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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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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You have to hand it to Luca Guadagnino, who this year delivered a one-two punch in the sensual pro-tennis roundelay Challengers and now the equally sexy, dreamlike Queer, his new adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ partially autobiographical 1985 novel (first written in 1952) of…
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A thirty-something coworker recently vented her frustration with society’s suffocating insistence that motherhood is the pinnacle of a woman’s fulfillment. This came after enduring yet another round of nosy relatives asking, “When are you starting a family?” paired with the patronizing, “You’ll change your…
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Pablo Larraín’s Maria is foremost a vehicle for Angelina Jolie, bringing vocal precision and quietly regal vulnerability to her portrait of legendary mezzo-soprano Maria Callas. A meditation on artistry and decline as Callas drifts through her final days in a haze of memory, the…
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In the Cannes-winning All We Imagine As Light (currently playing at Chicago’s Gene Siskel Film Center), writer-director Payal Kapadia presents a rich tapestry of three Mumbai women whose routine, work-a-day lives take on a poetic grandeur against the grit of their big city existence.…
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