdom says that there are Old Testament Christians and New Testament Christians, but this oversimplification leaves out the third and most entertaining segment of the faithful: the Apocrypha fans. The Bible is not a singular text, but an anthology that has been re-edited over the millennia, with whole books excised. Labeled the Apocrypha, they…
Peter Hujar’s Day Review: Being Alive
In his first feature since 2023’s electric pas de trois Passages, Ira Sachs enlists Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall in a most curious experiment that somehow avoids coming off like a gimmick. A slim two-hander, Peter Hujar’s Day dramatizes a 1974 conversation between the writer Linda Rosenkrantz and her friend, acclaimed photographer Peter Hujar, conducted…
Predator: Badlands Review: How to Keep a Long Franchise Fresh? Play It for Laughs.
In season 6, episode 24 of The Simpsons, “Lemon of Troy,” bully Nelson Muntz begrudgingly rescues nerd Martin Prince from an ass-kicking, and Martin insists they are now friends, much to Nelson’s chagrin. It’s not hard to imagine that Predator: Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg and writer Patrick Aison just showed the memorable scene of Martin…
Die My Love Review: Mommy Weariest
Tradwives may rule a uniquely hellish pocket of the internet, but in arthouse film at least, Grim Mommy is ascendant, with an emerging canon presenting a more clear-eyed portrait of women buckling under domestic stress – in last year’s Nightbitch, this fall’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, and now Lynne Ramsay’s hallucinatory picture of…
Stitch Head Review: Making Friends One Body Part at a Time
The opposite of love is not hate. It’s fear, or at least that’s the message of Stitch Head, a touching and funny addition to the shadow-drenched library of kid-friendly Halloween movies. Maybe if the wild-haired and cackling Professor (voiced by Rob Brydon) had shown a little more love to his first creation, Stitch Head, a…
Review: Catch the Nouvelle Vague
There’s a moment in Nouvelle Vague – Richard Linklater’s retelling of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle – that will resonate with everyone who has ever been a part of the film business. It’s when cinematic legend Roberto Rossellini (Laurent Mothe) visits the offices of seminal movie magazine Cahiers du Cinema, where…
It Was Just an Accident Review: No Exit
Dissident Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi hasn’t been reticent about putting himself in his films, even appearing in 2023’s No Bears as himself. So it’s not hard to see a connection between his own experiences, having been arrested and detained multiple times by the Iranian government, and the trauma suffered by car mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri),…
Austin Film Festival Review: You’re Dating a Narcissist!
A sparky cast and scenic vistas can’t quite overcome the suffocating singlemindedness of You’re Dating a Narcissist! That’s not just the name of the film – it’s also the title of a book written by psychology professor and podcaster Judy (Marisa Tomei), as well as Judy’s default diagnosis of basically anyone in a relationship, from…
Bugonia Review: Bugging Out
The red sole of a Christian Louboutin high heel has become cinematic shorthand. It’s the feminine version of those business cards that Patrick Bateman would drool over or a modernizing of Alexis Carrington’s ludicrously over-padded shoulders. It speaks to a certain affluent cruelty, style without humanity, and provides an easy introduction to Michelle Fuller, pharmaceutical…
Shelby Oaks Review: A Silent Scream
Five years ago, in survival horror Hunter Hunter, Camille Sullivan delivered one of the most desperate and heartbreaking endings to a film imaginable through a mere look. As Mia, the doomed protagonist of multilayered occult chiller Shelby Oaks, she does the same again. It’s not giving anything away to suggest that she’s doomed. There’s too…
Review: Linklater’s Blue Moon Shines
Time has been a constant theme of Richard Linklater’s films. Yet whether it’s the longitudinal filmmaking of Boyhood or the episodic growth of the Before trilogy, he’s looked at time’s passage as a lengthy process. In Blue Moon, he stops the clock, depicting the end of an era, of a partnership, of a man, in…
Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere Review: A Rock God Turns Down the Volume
In contrast to Bruce Springsteen’s working-class wail, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is comparatively soft-spoken. It chronicles the period of time in the early Eighties when the ascendant rock star retreated to New Jersey to write Nebraska and grapple with a deepening depression, tonally adopting the same tempo and shadings of that now-legendary album –…
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