My first priority after seeing France’s handsome The Taste of Things, a cuisine as art and love saga featuring the double act of a regal Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche, was a direct dash brunch at Chicago’s finest French restaurant. In a recipe combining…
Read MoreCongrats, Departing Seniors: Caps Off to Fresh Teen Slasher Picture Smartly Balancing Humor, Horror

The eternally successful horror film genre has proven more profitable than perhaps any other given its dependably low investment, high-yield returns and passionate fanbase, always up for their next good scare. And while such scare pictures of late have taken a turn toward high…
Read MoreThe space-set thriller I.S.S. is a modestly effective U.S.-Russia face-off in which a handful of scientists are forced to confront national versus personal loyalties while a war between their respective countries wages on Earth. Set aboard the orbiting International Space Station laboratory 248 miles…
Read MoreA well-meaning educator finds herself in the crosshairs of suspicion in the tightly coiled dramatic thriller The Teachers’ Lounge, a morality play indicting the swift spoils of cancel culture and the discarding of objective truth in a rush to judgment. It also has something…
Read MoreEvil in the Cold Light of Day: Single-Minded The Zone of Interest Tells Us What We Already Knew

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest is an austere exercise with a single idea—that evil deeds can be compartmentalized while their perpetrators lead otherwise innocuously guilt-free lives—stretched out for 106 minutes. Deploying a theme applicable to many of history’s villains, Glazer’s glacial treatise on…
Read MoreA Superb Jessica Chastain Confronts Troubled Past in Memory, Michel Franco’s Searing Drama

Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard superbly navigate challenging psychological terrain in a tough, hopeful picture.…
Read MoreFerrari, Michael Mann’s moment-in-time biopic starring Adam Driver as an aging Enzo Ferrari in the 1957 crosshairs of heated personal and business dramas, is a sum of its parts picture enlivened by a thrilling recreation of the thousand-mile Mille Miglia car race, worth seeing…
Read MoreWith The Boys in the Boat, George Clooney’s ninth directorial outing, the actor turned filmmaker has crafted a handsome, appealingly traditional throw-back movie with a reverence for both historical context and bygone true life sports movies done well a few decades ago. A late…
Read MoreSmart Satire: American Fiction and Sharp Jeffrey Wright Take Aim at Commercial Marginalization

In her 2020 Sundance-winning The Forty Year-Old Version, New York playwright Radha Blank wrote and directed a close-to-reality self-portrait of a Black writer and artist in a state of continual invention. Her dilemma? The Broadway purse strings, held by affluent, liberal white producers and…
Read MoreIn Paul King’s sunny, funny Wonka, Timothée Chalamet steps into the very big Roald Dahl-Gene Wilder shoes belonging to the world’s most famous chocolatier for a pleasing, throw-back musical of genuine sweetness. It turns out those shoes fit quite well, and far better than…
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