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,…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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…
Read More
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.…
Read More
Great news for fans of the iconic Broadway sensation Wicked—and honestly, for anyone who loves great entertainment: Jon M. Chu’s highly anticipated big-screen adaptation of the 2003 musical phenomenon doesn’t just deliver the goods; it soars. Arriving as one of 2024’s best studio pictures,…
Read More