Young Spielberg decided to go full auteur and make his Dr. Strangelove, but it’s the late '70s and not even Kubrick is as cool as SNL. So, he conjures this wildly incongruent collision of fatalistic satire and chaotic sketch comedy. The result is totally bizarre—especially when you throw in Stanley Kramer and a few moments of Speilbergerian action (that feel like an unsupervised boy playing with army action figures).
I’m sure this is common knowledge, but the first three minutes…
A Different Man wields painful irony the way The Substance wields grotesque body horror—in both cases, the films overindulge to the point of parody, yet I found the core ideas unshakable. Here it’s simple yet profound: insecurity, isolation, and outrage might come from within rather than being the product of external circumstances (even when those circumstances are dire). Nobody can poison our happiness more effectively than we can, and it’s an intoxicatingly heroic act to cultivate joy against all odds.
Long stretches of The Brutalist had me as blissfully happy as I've ever been in a theater. It’s impossible to oversell how phenomenal this looks, so don’t worry, high expectations won’t betray you. It’s like a portal to the 1970s—not because it looks dated (it looks eminently modern), but because of the richness of 35mm, locations, and sheer talent.
This is an American epic in every great sense of the phrase, deeply rooted in the way the settled have exploited…
Billy Wilder? The best.
Curtis and Lemmon? The best.
Excuse me while I watch every single Joe E. Brown film. Osgood is the best.
Marilyn Monroe literally glows in this, but her character isn’t as well-written as most of Wilder’s female leads, which holds the film back instead of vaulting it forward like MacLaine in The Apartment or Olson in Sunset Boulevard.
He wasn’t just a director who created many of the finest films of the last fifty years—he was an unexplainable force, pushing the medium forward in an industry terrified of straying from safe norms. An iconoclast, not for the sake of being different, but out of an unwavering commitment to pure artistic expression that always felt more like a fact of his being than a put-on approach to the craft. A sincere dreamer with the rare and uncanny gift of…
A better documentary would let John, Steve, Lucas, and the rest of my favorite people talk more casually about whatever memories come to mind, freely unearthing the past based on their own nostalgia rather than what’s most obvious. But this documentary (very much a corporately green-lit piece of content from everyone's favorite streaming service) has little interest in following their train of thought. Instead, it keeps the film bolted to a rigid and totally uninspired tour of a legendary career,…
The Lisbon sisters are allowed to remain figments of people, and more so projections—whatever they’re needed to be for the adolescent boys, protective parents, or local professionals like the pastor and doctor, for whom the girls are simply part of their domain of responsibility (“make them healthy,” “save their souls”). There’s little interiority, and that’s the trick, as the film crushes you with the consequences of what it does to someone to be seen only as a game piece in…
I strongly dislike whatever Gerald Butler and O'Shea Jackson Jr. are dishing out with these performances and Gudegast is a very mediocre director, THAT SAID, there's a banger heist at the center of this film and that's worth a lot to me.
On screen, a genre-colliding martial arts legal thriller about an aging police officer who refuses to retire, instead reinventing himself as a DOJ prosecutor and continuing the fight against injustice from the safety of the courtroom (and a parking lot, and a rooftop, and a subway, and...). Off screen, singular action legend Donnie Yen returns to directing at sixty-one to ensure he’ll never have to retire from kicking ass on screen. While Prosecutor Fok doesn’t achieve the iconic stature of…
Spielberg stays true to the 1950s novella's conception of far-future sci-fi, realizing it with 2000s technology without reworking it to feel more plausible, practical, or overtly modern. The result is a science fiction artifact concerned more with the timeless anxieties of the 50's (McCarthyism, technological pessimism) than anything that would have dated it. A wonderful fusion of temperments and technologies, distinctly one of a kind.