American filmmakers have mostly abandoned incisive political cinema. A few years ago, I lamented this to Oliver Stone, who plainly noted that neither studios nor audiences want political thrillers or government critiques anymore. The new Mickey 17, however, sees a world-class Korean filmmaker using…
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If a horror movie scares you, swell. If not, no sale. And last year, Osgood Perkins’ Longlegs, about a heartland satanist spree killer, was an A24 marketing success (“Scariest Movie Ever!”) and a shivery chiller courtesy of an all-in Nicolas Cage as its titular…
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Whether scrappy indie (Terrifier, Late Night with the Devil, Strange Darling), studio gloss (A Quiet Place: Day One) or awards prestige (The Substance, Noseratu), horror films almost always bank tremendous profits. Last year alone they bludgeoned near a billion dollars from moviegoers with a…
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Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths reunites the legendary British auteur with actress Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who received an Oscar nod for his searing 1996 drama Secrets and Lies, in which she played the accomplished adult daughter of a downtrodden mother who gave her up at birth. That mother, indelibly…
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The opening sections of Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here, the real-life story of a Brazilian family torn apart by political persecution circa 1971, depict a tight-knit community of parents, children and friends suspended in a fleeting idyll, one to be tragically frozen in photographs,…
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One of Them Days, a raucous comedy powered by a pair of exuberant performances, is a female buddy picture that gets significant comic mileage from the pairing of stars Keke Palmer and musician SZA as L.A. besties and roommates on a slapstick odyssey to…
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In The Last Showgirl, Pamela Anderson has what feels like a late-career renewal, even if the character she plays—a Las Vegas career showgirl in a fading spotlight—sees her own options begin to dim. You can feel Anderson, in this modest character study, really showing…
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Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Brady Corbet’s remarkable The Brutalist—a sprawling, 3.5-hour immigrant epic spanning decades and continents—is its intimacy, despite its determined scale. Structured in two acts with a “built-in” fifteen-minute intermission, the film impresses in ambition and reach while maintaining an…
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A recent UCLA survey of Gen Z moviegoers revealed a distaste for nudity and sex on screen, a u-turn from the boundary-pushing films young audiences lined up for after the Hays Code’s fall in the late 1960s, like the X-rated Oscar winner Midnight Cowboy and frank…
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Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a masterclass in building movie atmosphere from one of contemporary American cinema’s most distinctive young auteurs. With just four films, Eggers has carved out a signature as an exacting writer-director with a personal stamp, blending meticulous attention to folklore and…
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