Sexiness is back in American movies after an era of intimacy-averse Hollywood that all but erased the freewheeling “sex comedy” from screens. The reasons for its extended hiatus are many—polling from turned-off young moviegoers, post-#MeToo intimacy coordination and A-lister anxieties about viral screen grabs.…
Sexiness is back in American movies after an era of intimacy-averse Hollywood that all but erased the freewheeling “sex comedy” from screens. The reasons for its extended hiatus are many—polling from turned-off young moviegoers, post-#MeToo intimacy coordination and A-lister anxieties about viral screen grabs.…
Read More
The best movie characters tend to stay with you after the closing credits, and in Carolina Caroline, Samara Weaving gives us one that really lingers. As a Texas dreamer turned lovestruck outlaw in Adam Carter Rehmeier’s renegade road movie, Weaving balances romantic abandon and…
Read More
I knew Carolina Caroline had left its mark when I couldn’t stop thinking about its title character after my first viewing. On the second screening, I plugged into the rhythms of its central relationship and almost melancholic country-and-western lyricism, and the way star Samara…
Read More
Tuner, an offbeat character study about a troubled young New York piano tuner, is like a keyboard whose ivories are touched too lightly but beg for a more resonant plunk. From director Daniel Rohner, whose 2022 doc Navalny won an Oscar, it’s capably made…
Read More
The most welcome surprise of the 2026 movie year comes in Is God Is, a richly atmospheric tale of vengeance so dripping with attitude and atmosphere it practically oozes off the screen like humidity before a storm. Written and directed by first timer Aleshea…
Read More
In Blue Heron, Canadian-Hungarian filmmaker Sophy Romvari excavates a powerful, semi-autobiographical family history through memory and form. It’s a movie about reconciling childhood and loss through fragments to understand a trauma that, from a child’s view, felt incomprehensible. Only decades later can the full weight…
Read More
If you’re going to make a sequel to a cultural touchstone like 2006’s The Devil Wears Prada, Lauren Weisberger’s gossipy roman-a-clef account of the ultimate boss from hell—one Miranda Priestly, an instant icon villainess with a viper’s tongue delivering the most coolly scathing put-downs…
Read More
Bitingly funny and tragic to the core, Our Hero, Balthazar walks a knife’s edge of absurdist social critique and dead serious pathos as the year’s ballsiest, most original movie. From co-writers Oscar Boyson, who also directed, and producer Ricky Camilleri, it’s a bleak provocation…
Read More
Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-handed, modest bit of drama driven by a pair of eminently watchable actors—no more nor less. It’s Soderbergh applying a deceptively low-key style to a few weighty subjects, in the tale of a formerly renowned painter in his…
Read More
The new Faces of Death, a clever, creepy riff on the notorious 1978 shock doc video nasty, is a “meta” consideration of exploitation and clicks, from the mondo VHS legend to the lurid labyrinths of the dark web. But it’s also a smart serial-killer…
Read More